In this post:

• Internationalisation
• Resource types
  • Natural resources
• Types of weaponry and defences
• Production and capability types
• Technologies
• Fleet strategies
  • Defence strategies
  • Attack strategies
  • Relative strengths
• Stuff that can be built
  • Building types
  • Ship parts

Internationalisation

All text that is independent from the interface used to access the game is stored in the database. Each string is identified by a code, and associated to translations in various languages. Each language is identified by an ISO code and a name (in the language itself). The set of translations available in a given language may be incomplete, for example when a new language is being added.

All definitions which require a name or a description in fact use the internationalisation system.

Resource types

The various types of resources which empire may possess and use are defined in the database. Each resource type is identified by its name; in addition, it carries a description as another string from the internationalisation system. It belongs to a resource category, itself identified by yet another string. All resources are given a value which is used to compute e.g. player rankings. Finally, advanced types of resources only become visible when some technology has been discovered.

Natural resources

Some types of resources can be found in the game universe and can be extracted through mining operations. These natural resources are added to the map when it is generated. Each type of natural resource has a non-zero probability of being found at a location; in addition, the map generator should enforce an average quantity and average extraction difficulty.

Types of weaponry & defences

There are three categories of weaponry (beam weapons, mass drivers and missiles) and their respective countermeasures (shields, armours and point defence systems). Each weaponry or defence category should be identified by its general type and by whether it is a weapon or a countermeasure. In addition, a name and a description need to be associated with each category.

Production and capability types

Productions and capabilities, whether they apply to whole empires, planets or ships, are described in the exact same way.

Generally speaking, a production or capability is identified by a code name. It possesses a display name and a description. It carries a flag indicating whether it is an additive or exclusive property – for example, ship components providing automated repairs have an additive effect, while mineral scanners are either present or not.

The value of a production may not be meaningful to the player. In order to display that value, a production definition includes a non-zero display multiplier, and may use a prefix and / or a suffix. If there is a suffix, then a suffix tooltip text may be included. The prefix, suffix and suffix tooltip text are of course internationalised strings.

While empire and ship productions do not include any additional data, a planet production or capability definition features a flag that indicates whether the production is local or global. A local production is used at the planet’s level only, while a global production is computed at the owning empire’s level.

Technologies

A technology is identified by its name. It carries a description, and requires an amount of research points to be accumulated before it is discovered. Each technology belongs to a technology category, identified by its name. A technology has an implementation price, defined by at least one type of resource and a positive quantity. Finally, a technology may only be researched once its dependencies (a set of other technologies) have been discovered.

In addition, a technology may provide some amount of an empire production.

Fleet strategies

Generally speaking, a fleet strategy is described by a name and a description. In addition, all fleet strategies include a probability of intercepting shots to other fleets, an advantage threshold used to determine whether ground armies should be dropped to the planet’s surface, and an advantage multiplier which indicates how much support a ship of size 1 gives to the ground armies. All strategies also include a probability of changing targets.

Defence strategies

A defence strategy is a strategy which can be used by fleets in defensive mode. In addition to the common strategy information, it also includes a probability of intercepting shots to the planet.

Attack strategies

An attack strategy is a strategy which can be used by attacking fleets. In addition to the common strategy information, attack strategies also include information related to attacking the planet: a weight modifier for ground structures, which determines how likely a fleet using the strategy is to target the planet’s buildings; a military objectives modifier, which indicates how likely the fleet is to target civilian structures, and a civilian casualties modifier, which will be used to compute civilian casualties when firing at ground structures. In addition, because planets do not have strategies, the information regarding attack strategies’ relative efficiency opposed to planets is included along with attack strategies. This information consists in 4 modifiers: aim and damage modifiers for the fleets, and aim and damage modifiers for planets.

Relative strengths

Each combination of an attack strategy with a defence strategy is described through 2 sets of modifiers: aim and damage modifiers for both the attacking and the defending sides.

Stuff that can be built

The database should contain the definition of all “buildable” items. Such an item is always identified by a name; it is associated with a description, and its construction requires a positive amount of work. In addition, all items which can be built carry a construction price and a maintenance price, both being a non-empty set of resource types associated with positive quantities.

Building types

A building type is a buildable item. It generates at least one type of planet production, with a maximal quantity associated to each type of production. Each type of building provides a quantity of jobs to be manned by the planets’ population, and possesses a maximal amount of hit points.

Buildings may also provide planet-side weaponry. A building may be associated with a type of weapon, along with weapon characteristics – accuracy, base damage, charge time and cool-down time.

