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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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[X][FACTION] Approach the Developers - Crew recruitment and training is an issue not just for Starfleet, but for all Member World fleets. Propose founding a joint Federation Space Academy based on input from Starfleet and all Member World fleet organizations with the goal of unifying starship crew training standards across the Federation, allowing Starfleet Academy and similar member world institutions to focus solely on service-specific training. (Desired mechanical effect- Improve Crew income, especially officers.)
 
[X]Plan Infra 2.0

[X] [FACTION] Approach the development faction about putting together a general recovery program for the aftereffects of the Licori war. Some of our economies will suffer from war mobiliziation, our allies the Ked Paddah and Gaeni have suffered even more greatly economically, and the Licori themselves will need help on both economic and sophontarian grounds. Regardless of the details of the eventual peace deal we will need to be ready for action across the board.
 
Hm.

The combination of having damage scale with combat score, AND having critical hits, causes heavy outposts and starbases to develop a nasty tendency to one-shot things, or at least do so much damage in a single shot that the target is effectively doomed and unlikely to contribute meaningfully to the combat.

This is what happened to Endurance and Sojourner- crippling single shots that did roughly 40-50 damage and knocked down the shields all at once, almost at the very beginning of the 'heavy metal' phase of the battle. After that, they were taking hull damage with every shot and were reduced to military irrelevance very early on. Quite frankly, had I been in command I would have tried to order them out of the battle when they reached somewhere near half hull, simply because they were getting pounded into scrap without being able to contribute usefully in return.

It's like, it's one thing for a ship at half hull to stay in the battle when many ships on both sides have lost shields. That's reasonable because while you're exposed to risk, it's not disproportionate risk. But in a situation like this, the badly damaged ships simply cannot contribute anything to the battle; their own damage means that even if they hit a target they're just impotently inflicting scratch damage on its shields, while taking terrible injury themselves.

So it creates a situation where we have these 'dead man walking' ships that just sit there taking hit after hit until the law of averages catches up with them, accomplishing almost nothing and racking up huge numbers of crew casualties for our side.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Hm.

The combination of having damage scale with combat score, AND having critical hits, causes heavy outposts and starbases to develop a nasty tendency to one-shot things, or at least do so much damage in a single shot that the target is effectively doomed and unlikely to contribute meaningfully to the combat.

This is what happened to Endurance and Sojourner- crippling single shots that did roughly 40-50 damage and knocked down the shields all at once, almost at the very beginning of the 'heavy metal' phase of the battle. After that, they were taking hull damage with every shot and were reduced to military irrelevance very early on. Quite frankly, had I been in command I would have tried to order them out of the battle when they reached somewhere near half hull, simply because they were getting pounded into scrap without being able to contribute usefully in return.

It's like, it's one thing for a ship at half hull to stay in the battle when many ships on both sides have lost shields. That's reasonable because while you're exposed to risk, it's not disproportionate risk. But in a situation like this, the badly damaged ships simply cannot contribute anything to the battle; their own damage means that even if they hit a target they're just impotently inflicting scratch damage on its shields, while taking terrible injury themselves.

So it creates a situation where we have these 'dead man walking' ships that just sit there taking hit after hit until the law of averages catches up with them, accomplishing almost nothing and racking up huge numbers of crew casualties for our side.
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Maybe nerf critical hits? I was expecting them to do maybe double the attacker's Combat score, not quadruple.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The results seem to be within what I'd want in order for fixed defenses to hold value as deterrents.
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The only reason I have a problem with the outcome is that it doesn't make narrative sense for it to happen this way. 100-200 turns of combat is presumably supposed to represent a considerable span of time, after all. Having a few ships be reduced to "dead men walking" early in the battle and inexplicably hanging around for all that time, while hundreds of their crew die uselessly, while other ships get through the battle largely untouched, doesn't make a lot of narrative sense.

I'm fine with the outcome of fixed defenses easily being able to heavily damage or wreck our ships. I'm just not so happy with the idea that our ships will hover around for very long periods of time while slowly being beaten to death, given that the way combat and hull HP interact means that ships that have been beaten down this way aren't accomplishing anything.

I can actually think of ways around this that don't involve changing anything. For example, if damage scaled quadratically with HP loss*, ships reduced to 50% HP would still have 75% of their firepower; ships at roughly 30% HP would still hit at half power. At which point it would be more reasonable to imagine the commanders staying around and continuing to fight, because they're doing meaningful harm to the enemy and serving a purpose other than "get a lot of redshirts killed."
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*To be clear, right now a ship's effective combat score is C*(1-X) where X is the percentage of the ship's hull HP it has taken in damage.

