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Gameplay Proposal
Below has been superseded by the following document:
The intention is to sketch out some initial gameplay ideas that we can try out; these should be fairly simple to implement, and if we like them, then it will be pretty easy to refine these into a complete game.
While we intend for ships to be more complex in the future, for the time being, ships will simply have hitpoints, available power, system slots, and weapons hardpoints.
The 'available power' idea probably needs some fleshing out. At the moment, imagine it working like capacitor power in EVE Online; it's a pool with a maximum value, and weapons/systems/shields will take a fixed value every tick. Some systems, like reactors, will add to the pool every tick. Should be simple enough to implement, but might be tricky to get a good balance.
These will be located either in a quadrant (see below), or will be abstract (no physical location). They will allow players to upgrade/modify their ships with different systems.
Ships are split up into 4 quadrants, both for the purposes of hitting, and also for the purposes of weapon hardpoints. A ship's total HP is the combination of the HP of each quadrant; once a quadrant reaches 0 hitpoints, all systems (weapons, engines, etc) in that quadrant are disabled. Any additional damage received over the HP of a quadrant applies to all other quadrants equally.
While a ship may have multiple weapon hardpoints per quadrant; firing arcs will be calculated based off each quadrant. Assuming a configuration like below, the centerlines of the arcs will be calculated as marked:
Forward Arc Center
^
|
+======+======+
| Forwrd Quad |
+======+======+
| | |
Right Arc Center <--| RQ | LQ |--> Left Arc Center
| | |
+======+======+
| Rear Quad |
+======+======+
|
v
Rear Arc Center
All weapon hardpoints in the same quadrant have the same centerline for their firing arc. (They may have different arcs; one may be 45°, while another in the same quadrant might be 180°.)
For the ease of implementation, all weapons will be done by 'dice roll'; basically calculate the percentage chance of hitting, and then use an RNG to see if the hit succeeds.
Each weapon would define percentages of events likely to happen, and then build a hit table from 0 to 98.99. Then we do an RNG roll to determine what happened.
lordnull has proposed a more complicated system that we may use in the future:
Proposal: Single role system that takes into account all offensive bonuses and defensive bonuses, as well as all possible outcomes, arranges them in a row, then rolls once to get result. This is what WoW uses; it allows defenders to push critical hits off the table (literally).
Example: the basic roll bar with each outcome and how large it is could be:
| 40: Dodge | 15: hit | 5: crit | 15: system hit | 5: system crit | Rest: Miss |
On a roll of 1 to 40, it’s a miss, 41 to 55 it’s a hit, 56 to 60 it’s a crit, and so forth. Anything above 80 is a clean miss.
The player then installs weapon that specifically targets systems:
| 40: Dodge | 15: hit | 5: crit | 20: system hit | 5: system crit | Rest: Miss |
This changes the miss chance to 85 or more, giving a greater chance to hit a system (as well as hit overall). The order and types of results would need tweaking, but this does mean that each attack only requires one roll.
All weapons have two damage stats: damageOnHit and damageOverTime. Most weapons will be primarily one or the other; but it could be neat to have some weapons hit moderately hard, and then keep dealing damage for a while. (Say, a missile with an acid warhead, for example.)
Firing arcs are defined in degrees, centered on the centerline(or, more accurately, the normal) of the quadrant of the hardpoint the weapon is in. In order for a weapon to fire, it's target must be within it's firing arc. In addition, the closer the enemy is to the centerline of the arc, the more likely it is to hit. The range will need to be small, between 10% and 20%.
Some (most? all?) weapons will have target locks. Basically, while an enemy is in the firing arc of the weapon, the % hit chance will increase over time, up to a maximum (probably between 90% and 100%). Firing before the target lock 'finishes' is possible, you're just less likely to hit.
I imagine that low-yield weapons (small damages) will have fast (or no) target locks, while high-yield (large damages) will have longer target locks. This helps to add some required skill to the gameplay; you have to keep your enemy in your firing arc in order to be able to hit him; and if you want to hit him hard, you need to keep him there longer.
When thinking about the low-yield and high-yield weapons, we suspect that the low-yield weapons will have a slight advantage against skilled players; you'll do slightly more DPS against someone who keeps slipping out of your firing arc, all things being equal. To offset this, we can give the low-yield weapons a smaller firing arc than the high-yield ones, making it slightly harder to escape the high-yields, and slightly easier to escape the low-yields. All this needs playtesting to see how much, if any, we need to do this. But, it's a possible 'knob to turn', when we need it.
Ships can have shields which soak incoming damage, however shields have an interesting caveat. They drain a ship's 'available power' very rapidly. This means that players will have to choose when to have their shields active, as they will most likely be in a situation of being able to run their shields, or fire their weapons, not both.
Note: I'm fine with allowing for tank builds where they put a huge reactor on their ship and run the shields constantly. In fact, some weapons can even be implemented to be able to still fire if they can't get enough power; just their DPS is reduced proportionally. What I'm not fine with is a build where you can tank and do decent DPS. The idea here is to keep shields a thing most players pop when in trouble, not something they always keep on.
Shields have quadrants that match the ship’s quadrants. Just like a ship, they have HP per quadrant, however, once they take damage over the HP per quadrant, the damage is dealt to the ship, not to the other shield quadrants (as ship does with it’s hull).
Another idea would be that any damage over the HP of a shield quadrant would drain that amount of hp from the other quadrants and do that damage to the ship’s hull. This would have the effect of getting penalizing players for getting hit in areas where shields are down, and drop shields faster. It also incentivises skilled players being able to hit the same shield quadrant over and over again.