Ship part types

A ship part is a buildable item. It belongs to a ship parts category identified by a name (a category may be a sub-category of another category).

There are different types of ship part types, which correspond to major elements of a ship’s design.

Rationale regarding the hybrid direct/meta modelling of ship parts: some of the ship parts’ characteristics are essential in that they provide the basic description of a ship design; most of these characteristics are used as constraints during the design of a ship (for example, available hull space must be greater than / equal to the amount of used hull space multiplied by the empire’s miniaturisation capabilities). In addition, these basic characteristics should not change in further versions of LW. However, other characteristics corresponding to various special abilities are not necessary in most operations, and are likely to evolve as development progresses. The latter are stored using meta-modelling while the former are stored directly.

Hulls

A hull is a type of ship part which provides space for other parts. It is either mechanical or biological in nature, and defines the amount of hit points as well as the basic manoeuvrability of a ship. In addition, a hull may provide energy. Finally, it may provide ship capabilities in various quantities.

Generators

A generator is a type of ship part which consumes space in a ship’s hull and provides energy. It may require the ship to be mechanical or biological.

Normal space engine

A normal space engine is a type of ship part which consumes space in a ship’s hull and requires energy. It provides thrust. It may require the ship to be mechanical or biological.

Hyperspace engines

A Hyperspace engine is a type of ship part which consumes space in a ship’s hull and requires energy. It provides Hyperspace displacement power. It may require the ship to be mechanical or biological.

Hybrid engines

A hybrid engine is an engine that is both a normal space engine and a Hyperspace engine.

Weapons

A weapon is a type of ship part which consumes space in a ship’s hull and requires energy. It is associated with a weapon type, and possesses a charge time, a cool-down time, an accuracy value (which is a probability) and a base damage.

Countermeasures

A countermeasure is a type of ship part which consumes space in a ship’s hull and requires energy. It is associated with a defence type and possesses an absorption probability, a maximal absorption value and a per-minute absorption recovery value.

Other ship parts

Any other type of ship part is a ship part which consumes space in a ship’s hull and may require energy to function. It may provide ship capabilities in various quantities.

Summary of ship part “types” and associated information

The table below is a summary of the information required by the various “families” of ship parts listed above.

There are two major computations performed by the battle system. First, space combat is computed. Once this part is over, and provided there are still attacking ships in orbit, computations regarding ground combat are performed. Once these two main chunks have been computed, experience points are attributed.

This posts attempts to explain what the various steps of each computation are and how they work, generally speaking.

This flowchart shows the essential steps of the battle computations. Exit conditions and various internal steps have been omitted for clarity.

Space combat

The first step of space combat is fleet updates. When attacking fleets first start a battle or when fleets join an ongoing battle, they suffer “time dilation” which causes them to be less efficient for some time. This time dilation effect must be decreased over time.

Once fleets’ time dilation strengths have been updated, ships need to undergo various systematic updates: ships that can repair themselves will regain hit points, countermeasures will recover from previous damage absorption, and weapons will charge or cool down. If no weapons are ready to fire, then the space combat computation is over.

If there are weapons ready to fire, the first step is target selection. If a weapon already has a target, there’s a chance it might still select another target – this depends on a fleet’s strategy (for planet-based weapon platforms, there is a fixed, very small probability of target change). If such a change needs to occur, or if the weapon had no target for some other reason, it will seek a target based on the fleet’s (or the planet’s) tactics – basically, it can select targets by size, weaponry or defences, with different priorities. An attacking fleet’s strategy will determine whether the weapon may target the planet’s infrastructure.

Once weapons have selected their targets, they may fire. A computation is performed to determine whether the weapon actually hits, whether the shot may be intercepted and which amount of damage it would cause on a “naked” ship from various variables such as the ship’s experience, current hit points, manoeuvrability… When a weapon fires, there’s also a small chance of a critical hit, which cannot be intercepted and deals twice as much damage.

Depending on strategy settings, some ships may try to intercept shots aimed at other fleets or at the planet. Such an interception depends on how successful the aim was, and on various other factors such as how many hits the intercepting fleet might sustain. A successful intercept will cause the ship that intercepted the shot to take the damage – which is particularly useful to defend planets. No ship can intercept two shots in a single battle update, however.

Once the destination of all shots have been computed, the corresponding damage is inflicted to ships and buildings. Ships may have countermeasures which can sometimes absorb part or totality of the damage. Of course, should a ship or building reach 0 hit points, it is destroyed. In addition, any ships or buildings that provide ground armies will have their army strength reduced accordingly.