I'm proposing that it could be C*((1-X)^2). This still yields 100% at full health and 0% at zero health, but it behaves differently in between. In particular, a ship can lose the first 10% or so of hull and suffer negligible reduction in performance. You have to get down to 3/4 health or lower before the ship's firepower suffers noticeably.

The drawback is that this is also a shield penetration nerf, because one or two shots that bypass shields no longer have much effect on the target's firepower.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The results seem to be within what I'd want in order for fixed defenses to hold value as deterrents.
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I agree, but unless those high crit results were from a special ability that fixed defenses have, then we could just as easily see them in any battle, or even see high-C ships scoring them against fixed defenses with the same probability.

Assuming that the high station crits aren't already coming from a special ability; leaving the crit system as it exists in place for stations but nerfing it a bit for starships should make these results more consistent.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I'm proposing that it could be C*((1-X)^2). This still yields 100% at full health and 0% at zero health, but it behaves differently in between. In particular, a ship can lose the first 10% or so of hull and suffer negligible reduction in performance. You have to get down to 3/4 health or lower before the ship's firepower suffers noticeably.
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You mean C*((1-X)^0.5). Squaring the factor would have the opposite effect.
 
[X]Plan Infra 2.0

[X][FACTION] Approach the Developers - Crew recruitment and training is an issue not just for Starfleet, but for all Member World fleets. Propose founding a joint Federation Space Academy based on input from Starfleet and all Member World fleet organizations with the goal of unifying starship crew training standards across the Federation, allowing Starfleet Academy and similar member world institutions to focus solely on service-specific training. (Desired mechanical effect- Improve Crew income, especially officers.)
 
Nix said:
You mean C*((1-X)^0.5). Squaring the factor would have the opposite effect.
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Actually, playing around a bit with a graphing calculator, the effect I had in mind is neither C*((1-X)^2) nor C*((1-X)^0.5), it's just plain C*(1-(X^2)). Among other things, because I consider it a desirable feature that the derivative of damage per shot, with respect to hull HP, be at or near zero when the hull is at or near 100% HP. This result is not obtained with the square root function.

But your square root function does more closely approximate the result I'd intended than the result of my little slip does; at some point I stopped thinking in terms of "one minus x squared" and started thinking "one minus x, squared," which yields just about the exact opposite of the result I wanted.

OneirosTheWriter said:
But if you take away my crits, what will I have left to cackle about?
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I'm not proposing to take your crits. Just to enable ships to run away screaming after being severely buttburned by massive crit firepower.
 
If enemy shields >= 90% and own shields <= 10% then retreat.

A conditional to tell a shit to just GTFO would be nice. And a bit of balancing to crits would be nice.
 
MTB said:
Point is, there are situations where it makes sense to stay in the fight even with 60% hull, and situations where it makes sense to retreat with 95% hull.
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Perhaps something like having each ship compare it's percentage of Shield+Hull remaining against the average of the fleet. If a ship's percentage falls more then say 10 points below the mean have it fall back until it's back within that threshold from either regenerated shields or just the rest of the fleet suffering damage. I'd probably put the threshold to return slightly higher then the threshold to retreat to avoid ships constantly drifting in and out of battle.

That would allow for heavily damaged ships to fall back until they've either recovered enough to participate again or the situation is desperate enough that they are needed.
 
My own view:
If it is a do or die for your species, then no retreat, no surrender.
If it is a skirmish in deep space, bug out at no later than 50% hull - if you can.
In-between depends on why the fight is occurring. And different captains/admirals/Klingons will have different ideas of when to point the bow somewhere else and engage warp.
 
UberJJK said:
Perhaps something like having each ship compare it's percentage of Shield+Hull remaining against the average of the fleet. If a ship's percentage falls more then say 10 points below the mean have it fall back until it's back within that threshold from either regenerated shields or just the rest of the fleet suffering damage. I'd probably put the threshold to return slightly higher then the threshold to retreat to avoid ships constantly drifting in and out of battle.

That would allow for heavily damaged ships to fall back until they've either recovered enough to participate again or the situation is desperate enough that they are needed.
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Goat said:
My own view:
If it is a do or die for your species, then no retreat, no surrender.
If it is a skirmish in deep space, bug out at no later than 50% hull - if you can.
In-between depends on why the fight is occurring. And different captains/admirals/Klingons will have different ideas of when to point the bow somewhere else and engage warp.
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Eh...

Making it easier for damaged ships to withdraw has the potential to make this game extremely frustrating. So few battles will be decisive, so few victories will actually mean anything.
 
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