Damage Control Expansion - Attack Ships on Fire

[Spookyfam]

Please read and consider my suggestion for adding new features into the game.

The main issues I’m trying to address with these suggestions are:

1. The lack excitement and human (ships’ crew) struggle in aurora’s combat.
2. The disproportional advantage that a minor, e.g. 5%, speed advantage gives to ships in combat.
3. The lack of any kind of combat other than “decisive battle” in aurora.

The main ways I have tried to resolve these issues is by

1. Making all ships have larger HTK, and adding dangerous damage over time (DOT) that the crew must act to counteract.
2. Making ships focusing on combat actions more vulnerable to internal damage. And ships focusing on fleeing or damage control less vulnerable to internal damage.
3. Enabling ships to deal disproportional damage if they are defending/fleeing.
4. Edit: Also enabling ships to actually flee, even if they are slightly slower than their enemy.

Aurora4x Suggestion - Damage Control Expansion - Attack Ships on Fire - V01.pdf (4.0 MB)

About half of the file are pictures so its not as long as it appears.

These suggestions were designed to not invalidate any existing mechanics in aurora, nor require major discarding or rewriting of existing code (hopefully).

Furthermore, these suggestions also resolve some existing issues with aurora. For example, too much shield usage, lack of usage of internal armor, the extreme randomness of secondary explosions.

I welcome the forum’s questions, criticisms, and further ideas.

[GrandNord]

Touching on what you wrote about ships combat, there is just too little difference between a mission killed and an actual kill, since when the armor starts to get pierced, everything becomes insanely vulnerable all at once

I think I already suggested this quite some time ago on the old forum but maybe putting some components as external components (out of the armor’s protection) would help with that. Sensors, weapons hardpoints, hangars doors, jammers, maybe shield projectors, etc, should not logically be protected by armor.

It would add a lot of variety in the situations ships can end up in and in the battles, it would incentivise redundency and spreading shots to the whole enemy fleet in the hopes of degrading their combat effectiveness throughout the battles. It would also add some élément of luck with what would essentially be lucky strikes against important outside components.

Of course, a lot of parameters might need to be shifted around in term of the HTK of various components or the odds of hitting them. Maybe some additionnal option could be added to component design to harden them, balance with higher weight (like increasing turrets HTK) and maybe lowered effectiveness.

[Spookyfam]

Increase the base HTK of most components, and assign each existing available component as “volatile” or “non-volatile” and as “sensitive” or “non-sensitive”

Add a technology “Durable Component Construction” which further increases HTK of non-sensitive components. Ship designs need to update to benefit, similar to the “update armor” and “update CDE” buttons.

Would this meet the issue you are talking about? My intention was for ships to be able to be “mission killed” way before they actually explode. And to be able to keep firing back even when on fire and doomed. i.e. they can survive for much longer than right now when starting to take internal damage.

I just think that adding components outside of external armor would require reworking of the existing damage models, and it would also need reworking of the design interface and ships in general.

Edit: You can make it so that unarmored engines and unarmored direct fire weapons cause evenly distributed single tile wide “holes” in the designed armor of a ship. The ship armor is thinner (pre-damaged and cannot be repaired) at the holes, down to a minimum of 1. With a curresponding reduction in ship armor cost. The minimum armor at the holes are increased by 1 layer per armor tech researched. Armored weapons and engines reduce their armor hole penalty by 1 layer per extra HTK; up to fully restoring to the ship’s max armor. Missile launchers always cause holes (nerf missiles). Small weapons and engines cause partial holes, rounded up to the nearest integer. Weapons use the lowest extra HTK for reducing the armor penalty.

[CopyOfSatan]

Armor and Shields are the main means of protecting the ship. They reliably absorb a certain amount of damage without reducing the ship’s combat capability. HTK rather provides a chance that the next hit will destroy the gun and a couple of crew cabins, rather than vital or explosive systems. Technically, there is always the possibility of destroying a ship of any size with even 1 damage hit if it does not have armor and shields. HTK does not provide reliable protection, it is nothing more than a chance of survival when the main protection is gone.

