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SUGGESTION: another idea for balancing/differentiating weapon types

Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2015

Right now there is little debate that beam weapons are overly powerful ^ the difference between balistic/missiledrops down to different shades of badas a result.  The basic premise for the idea is to add a new component type (reactors).  I can see two good ways of making them work:

  • I'll start with the short one first & do the possible today with xml only (I think) last.  I can't see a way to add a secondary MasCap type stat that weapons have a drain on seperate from their various masses... but if one could be created for energy/power/etc with different weapons having different drains (beam weapons getting a high drain, missile/malistic obviously quite a bit less to varying degrees). reactors can get their own fork on the tech tree getting better as they go up & more powerful weapons having higher power requirements.
  • Now that the basic kernel of the idea is sketched out, the way I can see this sort of thing being accomplished by xml/minor xsl modding only involves the following:
    • raise the base mass of beam weapons significantly (i.e. 75%) from 
    • give give larger (medium & up?) ships progressively larger bonuses to negate some of that bump
      •  lets say a huge hull gets -15% like so


        <Stats>
        <EffectType>BeamMass</EffectType>
        <Target>
        <TargetType>Ship</TargetType>
        </Target>
        <BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
        <Value>-15</Value>
        </Stats>
        <Stats>

    • Make a new mass component/subtype  (reactors) with a base ReactorMass of their own that is limited by a  <OnePerShip>true</OnePerShip> to keep from simply stacking them up higher & higher by adding more of them.  Set these modules to offset some of the hit from higher massed beam weapons just like with the ship hulls to where larger hulls might wind up being able to hold a similar/slightly less amount of beams with big enough reactors after the reactor mass is factored in.
    • Perhaps make those reactors also give small multipliers that improve MovesCap, ShipRange, ShieldStrength, ShieldMass, Beam/Missile/KineticCooldown, etc in different branches to account for different reactor type lines being tuned for various specialized needs
  • No conceptual xml example here simply because weapons are so badly out of balance & it's hard to guess where they should be targeted for reasonable results