Damage Effectiveness

posted on January 4th, 2014, 5:28 am

I know what your thinking; "You've done something like this before." "You're always have ideas about damageing your opponent."Well, this time, it's different...sorta.I had an idea, and it kinda fits canon as well as gameplay. In every series, weapons are effective in some areas, while useless in others.

The best example is the Enterprise (NX01) being incapable of damaging an enemy because of its shields. It was only after they installed the new Phase Cannons that they were able to take down the shields and use their torpedoes to damage the hull. Note though, the torpedoes did nothing to the shields.

Something like that could be useful to modders. By alowing us to set specific shield and hull damage, that lets modders add a bit of effectiveness to the weapons.

For example, say phasers do great damage to the shields, but are vertually useless against the hull, whereas torpedoes do large amounts of hull damage, but low shield damage. Players will opt to have a few phaser ships covering a couple of torpedo ships.

As a bonus, if you only set one damage, it will act like the regular setup for FO. Counting as the damage for both.

Code Idea:

Code: Select all

//Hull Damage
HullDamage = 32
//Shield Damage
ShieldDamage = 7.21

//In case you don't want absolute Damage
HullDamageVariance = 0
ShieldDamageVariance = 0

posted on January 4th, 2014, 11:35 am

Something like this is already possible with UniBeams. I used it to make the QCB (breaks shields, no hull damage) and GHRC (ignores shields, rips apart the hull) for KA2. A simpler command would be nice however.

posted on January 4th, 2014, 11:52 am

Something like this is already possible with UniBeams. I used it to make the QCB (breaks shields, no hull damage) and GHRC (ignores shields, rips apart the hull) for KA2.

True, but that's limited. If you fire a weapon that, as you stated, ignores shields and strikes only the hull, then it is like the shields aren't protecting the ship at all. What if the weapon, which isn't suppose to do shield damage, is a torpedo. By setting it to strike only the hull, then the shields wont defend against it.

What I'm proposing is a code that lets you damage both the shields, and the hull, but at different rates. This way, that torpedo you made does minor shield damage, but lots of hull damage.

It can also be used to compensate for buffs to a ship, instead of limiting the ships hit points, which is dangerous for some of the things in the game, such as nebula.

posted on January 5th, 2014, 2:02 am

I like this. Frankly, I'm surprised that this isn't already implemented. It makes weapon types much more important and encourages ship diversity in fleets.

posted on January 17th, 2014, 2:21 am

I kind of sorta have done this with my Jem'Hadar weapons..but I did it much different and more complex. This is simpler.

What i did was have a polaron beam weapon that strikes the shields and does minimal damage..but because the phased polaron beam penetrated the shields..it did damage to the hull underneath... there are actually two weapons firing..the beam you see and the invisible weapon (no sprite, no sound) but same recharge and fire rates...

This would be much better...we could specify a weapon to do damage to both shields and hull at the same time...say 50/50 or 25/75 or 0/100

posted on January 23rd, 2014, 2:08 pm

It makes much more sense, unfortunately the people of Activision did not think of supporting this by recognizing shields as a separate health system. Its practically an extension of the hull's health bar with dependency on a system. You'd have to recode the core code. Which I am sure the Devs are trying to figure it out.

posted on January 23rd, 2014, 7:33 pm

I really like this idea and can see it being extremely useful in the future.

posted on January 29th, 2014, 2:38 am

In Fleet Ops version 2 there was a weapon that lowered shields entirely but did no hull damage, although that may have been coded to disable the shield subsystem instead? It was on the Fusion cube and rather hard to micromanage since it was useless after the first shot.

posted on January 30th, 2014, 5:06 am

See my post above, the second one.

posted on January 30th, 2014, 5:09 am

in that case how about every time the weapon fires it replaceweapons the target ship for one with twice as many shield hitpoints, then it deals damage, then it replaceweapons it back? If the conversion used percentage shields and hull, it would result in the effect you're looking for XD

posted on January 30th, 2014, 5:24 pm

First, to complicated. Your replacing a ship, doing damage, then replacing it again, and its not even your ship. I tried something similar, and not only did it not work, I ended up crashing my game because it continuously replicated the new ship, but left the old one.