“Durable Component Construction” technology would allow your cruisers to survive more hits, but the difference between their survival rate and that of smaller frigates will be increased. So, if you need more survivable ships, why don’t you just make them bigger?

You can add additional components and damage control modules to reduce the risk of damage to important systems and to be able to repair them (and probability to repair them immediately after receiving damage), if your doctrine involves tanking damage with expensive ship internal systems.

I also don’t understand the reason that would cause a warship to slow down when attacking a cargo ship. If you have a more expensive, more powerful engine, you gain an advantage in speed and the ability to impose a combat distance that is advantageous to you. Why would my long-range ships reduce their speed when attacking an enemy fleet without shields, if speed and range are their main advantages?

I don’t see the need for the proposed changes.

[AuroraSteve]

@Spookyfam

The main issues I’m trying to address with these suggestions are:

1. The lack excitement and human (ships’ crew) struggle in aurora’s combat.
2. The disproportional advantage that a minor, e.g. 5%, speed advantage gives to ships in combat.
3. The lack of any kind of combat other than “decisive battle” in aurora.

I don’t know how much Aurora you have played, but I haven’t had the same experience.

Firstly, Aurora is an operational and strategic game, not a tactical one, so the modelling of crew is at the level of total crew, casualties, etc. plus the capabilities of the officers. Besides, the ‘struggle’ of the crew is effectively represented by the actions of these ship aided by some imagination.

A 5% speed advantage doesn’t help you against missiles, or longer-ranged energy weapons, or jump point defences, or being surrounded. There are many options to overcome speed advantage. The only situation where it really proves decisive is in deep space against an enemy with shorter-ranged energy weapons. If you are the slower ship, you should try to avoid that situation.

There are many battles that are not decisive, which is why I asked about your playing experience. Read my latest campaign (Suns Never Set) for the long running series of battles in Delta Eridani between my own colony on the fifth planet and a Precursor stronghold on the fourth planet.

Beyond that example though there are many battles where I have engaged and then disengaged without destroying the enemy.

With regard to your specific suggestions:

1. There is already an enemy in the game with damage over time weapons.
2. One of the most important principles in Aurora is that the internal physics must be consistent. Giving ships less damage or more damage because they are shooting or not shooting doesn’t fit that principle. There is no ‘all power to shields’ option.
3. The same applies. There is no reasons that weapons would cause more or less damage because a ship is approaching or running.
4. There is no reason that a ship fleeing would be able to move out of range, just because it is ‘fleeing’. If you get caught in deep space by a faster ship with better weapons, you are going to die unless you reach a jump point, are reinforced or you enemy runs out of maintenance supplies or fuel.

I’ve run quickly through your doc and I understand there is a lot of effort involved on your part. However, bear in mind that Aurora has twenty years of development, testing, adding player suggestions, etc. so the game balance is very good now (in the sense there is no optimal approach). Any changes need to ensure that balance is maintained, while giving the player new meaningful decisions and not adding micromanagement that outweighs the gameplay benefit.

1. I’ve considered fire before, but a combat-oriented spacecraft would be setup to vent atmosphere to quickly quell any fire.

2. You have made a lot of mechanical suggestions around shields, weapon failures, etc. but you need to explain why this would be better than the current mechanics, using the above principles. Also remember that Aurora is not a tactical game so mechanics should reflect that.

3. The whole point of box launchers is they can only be loaded/unloaded at port facilities.

4. Reactors won’t explode differently just because the ship isn’t in active combat.

5. Steering control is too tactical. There is no facing in the game for example, or weapons arcs.

[Spookyfam]

Thanks for responding. I’ve played Aurora on and off for about 10 years. Joined with the Quill18 Wave. Mostly been a lurker on the forums tho. I’m unemployed atm so…

On the topic of operational and strategic, to be able to have damaged ships survive and fight another day, is IMO most definetly a strategic mechanic. Furthermore, to characterize the combat as strategic or operational only, is not an accurate assessment. Aurora has many tactical level mechanics, ship decoys, detailed PD setups, fighter combat etc. Furthermore, I think my suggestion is at a level compatible with Aurora, for example, the suggestion of FFR, is a ship level rating. You arent controlling individual crew like in FTL for example.

