ship subclassing

[Veygaar]

*looks around thread....*

*...buys a Hayabusa*

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Veygaar for Admin Moderator 2013!!!

[Rodnas]

To me there are two possibilities - the one i would prefer is rebalincing LFs to something completla different than theyare now, some good ideas popped up here and there but it seems the community is quite a bit oldschool and conservative when it comes to creativity and doing actually new stuff

This leaves you with rebalancing, proper balancing and so on. And here lies the problem: stats for ships, especially for snubbies are very, very inconsistent.
We already have "subclasses" like light, medium and heavy ships in each class, the actual ships ignore those distinction though.

What would be a feasible approach would be to give each ship class and their subclass a "stat-area" which is never crossed in any case. to explain my idea i use rough and arbitary numbers

LF
Armor: 3k-6k
Agility: 80-100 rad/s
Powercore: 4-9k
Gunslots: 2-4
Size: XS-M (we wcould definatly use a stat like profile size!!)

HF
Armor: 6k-9k
Agility: 70-80 rad/s
Powercore: 9-10k
Gunslots: 4-6
Size: M-L (we wcould definatly use a stat like profile size!!)


VHF
Armor: 9k-12k
Agility: 60-70 rad/s
Powercore: 9-12k
Gunslots: 6-8
Size: L-XL(we wcould definatly use a stat like profile size!!)

And then subdivide the classes into the heavy-medium-light categories, and aswe are talking abiut LF's here:

Light LF:
Armor: 3k-4k
Agility: 94-100 rad/s
Powercore: 4-5k
Gunslots: 2
Size: XS
Note: Only CD available, no mines or turrets

Medium LF:
Armor: 4k-5k
Agility: 88-94 rad/s
Powercore: 5-6k
Gunslots:3- 4
Size: S
Note: CD + Mines

Heavy LF
Armor: 5k-6k
Agility: 80-88 rad/s
Powercore: 7-9
Gunslots: 4
Size: M
Notes: CD/Fighter-torp ,Mine


Now i guess this doesn't look to revolutionary, then again if you look at some of the worst offenders you can really only look and wonder if stats were randomly determined in some cases or not.

Example: Personally, agility is the most important stat in my book, followed by the sadly way too ungraspabe "size"...
Now let's take a peek at those oddballs-

A nice comparison of light fighter stats + the everpopular eagle and bayonet

If you "discriminate" Light fighters with hull from 4800 to 5500 mediums 5500 to 6500 and the faties at 6500- 7200/9800

You can see that there is a huge mess between hull and agility aswell as availability of torp slots or guns - if desired i will give a deeper analysis on this table, but y summary is this:


The "best" LFs are the Liberator(best overall agility/speed),the Surveyor( Speed where it counts and top armament), with a tie beteen the Marasulu and the Falchion( one has +1 gun, the other a Torp slot, both are very agile in comparison to their hul)

The worst are the Scimitar( poor agility, poor stats),the Decurion(slow for everything than fast roll onset, poor armament and core) and the Loki( with good guns but poor agility)

As some might have noticed, the Eagle and Bayonet sneaked in, too - and while the Eagle performs a bit poorer on the overall agility then the Loki it lands in the solid middlefield for my complete score.
And,who would have thought- the Bayonet outperforms them all middlefield in agility, though very good response times+ a good core,hull and weapons makes this little funboat the leader in the score comparison field

Of course what is sorely missing is a "hittable surface" score which can only be guestimated similar to what Ursus did(and i sadly have no idea to set up those )

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---

[Ursus]

Yeah I'd like to come up with profiles for the sub-classes. We already have it in some of the other classes (bombers, destroyers, were already mentioned), and it seems to work well there so we should copy it. Consistency keeps gameplay simple, and if it works do it.

This leaves you with rebalancing, proper balancing and so on. And here lies the problem: stats for ships, especially for snubbies are very, very inconsistent.

Yeah, its a mess alright. Its really bad when you start looking at model sizing. This is the Kusari VHF next to the Gallic civilian LF. Two problems there: one is the VHF is actually a HF model that was too damned small even for that, and the other is that the LF uses the same hull as the Gallic heavy bomber. There's no easy fix for something like this.





Also, I dont want to get hooked on LFs too much. HFs are the real "undefined" class in disco, and are far less purposeful than LFs. At least LFs have tactical purpose as scouts, interceptors, and anti-bomber fighters. HFs dont have the speed of LFs or the durability of VHFs, so they are only useful in the VERY specific role of anti-bomber duty, and that is only when you have access to a good HF that can actually take on a bomber without dying quickly. Dont overlook that last point either, there are only 19 MkII HFs, and only about half of those are worth flying (Bayonet and a handful of others).

I think the root problem here, as I've said for a while, is that VHF is defined as the "default" snub class, and the other fighter lines are balanced to it. But since VHF is the default, it has the balanced agaility vs size vs firepower, and there is nowhere to go but weaker for the lower lines. They should be balanced to size, the HF should be the sweet spot.

