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.