Tryptic's Mod version 3.2c...I mean 3.2d

posted on February 19th, 2020, 11:55 pm

Hi Fisher,

I love stealing enemy ships, too. But there's a much easier way.

Take your fleet and begin attacking an enemy ship. then click the "transport" button and hover it over the enemy ship. As soon as his shields are down, begin transporting your crew aboard. This way, you won't have to worry about disabling life support and letting the enemy crew die that way. You can just keep transporting crew aboard until the ship is yours, then send it back to your shipyard for repair / recrew.

Hey man!

I know about all of this, what I was trying to say is that in the stock armada 1 & 2, the subsystems of a starship was a lot easier to become damaged. With fleet ops, it's really difficult to catch a starship out by losing the engines or shield system. It works both ways when I think about it, it's much more intense when one of your veteran ships is under heavy attack, or you have an intense wait for a ship to repair its subsystem.

The newton class starship is mainly used to repair base structures that have sustained damage, but if the sub-systems were altered to become more frequent, it would increase the value of the newton class and ultimately change the overall dynamic of an attack fleet.

The only time I have seen my ship's subsystems damaged is when they are close to being destroyed, and the odd time that an enemy ship has got a lucky shot off. I only really play against the AI on 8 player free-for-all maps so I don't know how much that affects the overall values.

posted on February 22nd, 2020, 5:01 am

So the key about Subsystems is the way they interact with disabling effects:

-A subsystem that takes damage remains operational until it reaches 0 hp. It then becomes broken and slowly repairs itself back up to 100% hp, at which point it comes online
-A subsystem that becomes disabled, however, goes straight to the broken state. A ship that takes a single hit to its weapons and goes to 97% hp on the subsystem, but then has its weapons disabled, will go into the weapons destroyed state until its weapons repair themselves to 100% and come back online

This interaction with disabling effects makes a few abilities like Nanites WAY more dangerous since it not only disables random subsystems, it causes more subsystems to be destroyed when ships take hull damage.

I believe Armada 2 had bleed values where a small percentage of shots would bypass shields and deal direct hull damage. This would allow some subsystems to become damaged/destroyed even while shields were up. However to my knowledge, the Fleet Ops devs set this number to 0% as they felt it was a poor mechanic to try to balance. Which it totally is, by the way. I haven't done my personal analysis but I'm not sure putting it back would ever be a good idea.

Another value is the chance of subsystems being damaged when a ship takes hull damage. This one is unfortunately out of my reach since it is defined in every single ship odf file rather than a central location, and I'm just not ready to modify every single ship in the game to change the "chance of engine hit" from 2% to 5% or something like that.

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With that said, I have introduced a small number of Life Support disabling effects in TM. The Dodecahedron's adapted photon torpedoes already had a high chance to disable Life Support, but I added a small crew killing effect to them as well (except against stations). I also added a life support disable to the Dominion B5's special ability, and when I finish 3.8 one of the Romulan Tavara refits will have an AoE Life Support Disable. I've kept an eye out for other ships that could be fun with one, but it remains a hard ability to balance since a ship that gets Life Support disabled while it's repairing in a yard might stall in the yard and prevent other ships from repairing. If I'm not careful I'll create an easily abused ability.