Another option is to delete the HF class, and balance large LF and small VHF into a reinvented HF middle. I mean, you got stuff like CTE Griffin LF is one of the largest and worst LFs, but CTE Falcon HF is one of the smallest and best HFs, because they are basically the same ship model in different classes. No way to fix that except delete one of them. Same for the BHG snub line, the Gallic civ line, and IMG line too (probably more, I just stopped counting after 5).

Not proposing anything, just talking out loud.

Of course what is sorely missing is a "hittable surface" score which can only be guestimated similar to what Ursus did(and i sadly have no idea to set up those

This is the technique I'm using to establish relative "presence". For the pictures in this thread, just use Milkshape, create a new MS3D file, import a CMP, select the model, and "merge" it into the MS3D. You can do several models at a time that way, until you start getting group name collisions.

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Rodnas]

Yep, i am with you on that one- it would be good if the mess would get reduced and logically restructured, no matter which snub class( i dissected the LF because i thought it's the threads topic).

Though if you look on the stats and such you can see the clear that the LFs are not that clear defined either as only "the best" can actually perform like they should and people here state, the rest are easily out-lightfightered by the Bayonet and the Eagle for example and i didn't even put in all of the "bad" or heavy LF's.

Of course the HF suffer even more as they lose the little advantage of a 400 cruise the LFs have. So most of them are outturned by the better armed and armored light VHFs that are the "masterpieces" to fly right now.
And with the VHFs being everyones darling i am afraid that the conservative community is too frightened to lose something on their VHFs so the HFs have no place to go to.....basically no one wants the LFs to become smaller, faster and unhittable which means everyone else needs to be slower and sluggisher. But as everyone wants a can-it-all ship you won't see bombers only being usefull for GB and up, VHFs usefull vs Bombers, GB and VHF and HF usefull against everything smaller than a GB. Light fighters should, at least in my opinion get special equipment for pinning enemies down + maybe a longer cargo scan range and such to make them better and more clean cut support ships.

Oh well....

Question concerning that milkshape thingy: is it posible to have that proggy calculate how many square pixels or something are visible? i really like those sizing pics, but they are still quite subjective - for a proper "size-balance"factor the ideal thing would be to determine the visible front, side and on-top pixels....which then still lack a factor for easy or hard to hit shapes, but that would be over the top propably....

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---

[Ursus]

That's a good idea to calculate surface area, I didnt think of that so I didnt look for it. If you find something, post it in that other thread

Also, there should be a bias for vertical size. 90% of the game is lateral turning, and tall ships present more surface area during turns than flat ships do. There's a reason most of the ships are squat, and the few that are tall have OP weapons as balance (BHG buckshots, Corsair pulses, etc)

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Rodnas]

If i get proper images done i found a way to calculate the surface area

Personally i wouldn't put a bias for sides in as for example the BH series may be tall- but short. This means if you want to shoot aship flyng e.g. to the left you have to follow properly with your mouse, meaning moving along. If you aim up or down( using the big broadside that is presented to you) you will lose your arget simply because you don't follow it properly anymore. The mentioned shortness guarantees thatif you miss just by a little bit you don't hiit the rear or the nose of a ship(as is the case with long shapes) but you completly miss.

=> in my opinion good shapes are "short" for left right turning followed by "flatness", for justs or direct chases "flat" or "slim" are good while "round" or "voluminous" is bad .... being long and tall is propably the worst thing that can happen to you, follwed by being cross-shaped....


But back to what i mentioned: are size comparisons valuable for balance discussions? i was thinking on a front,side,top,total score (for now, without factoring favoured/disfavoured sides)

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---

[Ursus]

But back to what i mentioned: are size comparisons valuable for balance discussions? i was thinking on a front,side,top,total score (for now, without factoring favoured/disfavoured sides)

Profile is what matters. Some fights are chasing, some are jousting, some are dogfights, etc. Chasing and jousting put the front and rear profiles into play. All ships turn, 90% of them turn left/right instead of up/down, and that puts the side profile into play. The game engine punishes you for going vertical (it tries to correct your "mistake" for you), and most people do not fly above or below a target, so the top and bottom profiles are not used very much. Overall "volume" of the object determines how easy it is to hit at different times, but the different profiles need to be weighted differently. Stuff like turning speed and acceleration are also factors, a heavy bomber that makes slow lumbering turns is going to explose the side profile a lot longer than an ultralight.

Actually I think there are too many factors to have any kind of programmatic score, but you can do some rough rules and then apply some basic templates. Smaller ships cannot carry as much armor as larger ships, duh. They should be stripped-down versions of larger ships. There should not be a VHF that is substantially smaller than a LF, because the LF should not be an LF if its that big. So you take something like volume or your suggestion of surface area, do some weighting and that tells you how much armor they can hold, how offensive they can be with guns and powerplant, etc. Ships that are supposed to be small for fiction can still be small, but they should be from the appropriate relative class, not for a class above them.

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Rodnas]

I am having a üroblem with milkshape here, which crosses my plans: How can i get a standardized sizing for all models in- i want to ensure that all screens are evaluated in the same way to avoid errors?

Also, i have small arrows all around my models...who do i get rid of those? Maybe i ned a new topic for this, i am a fail at 3d stuff^^

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---