Ground combat

Once space combat has been resolved, and provided there are any attacking ships left, the computation of ground combat begins.

First, the ground defence advantage is computed. It is determined by the amount and type of ships supporting ground troupes, by the amount and type of military buildings, and by the population’s happiness.

The support that fleets provide for ground armies may vary depending on a fleet’s current strategy. Fleet strategy also determines whether ships that carry armies should drop the troupes to the planet’s surface or attempt to extract them.

Once the system knows which armies are on the planet, providing there are both attacking and defending armies, ground combat is computed. The damage dealt by either side is mostly determined by the advantage value, although their respective sizes has an influence. Finally, damage is applied to armies (and to the corresponding ships or buildings).

Assigning experience points

After all actual fighting has been computed, experience points are given to ships (buildings will have no XP in milestone 2, but that might change later). The amount of experience points granted to a ship is determined by the damage it inflicted to other ships, by the shots it intercepted, and by the damage the ground armies it carries inflicted.

Next time…

… I will explain the mechanics of space combat more precisely, and how it is affected by fleet tactics and strategies.

In order to make sure that the fleet-related information is complete, the most crucial component is the battle system. It affects a few things on planets, and has far-reaching consequences on the whole ship design and fleet management system.

The most basic types of information handled by the battle system are the definitions of weapons and their countermeasures. The basic principle – three types of weapons vs. three types of countermeasures – has been described many times. This time I needed to come up with the details.

Weapons

In addition to their types, weapons will have four characteristics.

• Base damage is the “standard” amount of damage a weapon deals when it hits. Depending on circumstances, the actual damage may be different.
• Accuracy describes the probability that, in a perfectly neutral environment, the weapon actually hits what it is aimed at.
• Charge time and Cool-down time are delays that occur before and after the weapon is fired.

It is easy to compute the average damage inflicted by a weapon at each tick. This allows weapons of the same level, but of different types, to be relatively different in behaviour without sacrificing game balancing.

For example, one could imagine a beam weapon that fires once every two ticks, with a base damage of 5 and an accuracy of 80%. This weapon would inflict, on average, 2 points of damage every minute. It is easy to create a mass driver with similar results; such a weapon would fire once every 4 minutes, inflicting a base damage of 20 with an accuracy of 40%.

In battles, each weapon fires independently. Weapons on the same ship may have different targets – while this makes no real sense for fighters, it prevents really big ships from concentrating their fire on a potentially much weaker target.

Countermeasures

Just like weapons, countermeasures have a few more characteristics in addition to their type.

• Maximal absorption is the maximal amount of damage that can be absorbed by a countermeasure before it becomes inefficient.
• Efficiency describes the probability that a countermeasure intercepts damage.
• Absorption recovery is the amount of absorption points recovered at each tick after damage absorption.

Balancing for countermeasures is a little more tricky than it is for weapons. I chose to use a (totally artificial) value corresponding to the efficiency multiplied by the amount of minutes a countermeasure would be efficient for if it was absorbing half its maximal capacity at each minute:

Efficiency * Maximal absorption / ( Maximal absorption * 0.5 – Absorption recovery )

Obviously, this means that the recovery should always be lower than half the maximal absorption…

In battles, all countermeasures of the same type act as one single countermeasure on a ship, with an weighted average used as the efficiency and sums for both the maximal absorption and the recovery.

Balancing weapons and countermeasures

No countermeasure can prevent damage indefinitely unless its recovery rate is higher than the damage being inflicted. While this might happen when pitting e.g. a very big ship against a single fighter, it makes it relatively easy to balance weapons and countermeasures of the same level – a weapon’s average damage should be slightly higher than its respective countermeasure’s recovery rate.

Next time…

I am still working on the battle system at the moment. My next post will be about fleet tactics and strategies, as this has been (is?) a major headache.

Missile countermeasures come in three different types.

• Anti-missile weapon systems (AMWS) are weapons that try to shoot incoming missiles to destroy them; this type of countermeasure uses a lot of space on board.
• Electronic missile countermeasures (EMC) try to fool an incoming missile’s guidance system to prevent it from reaching its target. They are much smaller than anti-missile weapon systems, however they are very demanding on the ship’s generators.
• Physical missile countermeasures (PMC – for lack of a better name) use advanced knowledge of the universe’s structure to get rid of incoming missiles. While these systems use quite a lot of space and energy, they are more efficient than EMCs or AMWSs.

Do you have other ideas of possible missile counter measures?

Do you have ideas of other categories of missile counter measures?