Posted July 09, 2023 by Desire Path Games
#combat #hullmods #update #factions #ships
Welcome back for another update. This month we have a dozen new ships, a new faction, a stamina system, strafing, and a good number of new hullmods and abilities.
The AFG was one of the first factions added to the game and by far saw the least amount of attention, mainly just using them as a placeholder to show off different factions. I'd always intended them to be more of an energy/shield focused faction but was never quite comfortable with their aesthetic or design. With the new plate shield and spinup weapon tech I got a much better idea of what I wanted out of them mechanically and visually.
For weapons many of their ships are intended to have very strong ballistic broadside mounts with secondary energy weapons for pressure/PD, and a strong focus on miniguns or weapons with high rates of fire. Their arc shields are narrow/nonexistant and fixed in place, instead relying mainly on strong broadside plate shields to soak up damage, leaving them highly exposed to flanks from the rear. This design philosophy is most evident in the Proprietor class capital ship.
As for abilities many of their ships possess either Overwhelming Firepower or Plate Shield Restoration, allowing their ships to either dish out a crapload of DPS with their signature miniguns, or quickly replace broken plate shields on their defense oriented ships. This "sword and shield" approach is intended to round out their fleets overall.
The FCCA represents the leftovers of a collapsed dictatorship that had formed on the edges of the colonized sector. The dictatorship emphasized stockpiling incredible amounts of weaponry in order to maintain its political influence and dissuade would be coup attempts from its citizenry. Unfortunately, this did little to help it during the economic collapse that ravaged the sector. Mass starvation ensued and many abandoned the region as the government fell apart, leaving much of the military hardware behind in relatively unsecured armories. Years later new colonists fleeing the political tensions from the core worlds came in and rebuilt the area, forming several smaller new governments. Fearing invasion from outside forces, these governments began collaborating under a defensive and diplomatic pact and creating the Alliance. Now the very weapons used to instill fear in their predecessor's people are a tool to uphold their sovereignty, though old remnants still exist who wish to undermine this.
Alliance ships are extremely missile focused, favoring the Macross Missile Massacre approach to warfare. To make up for this they tend to have overall lower than average combat stats and really bad heat management. Each ship tends to favor a different type of configuration for using missiles. Torpedoes, LRMs, SRMs, and eventually a nuke launching ship are all different flavors of FCCA ships. Many of their ships and weapons were pretty high end at the time of their creation, but that was decades ago and the times have changed. Mechanically this means their ships lack fancy abilities that you'd see in other factions, and in a straight brawl will more than likely lose the heat/armor war. However, missiles are an excellent force multiplier en masse and otherwise okay missiles can become extremely powerful when you have hullmods/abilities to replenish or enhance them.
As the faction/game is still extremely early in development it's unsure how strong they'll become and I may have to water them down with more generalist ships to avoid the AI spamming an ungodly amount of missiles at the player. For now I'm just doing the shotgun approach and adding as many different archetypes as I can to tinker with the concept of a missile heavy faction. You'll likely hear me say it a lot but absolutely nothing in the game is balanced yet and won't be for a good while.
Ships can now enter a strafe mode where they will automatically turn to the targeted enemy. This can be toggled with ctrl
Ships now have stamina. Stamina reflects the status of the crew's morale/health/fatigue and the ship's more sensitive internal systems as the battle wears on.
Stamina is broken down into two stats: peak time and stamina. Each ship has a peak time at the start of battle where no stamina decay happens. This is typically a minute or so but will vary based on ship and size. Afterwards they will begin to degrade over time.
For stamina itself this represents the amount of time a ship can remain in fighting condition. This is currently 120/180/240 seconds based on size tier of the ship.
Running out of stamina incurs the Low Stamina debuff, which will severely reduce combat capability across the board.
Abilities have been designed to be able to cost stamina. This serves as an additional way to balance certain types of ships and to allow for more powerful abilities. Lesser abilities will cost little to no stamina, while very powerful ones can cost a great deal.
Added a ton of new hullmods, many of them related to the new stamina and strafe mechanics
Added a damage texture overlay to ships, causing them to appear more damaged as they lose health. Will need to refine it to deal with ships with holes in them but it's good enough for now.
I spent a couple weeks dedicated to upgrading an internal tool to help me rapidly iterate on ship development. To put things into perspective each ship has over 100 variables to account for, many of them dictionaries holding even more data. Engines, weapons, collision meshes, shields, abilities, hullmods etc. It adds up. Even getting the basic data set up to get a ship in the game could take several hours. More importantly it was mind numbingly tedious. After the improvements I was able to cut that down to about 30-45 minutes per ship, spritework and secondary data not withstanding. This should greatly help development in the long run, and perhaps way down the road I can polish it up and release it as a modding tool to the community.
I was able to get some work done on that, mainly just adding it to beams to okayish results. I suspect a more focused update is in order for visual improvements to combat, and will be keeping that in mind for the future.
Added the Boarded status effect, which damages the ship's health at regular intervals
Reworked Poison status effect to affect damage stamina over time