Firepower, why and how it can be changed

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Plant
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Plant »

ORIGINAL: Icemania

Holy Walls of Text! Has anybody got an Executive Summary?
Summary:

Plant: Opening Post. Not much has changed,other than refuting Spideys arguments.

Spidey: Doing everything he can because his world view, like Deathball, that having loads of weapons on ship with little defences is superior over a more balanced ship has been overturned. His arguments mostly range from comparing impossible ship designs, being hung up over the use of the word "perfectly", and not understanding game mechanics such aspects of the ship design screen, the firepower rating which we are discussing, the diplomatic system, and attack overmatch. If I am proven right, he says discussing it is a waste of time or that I am beating his own strawman!

Deathbull: Still butthurt over my pointing out that you cannot create ships without defences that can destroy entire fleets.


For some reason, even though I explicitly stated my intentions, Spidey has gained the impression that the formula I proposed as a starting point, is a sacred cow. I originally contemplated posting instead, that the current formula of firepower to be changed to a sum of not only weapons but also of defence. Of course the problem with that would be to decide what numerical values should be attributed to shields and armour, whereas in the now suggested formula it would not matter in relation to weapons.
Deathball
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Deathball »

ORIGINAL: Plant

Deathbull: Still butthurt over my pointing out that you cannot create ships without defences that can destroy entire fleets.

I love you too, Plant [:'(]
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Erik Rutins
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Erik Rutins »

Hi guys,

Can we please scale things back to a more friendly discussion level? I'm getting a tone here, especially from Plant, that when read on the internet sounds fairly confrontational. It should be possible to discuss games and ideas about them without getting personal or rude.

For my part - I think we certainly could replace Firepower with something more useful, but I think there are many different possibilities for what would be an improvement there. I'd love to see a wide ranging and constructive discussion on that as we often find great ideas or inspirations for them by reading through the thoughts and discussions of the DW community.

Regards,

- Erik
Erik Rutins
CEO, Matrix Games LLC


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Spidey
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Spidey »

Sorry for the delay guys. I've been doing other things the past few days, as well as playing the game a bit.

@ Erik

My apologies if I've been too confrontational. There are times when I don't know when to quit, I suppose.


@ Deathball

I don't know how to make a formula that can provide a reasonable estimate of "combat strength" without being both somewhat subjective in how factors are weighed in and rather unpleasant to work with. On top of that, I think it's risky to throw a dedicated power rating into the game, and while one could argue the merits of having a hidden power rating, it really just makes the experience of uncontrol and silly AI behavior even worse.

The more elegant solution, the way I see it, is to avoid even trying and attack the root problem. The root problem, again as I see it, is really ship control. How can ships be made to intelligentely behave as the player intends them to in the face of the enemy? Should they be aggressive, should they try to maintain distance, or what should they do?

Using firepower alone is a simple measure that at least means the player can very easily figure out what's going on. There's no puzzle as to what the ships were thinking. It's simple and that's a virtue in itself, but unfortunately it doesn't offer fine grain control nor is firepower a particularly accurate measure of combat strength. Plant tried to solve this by making the combat strength rating consider more factors. This improves on some aspects at the cost of (potentially) adding other problems.

My alternative solution is to let the player have more options to think things through in advance instead of trying to improve the "magic number" that the current system relies on. What we need isn't a better number, it's simply the option of choosing behavior based on more factors. Suppose there was an "overrides screen" where the regular firepower rating based behavior can be overruled against various ship classes. That way players could specify a general behavior based on firepower rating and then override this behavior against space ports or carriers or what have you.

This way doesn't really change anything in the game, it simply adds more fine tuning to the tactics settings of a given ship design. The only change to anything AI'ish is that the tactics-routine for ship positioning is made to include a check for any excisting overrules for that opposing ship class before it checks for firepower, which in an optimal world could be doable without inducing transient component fatigue on anyone. On top of that, the design files reader would need to be updated but I'd be surprised if that in itself wasn't fairly easy. A new screen would have to be added since there's no space in the current design screen, but that just might be possible without too much gnashing of teeth in an optimal world.

Testing requirements? Not too massive, I reckon. The AI designs wouldn't have to use overrules much at all so weird AI behavior against "unusual" player-designed class designs (like size 750 carrier-frigates or what have you) would be minimal. If we change the firepower formula to something more complex, however, then I fear that pretty much every kind of encounter would have to be checked for wonkiness. Granted, a math attack might go a long way of alleviating worries but the risk of unforeseen complications is, as I see it, anything but trivial.

There are no perfect solutions, of course, but I do think better results would be reached by adding complexity to the control scheme rather than decision factors. The AI doesn't have to be a lot better at evaluating the combat strength of the opposing ship(s) if the player can make more of the difficult choices in advance.
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Spidey
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Spidey »

@ Plant
Plant: Opening Post. Not much has changed,other than refuting Spideys arguments.
I don't mean to sound harsh but saying you've refuted something doesn't constitute a refutation. I've explained the potential problems in detail and if you still don't comprehend why I'm saying what I'm saying then the appropriate thing to say is that you don't understand it. Not that you've proved what I said to be wrong, which I'm sure you're also keenly aware that you haven't.
Spidey: Doing everything he can because his world view, like Deathball, that having loads of weapons on ship with little defences is superior over a more balanced ship has been overturned. His arguments mostly range from comparing impossible ship designs, being hung up over the use of the word "perfectly", and not understanding game mechanics such aspects of the ship design screen, the firepower rating which we are discussing, the diplomatic system, and attack overmatch. If I am proven right, he says discussing it is a waste of time or that I am beating his own strawman!
This is factually incorrect from start to finish. Every single word in the above is wrong. I have to ask myself if after all this writing you really got nothing whatsoever from the exchange other than what you wrote in this quote? If so, one or both of us has failed miserably.