I concede that if you play with missiles and jump point defences, then speed plays a lesser role. The problem is that you can always bring a battle into deep space if you have the speed advantage. Speed controls when, where, and if combat takes place. Once this happens, only missiles can help you when you are slower. This is probably one of the reasons why Missiles are the strongest weapon, and most used by players. This is probably also one of the reasons why shields are so OP. It enables kiting without the need to outrange the enemy.

I will take a look at the Suns Never Set story. That sounds like exactly the kind of battles I am looking for. I would like them to be more common, and encouraged by the mechanics, not a rarity. But missiles, and jump point combat, are exactly the opposite of that. Extremely deadly combat, over in seconds, no way for the defending side to escape if they lose.

I’d like to highlight a few points about my suggestion that may change your mind, or correct some misunderstandings.

1. The existing damage over time is not interactive with the crew.
2. My suggestions for ships receiving more damage or less damage does not make any changes to aurora physics. There is no actual damage debuff or weapon damage buffs.
3. My suggestions rely strongly on the “in-combat” vs “out-of-combat” tag. I feel that the buffs and debuffs given by the tag are realistic and consistent with Aurora. The tag elegently causes pursuing ships to put themselves in more risk than the fleeing ships, and also allows fleeing ships a change to escape.
4. There is indeed no way for a ship fleeing to just be faster. Reaching a jump point, reinforcements, and enemies running out of supplies and fuel basically never happen with how fast aurora’s combat is. Which is why it never makes sense for anyone defending a jump point to ever retreat. Its always better to stand and fight, even if you are losing, cause you can never get away. This is the main problem that I am trying to address with my suggestion. Fire and in-combat vs out-of-combat mechanics introduce ways for the fleeing side to potentially stop or slow down a pursuit, or even turn the tables.
5. I really would like to highlight the in-combat vs out-of-combat mechanics again. And to request you take a look at the details of this mechanic. And then give criticisms again. None of these mechanics add micromanagment for the player.
6. The mechanical suggestions around shields, magazines, weapons etc. are all meant to compliment the main suggestion, and to use the fire mechanic more. None of them affect micromanagement and I believe are balanced when looked at alongside the main suggestion.
7. If you read carefully, I hope you can imagine a situation where some ships perform a doomed last stand, and are able to actually succeed in allowing their comrades to escape.
8. For fire, the full quote from blade runner is “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, bright as magnesium”. The point is, that self-oxidizing materials, liquid Sorium, onboard fuel oxidizer storage, stabilized tritanium, diluted anti-matter fuel pellets, fusion catalysts, and other sci-fi materials will react when exposed to excessive heat, and produce heat keeping the reaction going. These are not your typical planetside fires, they will burn underwater and in vacuum if given the chance.
9. For box launchers, I dont make any changes to their reloading mechanics.
10. For reactors, its something to compliment the in-combat vs out-of-combat tag. If you dont like it, its not too important.
11. Steering control only affects map movement. It has no impact on actual tactical control of the ships. If its still too tactical, then you can omit it. But I think its immersive, and it also adds another way for ships to be forced to disengage from each other.

[AuroraSteve]

I think I probably know what my own game intends to represent .

By Tactical vs Operational, I mean that the ships don’t operate on a tactical basis. There is no facing, no weapons arcs, no power allocation, no turn rates, etc. Even in an operational-level game, they still need to fire weapons, use point defence, handle damage, etc..

You can’t change physics by assigning a ‘tag’ to a ship. Why would a ship take more or less damage based whether it’s commander decides to run away? The missile warheads are the same size and the energy weapons hit with the same impact. If you want new defensive options, they need to fit within the game’s physics model, not via a magic tag,

I end up with a lot more damaged ships than destroyed ones, so I don’t understand why you think the opposite. If I am attacking, I withdraw ships when they start to suffer damage. For defence, I usually avoid getting into battles I can’t win.

I also don’t understand your proposition that “a faster opponent can always bring a battle into deep space”. That is only true if you allow that. Many of my battles are against faster opponents and I still win. I either fight them at jump points, use long-range weapons or surround them in deep space. It doesn’t matter if you are faster if your opponent is closing from three or four different directions.