That, and it sounds like your talking about doubling the hitpoints. That wont work because, for one, the enemy ship would need to be completely replaced, in order to give it that boost which will negate any damage you've done so far, and once you replace it back, it'll, again, have fresh shields and hull.

All that's being proposed are two to four lines of code that let you indicate the damage to shields and hull separately. This way, your Defiant can take as much shield damage as any other ship, but laughs at the hull damage. Trying to do this now would result in an early death for your Defiant, and an annoyance for anyone trying to balance weapons.

The idea behind this was, as shown in some episodes, some species had weapons that just bounced off the shields, but did massive hull damage. (And vice versa, I think.)

If I've misinterpreted your meaning, let me know.

posted on January 30th, 2014, 5:40 pm

No you understood it pretty well, but I was trying to be funny. Back when I was in college we would come up with the craziest, most cringe-worthy coding solutions that would make the professor go "what the hell!?" when he saw it. That double-replaceweapon method would do the right thing, but the implementation would be MASSIVE and the game would probably crash with any more than 1-2 ships firing

The meat of the issue is what L337 64M3R said: that command would have to be coded at the game engine level which is below the ship coding level, and the devs may not be able to get to it.

But although it isn't possible to make a single weapon that deals more damage to shields or hull, it's possible to make a ship with one weapon that deals damage to shields only and another weapon that damages both, to get whatever ratio you want. Also, if you want a ship that has tougher shields or a tougher hull, that should be represented by giving it more shield or hull hitpoints, not by having the same number of hitpoints as other races but with some sort of resistance.

The only weapon I think is impossible is the one that deals more damage to hull than it does to shields, but doesn't deal that extra damage when the shields are still up. Without classifying shields as a different type of HP on the game engine level, there's just no way for the game to tell.

posted on January 31st, 2014, 4:03 pm

Nothing is impossible. Have a look at what enhancements the devs have already done to the engine. With a little time, and effort, they might just be able to set this up.

Without classifying shields as a different type of HP on the game engine level, there's just no way for the game to tell.

In truth, shields are classified as a seperate HP. This is in the ODFs, where you have both 'maxHealth' and 'maxshields'. If it was all classified as one, wouldn't it make sense that there wouldn't be a 'maxshields' command?

Also, if you want a ship that has tougher shields or a tougher hull, that should be represented by giving it more shield or hull hitpoints not by having the same number of hitpoints as other races but with some sort of resistance.

In FO, this is already being done, but in each of the episodes, if you look, they note lighter damage to something like shields, then to hull. This is all I'm suggesting.

No you understood it pretty well, but I was trying to be funny. Back when I was in college we would come up with the craziest, most cringe-worthy coding solutions that would make the professor go "what the hell!?" when he saw it.

posted on January 31st, 2014, 7:44 pm

Probably the most applicable means to this would be like as if Torpedoes, they'd do much more severe hull damage than what they would ever do to shields. And even when shields are up they still deal hull damage. This example is seen many times in Deep Space Nine, as well as the Star Trek movies Insurrection and Nemesis. And this is more emphasized in the JJprise movies thus far (even though its ridiculous how much damage the Enterprise can take vs in the Original series).

Probably my biggest pet-peeve is when they set it that ships have 100% shield protection against all weapons. This would be severely false. If the Hull and Shield specific damage could also be listed for specific ships like the example below then it would be even better.

Code: Select all

Shield Damage = 96
"crd_keldon" 117
"kli_neghvar" 82
"fed_galaxy" 91
"rom_dderidex" 105

Hull Damage = 179
"crd_keldon" 167
"kli_neghvar" 184
"fed_galaxy" 158
"rom_dderidex" 163


posted on February 1st, 2014, 5:13 am

What I did, although it's sort of a backwards way of accomplishing it, was to make it so phasers, disruptors etc (Primary Weapons) did no crew casualties, hull damage etc, as long as shields were up. Those funny variable things that define damage thresholds.

I left Heavy Weapons (Heavy Disruptors, Hellbores etc) and Secondary Weapons (Photons, Plasmas etc) alone, so they do "bleed" damage through shields.