Allow me to recap some of the issues. You're suggesting a combat strength formula that promotes a particular set of values as stronger but you have at no point managed to show that ship designs rated as stronger by your formula will in fact always be stronger in the game. Another problem is that you can't seem to make up your mind on whether the formula you're suggesting considers the amount of size dedicated to components or the actual component ratings. Another problem is that you're talking about "balanced" without actually defining it properly, though I'll give you that you've implicitly defined "balanced" as "using as much size for offense as for defense".

My preference is not berserker type ships. Quite the opposite, as I have written multiple times. I've talked about berserkers because they fall outside of your pattern in that they should be considerably weaker than "balanced" ships according to your formula, even though I've demonstrated that this won't necessarily be the case in the game. The claim that I don't understand aspects of the ship design screen is optimistic at best. There are numbers on that screen that I can't explain 100% but I do believe I understand the basics of ship combat. You've yet to show otherwise.

Final thing, if I intentionally write that some problem isn't necessarily important because it's not one that realistically comes up often then yes, it is a strawman to then bash my example for being unrealistic, since clearly I made no claim to the contrary. If you cannot understand why bashing someone for a claim he hasn't made is in fact a strawman then I fear this isn't the only time we're going to not see eye to eye on things.
For some reason, even though I explicitly stated my intentions, Spidey has gained the impression that the formula I proposed as a starting point, is a sacred cow. I originally contemplated posting instead, that the current formula of firepower to be changed to a sum of not only weapons but also of defence. Of course the problem with that would be to decide what numerical values should be attributed to shields and armour, whereas in the now suggested formula it would not matter in relation to weapons.
Starting points are not perfect, Plant. They are in fact the very definition of imperfect or they wouldn't be a starting point at all but rather an ending point. If you'd been willing to accept as much from the start then we could've saved a whole lot of time.

As for whether you sum attack and defense together or only the defense, you're still implicitly assigning weights to factors. In fact, no matter how you design the formula, you will by definition be assigning weights to factors. Currently the formula weights firepower at 1 and everything else at 0. You'd make firepower 0.5 and the abstract value of the sum of armor and shield 0.5. Those are in fact weights. Is an even split optimal? How about 45/55? How about 40/60? Those are weights too, weights that you've rejected for no clear reason whatsoever.

Your formula is to maximise the objective function of the biggest weapon effect value multiplied with the biggest defense effect. The defense effect is the sum of ratings for shields and armor. I originally thought shields would win this but it turns out that the ultimate shield has an effect of 320 for size 10 while the ultimate armor has an effect of 40 for size 1. What this means is that at the end of the tech tree, using your formula, a ship with 100 size dedicated to shields is decidedly less threatening than a shield with 100 size dedicated to UltraDense Armor.

You want a numerical example? Suppose we wished to use 200 size for combat components. To make that "balanced", we'd have to go with 100 size for attack and 100 for defense. For attack, let's go with 15 superflowing Titan Beams and 2 devastating Impact Assault Blasters. That's 100 size with a sum firepower of 479. On the defensive side, if we go with 10 exponential Meridian shields, we end up at a total defense effect of 3200. Sqrt ( 479 * 3200 ) = ~1238. On the other hand, if we go with UltraDense Armor and use 100 size on that, we'd have 4000 defense effect. Sqrt ( 464 * 4000 ) = ~1384.

Would you skip shields entirely on end game ships? Of course not, because armor can in fact leak damage against anything while shields only leak against certain types of weapons.
Tophat1815
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Tophat1815 »

ORIGINAL: Darkspire

ORIGINAL: Icemania

Holy Walls of Text! Has anybody got an Executive Summary?

Big ship slow ... small ship fast ... pew pew pew ... bang boom ...

Darkspire

I always appreciate what you bring to the table sir! [:D]
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Icemania
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Icemania »

It's tough to read when it's not in Hex.
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Darkspire
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Darkspire »

ORIGINAL: Tophat1812

ORIGINAL: Darkspire

ORIGINAL: Icemania

Holy Walls of Text! Has anybody got an Executive Summary?

Big ship slow ... small ship fast ... pew pew pew ... bang boom ...

Darkspire

I always appreciate what you bring to the table sir! [:D]

It's good to know my experienced observations are appreciated
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Plant
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Plant »

I have to ask Darkspire, before you recieved help on your "decimal" problem, how did you count your change in a shop or read a bank statement?
Tophat1815
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RE: Firepower, why and how it can be changed

Post by Tophat1815 »

ORIGINAL: Plant

I have to ask Darkspire, before you recieved help on your "decimal" problem, how did you count your change in a shop or read a bank statement?


He has "people" for that actually. And he does pay fairly well,with a health plan. Would you care for an application?

[;)]

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