You need to anticipate the situations you will encounter, via scouting, probes, long-range sensors, etc. If you don’t have a numerical advantage and the ability to surround your opponent, then you avoid getting into a fight in deep space against faster opponents with longer-ranged weapons.

Missiles are the strongest weapon in a tactical battle until you run out. Energy weapons are stronger in a campaign. The recent missile changes were to redress the balance because missiles were too weak. Besides, I’ve won plenty of battles against faster opponents (sometimes in deep space) using only energy weapons.

Shields are really good in longer-ranged missile duels. They are less effective in short-range energy combat.

You are asking for new abilities or mechanics changes to redress what you believe is a failure in the existing mechanics, but what you really need is more planning and better tactics. If your ships are in a doomed last stand, it’s usually because you allowed them to be in that situation, the enemy surprised you or you have nowhere left to run (home world defence). Aurora is much more about preparing for battles, than actually fighting them.

[Spookyfam]

Apologies for commenting on tactical vs operational.

I have no argument about what kind of game aurora should be if my suggestion is rejected on ground of not fitting into the kind of game that aurora is, then thats all good.

Indeed, scouting, and avoiding battles unless you are strongly advantaged is a playstyle that is most suited to success in aurora at the moment. My suggestion was not criticizing the game, nor saying that it is unplayable. It was only that I thought the battles I was fighting were getting too easy. I was never taking any serious damage from the NPRs even when they had technologically parity or superiority, and I was able to deal crushing damage to them in return. I think I got traumatized as a player too many times by getting my survey ships blown up and not being able to do anything about it… but I already play a pretty safe style.

I wanted to introduce new mechanics, and enable new playstyles, to allow the NPRs to escape, and to allow low tech players to venture out early, and to be able to win battles through grit and sacrifice. This is gonna be important for a WH40K style of game right?

I think you may have misunderstood the intention of this suggestion, it was not that the game was too hard, but that it was too easy, and the NPRs are too exploitable. It is too easy for the player to take advantage of their own higher speed. Not the other way round.

IMO, most interesting early modern naval battles owe much of their excitement to the damage control story; it’s a human struggle with an impending doom, with plenty of chances for heroics, triumphs, and melancholy. The most interesting storytelling parts of Aurora are not about the technology, the resources, or the ships and weapons. All of those are meaningless without the people. It is people who manufacture the ships, it is people who crew them, it is people who die in battle, and it is people that they are fighting for. (In WH40k too, the human aspect is the most interesting and meaningful aspect of that universe.) If you do not agree with me on this, or if you believe aurora is not a game for this kind of storytelling, then much of the motivation for my suggestions are also nullified.

My suggestions do not introduce any tactics like facing, weapon arcs, power allocation, turn rates etc. My suggestions are on the same level of abstraction as current damage control and internal damage modeling.

There is no physics changes. Indeed missile warheads and energy weapons always do the same damage. The change is only to the crew focus, and the state of the ship. Let me give the specifics of what I mean by in-combat vs out-of-combat for your convenience

1. A ship is considered “in-combat” if it has fired any weapon, taken any shield damage, or recovered any parasite in the last 300 seconds. Armor and internal damage do not cause a ship to be in-combat.

2. If a ship is in-combat, its FFR is divided by 4.

3. When a ship is in-combat, its maximum map movement speed is reduced by 25%. Speed when attacked by missiles and beam weapons are not penalized.

4. If NPR beam ships are confident, they should hold fire until they get close to the

   enemy. Then open fire at point-blank range.

5. Jump engine radius upgrades allow ships to also enter jump points at a

   distance.

6. Ships in-combat cannot enter jump points at a distance.

7. Direct fire weapons have reduced explosion chance/size if the ship is out-of-combat. They are powered down or unloaded.

8. Non-box missile launcher explosions occur if the ship is considered in-combat. They are unloaded when out-of-combat.

9. Reactor explosions are reduced to 1/2 size if a ship is out-of-combat.

Thats its. Those points are what I mean when I say “Making ships focusing on combat actions more vulnerable to internal damage. And ships focusing on fleeing or damage control less vulnerable to internal damage.” These changes, alongside increased internal HTK, would allow a substantially different pursuit dynamic. All the other points are just minor things to cover all possible scenarios.

There is no magic change to the robustness of ships, or power of weapons fire.

[CopyOfSatan]

@Spookyfam

you can never get away

According to one of Steve’s posts, some “afterburner” engine modification may be added to the game, so this could solve your problem. As I understand it.

Multiple engine types on ship

At the moment, fuel efficiency vs speed is part of engine design. It’s a strategic decision and you need to create a variety of different engine designs for different roles and situation. Allowing a range of fuel efficiency options within a single design removes that strategic consideration element, so I won’t go down that route. The option I am considering is an engine modification that has extra cost/weight and provides a limited ‘tactical’ benefit in specific situations, with the added poss…

[Spookyfam]

If that is the case, and it works as intended. Then that would certainly fix the problem. The issue is then, the pursuer can also engage afterburners.

If a clever solution exists, and it is more elegant and simpler than my suggestions (pretty low bar lol) that would be great!

[CopyOfSatan]

@Spookyfam

It is too easy for the player to take advantage of their own higher speed.

It’s actually true - once you gain some kind of advantage, NPR can be defeated pretty easily.

I suppose simply changing the difficulty won’t help much with this problem, and the issue is more about teaching the game AI things like surrounding a faster opponent, or at least using some stock of anti-ship missiles fired only if the target is too fast to catch up.

However, this is not a bad thing. I generally like game AI. It allows you to use various extremely inefficient ship designs and just enjoy the game, instead of forcing you to maximize the effectiveness of your empire’s development, use some “meta” (never put the words “Aurora” and “meta” in the same sentence/post/thread/forum ) strategies to achieve victory, and so on.

But I don’t think that teaching AI new tactical things will make the game worse.

[Spookyfam]

I agree. But tactics and AI are really hard. Unless Steve is gonna train and add an AI agent to the game lol.

Which is why its so hard to mitigate players exploiting their speed. In MOBAs and RTS, most units must stop to fire their weapons, with the exception of certain slow units; allowing fleeing enemies to get away without getting completely wiped out. I know aurora is not an RTS, but there’s a reason why that mechanic is is most other games. The point is, that there is gameplay merit to seriously considering how to discourage pursuit in Aurora.

[Pedroig]

Single Player Game.

Players will “Exploit” or “Abuse” mechanics until they get tired/bored of doing “the same old thing” and/or “always playing optimally” and at some point, start playing to play. To tell a story in which they don’t have total control over the outcome, one where they “know” the strengths and weaknesses of their enemies and choose to either ignore them or even make their own “tech”/“design” vulnerable to them.

BTW, look up Voidstriker, it has a bunch of the mechanics OP is either directly or indirectly alluding to (or others have thrown on, like “exterior hardpoints”. It is PnP last I checked though.

[Spookyfam]

Yeah, I agree. That is the ultimate argument that is always true. Aurora is a single player game, and a player can play it in any way they like. Furthermore, a player can always RP or headcanon whatever kind of gameplay mechanics they want.

Aren’t updates and expansions to the game are ultimately fundamentally all ways to improve immersion if you look at it that way tho? Since you can always imagine something that is not mechanically implemented into the game? That seems weird to me, and calls into question the universal validity of the “single player” argument…

However, for any suggestion, including mine, there is always ground for rejection based on an assessment that it does not benifit the game enough to justify the complexity or work. This is my first time writing a suggestion on the game, and it has been a learning experience for me.

While I did already have fun just writing the suggestion document, I still would like a fair assessment of the mechanics suggested. In hindsight, I should have been more focused in my post, and directed attention more strongly on the first suggestion, which was the main suggestion and why I split the suggestion into 3 parts, with much less importance for part 2 and part 3.

Basically, I’d like to at least have a fair discussion about the fire mechanic suggestions themselves even if we forget about implementing them into Aurora altogether. The fire mechanics and its interaction with in-combat vs out-of-combat were my “premier” suggestion after all.

PS. I had a look at Voidstriker, and it dosent seem to be too similar to the mechanics I am suggesting. A lot of the mechanics in Voidstriker would have issues with implementing into Aurora too.

[nakorkren]

A few thoughts:

1. I’ve never bothered armoring my turrets. Typically by the time my turrets start getting killed, the ship’s about to blow up because the reactor will get hit. Has anyone else had a significantly different experience, i.e. armoring turrets enabled them to win fights they would otherwise have lost?
2. Turrets being unarmored locations on top of the armor map, subject to being hit via the normal mechanism. Armoring your turrets would put layers of armor just over that turret column (or columns, depending on how many guns you had on the turret. You could do something similar for sensors, hangers, missile launchers, and engines, but because those would then result in holes into the interior, I don’t think we should do that. It would decrease the utility of shields and deep penetration weapons and dramatically increase the utility of railguns.
3. I actually like the idea of there being some impact of actively shooting. Lore-wise, maybe when you are actively shooting direct fire weapons (i.e. when you have a DFC in open fire mode), you reduce how much you are ducking and weaving to get a better shot, increasing your To-Hit chance for DFC but also increasing the enemy’s To-Hit against you with DFC or MFC. It could be something that happens automatically, or it could be something to can set in the Ship Combat tab (what % balance you want between evasive action and improved To-Hit). That would be an actually interesting tactical choice… do you prioritize dodging incoming missiles or shooting them down? Do you prioritize dodging while advancing toward the enemy, or hitting them better as you advance?

[Garfunkel]

I don’t know why you seem to focus so much on the pursuit or why you see it as such a bad thing. It’s an extremely common phenomenon in military history, both on ground and on the high seas, that after a battle, the losing side often faced heaviest losses while trying to disengage and retreat. In fact, it has been and still is a common tactic to sacrifice one/some unit(s) to enable the others to escape.

And you shouldn’t bring RTS/MOBA mechanics outside their intended games. Those are competitive multiplayer games where ‘balance’ is of extreme importance. Ships and planes don’t stop to shoot and modern armoured vehicles don’t need to do so anymore either thanks to gun stabilizers and gyroscopes and so on. This is not to say that Aurora needs to be 1:1 ‘realistic’ but if Steve has to make a choice, I would prefer him to always fall on the side where something works in Aurora the same way it works in reality.

As to speed advantage, it isn’t negated only by missiles. In a recent game, my capital ships were slower than my opponents but my fighters were faster. So while my battleships fanned out trying to envelope the enemy, my fighters whittled down their defences. And this was a deep space battle. And you can always refuse deep space battles if you lack missiles, fighters, or sufficient ships to envelope the enemy. To do any real damage, they must come to your colonies and you have sufficient STOs on them, right?

[Marski]

I’m giving my extremely controversial and hot-take of saying that speed disadvantage is merely a issue to be circumvented by planning. If you can’t outrun your opponents then you force the opponents to come to you; Figure out their entry jump-point and park a fleet there and work your way from there. If the opponent has both speed and weapons range over you, then let’s hope you got plenty of missiles and/or fleetborne aviation to make up for it.

BUT besides that, I do agree with the OP that it would be a realistic change for Aurora to have certain components outside the armor belt, such as sensor systems and turrets. Give them a % hit-chance dependent on the size relative to the rest of the hull. I very much would love to see such change, it’d add more depth to space combat when you can’t no more just design a Wünderwaffen battleship with gorillion-thick armor that’ll just bullrush through everything with merely occasional resupply and refuel.

[CopyOfSatan]

@Marski

when you can’t no more just design a Wünderwaffen battleship with gorillion-thick armor that’ll just bullrush through everything

You can still do this with shields, but the armor will simply lose its relevance. There’s no point in putting up a defense that doesn’t protect the ship.

[Marski]

Shields currently do that

[Droll12]

This might’ve been a fever dream so @AuroraSteve might have to come in to correct me but I distinctly remember turreted weapons actually being outside the armor belt during VB6. I think that is why the turret armoring was originally a thing in the first place.

Now of course turret armor simply adds HTK to the weapon itself while still being behind the ships armour belt.