Ascendency Speed of Combat vs. SoSE Rebellion

[Wingflier]

I've been keeping track of this mod for awhile now, and I just wanted to point something out I've been thinking about.

Rebellion is a great game, but the battles happen very slowly and tactically.  It may take several minutes for even smaller ships to finally die.

Historically, Star Wars combat is much more visceral than this.  In just a few shots, even bigger ships can be critically damage and explode almost instantly.  The combat is much more frantic, chaotic, and fast-paced, and I think your Civil War mod for Empire at War reflected this dynamic as well.

I was wondering whether you planned to change major aspects of Rebellion combat in order to replicate the fundamental aspects of the canon.

[Lord Xizer]

Wouldn't that be kind of difficult to implement?

[Corey]

That depends which aspects you're referring to. It's inpossivle to implement the hardpoint system in Sins, however we do intend to increase the pace a bit compared to default Sins. Most of the team plays Sins on Fast or Faster, and I think those are both pretty good benchmarks, though we would like to leave the slower options for those who want them. Ideally it'd be fast enough that battles wouldn't get boring but not do fast that you can't use multi-pronged diversion tactics or respond when you get attacked somewhere else.

[Lavo]

Wouldn't that be kind of difficult to implement?

Not at all. Depending on how you make each ship's stats, if one has say, a half a dozen ISDs or an Executor out, it isn't odd to see Nebulon-B frigates, or small cruisers, get destroyed in a rather quick fashion. Sins combat is very slow as most ships have fairly similar health and as most ships don't pour out that much DPS, at least in comparison to some mods.

[JC123]

Not at all. Depending on how you make each ship's stats, if one has say, a half a dozen ISDs or an Executor out, it isn't odd to see Nebulon-B frigates, or small cruisers, get destroyed in a rather quick fashion. Sins combat is very slow as most ships have fairly similar health and as most ships don't pour out that much DPS, at least in comparison to some mods.

So simply skewing HP and DPS should make for really quick battles with small ships while capital ships and supercaps last quite a while.  Is this the rationale behind the % health addon for SOAGE?

[tlmiller]

While you can't implement hardpoints, you can implement disabled abilities.  I've never seen it happen in the vanilla game (not saying it doesn't, I haven't played the vanilla NEARLY as much as the 2 mods), but in SoaGE at least, when you hover over ships taking some hard and heavy beating, you'll see stuff popping up about "abilities disabled" "sublight movement disabled" etc.  So depending on HOW much you can disable that way, you could "fake" a hardpoint scenario in being able to do limited disabled and disabled to replicate some hardpoints being destroyed and all weapons systems destroyed.

Obviously, I don't mod myself so have no idea if that would be practical, but it's a thought if it is.

[Wingflier]

. Most of the team plays Sins on Fast or Faster, and I think those are both pretty good benchmarks, though we would like to leave the slower options for those who want them. Ideally it'd be fast enough that battles wouldn't get boring but not do fast that you can't use multi-pronged diversion tactics or respond when you get attacked somewhere else.

Well the "options" that Sins provides does not affect battle speed.  So even if you have everything maxed, the battles last the same amount of time as they would on the slowest setting.

My concern is that this battle speed (not movement speed, economy speed, or anything else) is way too slow for the Star Wars Universe, where ships can die very quickly in a heated battle.  It's certainly much faster than Sins battle speed, which can not be changed with any setting.

[Rovert10]

While you can't implement hardpoints, you can implement disabled abilities.  I've never seen it happen in the vanilla game (not saying it doesn't, I haven't played the vanilla NEARLY as much as the 2 mods), but in SoaGE at least, when you hover over ships taking some hard and heavy beating, you'll see stuff popping up about "abilities disabled" "sublight movement disabled" etc.  So depending on HOW much you can disable that way, you could "fake" a hardpoint scenario in being able to do limited disabled and disabled to replicate some hardpoints being destroyed and all weapons systems destroyed.

Obviously, I don't mod myself so have no idea if that would be practical, but it's a thought if it is.

Ability disable is within a couple Vanilla ships.
Most notably the Akkan Colony Capital Ship's ion bolt.

[Lavo]

So simply skewing HP and DPS should make for really quick battles with small ships while capital ships and supercaps last quite a while.  Is this the rationale behind the % health addon for SOAGE?

It was mainly put in due to a request by people who didn't like seeing ships die quickly, to allow for more tactical maneuvering/micromanagement/etc, a yes in other words. In the minds of the staff the current setup is good, but seeing as how such a change took no more than 5 minutes of my time (as abilities were not tweaked at all), I did it.

With regards to abilities disabling things, one could in fact make passive abilities that are set up such that when a ship takes a certain amount of damage, it can have a chance of having certain things disabled, with the buff reapplied (aka. another chance of it firing) every certain amount of seconds, after checking if the ship has taken enough damage. I personally have no experience with such set ups, though iirc ZombieRus of the Sins forum has done some research into implementing it into his mods. Alternatively, one could have abilities like the previously mentioned Akkan's ion bolt, and SoGE's Buzz Droids.

[Lord Xizer]

How would you do Super weapons health then?

[Corey]

I wrote a long explanation about damage distribution that I then realised most of you probably won't care about, so I put it at the end of this post.

As for how we intend to handle pacing:
The main concern we're going to have when we handle the pacing of battles is the impact on gameplay. Star Wars combat may be faster or more visceral than it is in Sins, I'm not actually sure that it is, but considering it's a game we can't really be concerned about realistic times for things, or else we'd be dealing with really long build and travel times. Watching the Battle of Endor or the Battle of Coruscant in the movies, I don't get a much different sense of it than I do from the battles in Sins when looking at the whole battle. In the movies, you tend to be getting a starfighter's perspective which can skew your perspective on it. Endor is an 8 minute battle scene with very few of the ships actually getting destroyed due to direct combat.

I'd say based on that and the varying accounts we get from the books (from a Quasar getting one-shot-KO'd by a Carrack at Bakura, to the other battles where it's a 9 hour slugfest and nothing seems to get destroyed), our best bet really is to do what allows for better gameplay aspects, although keeping a sort of cinematic or Star Wars feel is important too. If anything, I'd say that battles in Sins are actually faster paced than in ICW considering the relative volume of ships involved. The end result will probably be sped up a little from default Sins, but again, we want to have enough time for people to reinforce when getting attacked, or to be able to use one attack to hold up an enemy fleet somewhere while having raids in other places, which isn't worth it if the main battle doesn't last long enough for anything else to happen. Of course, this is really just what I'll loosely call the theory behind it, and it'll all be pretty open as we go so we definitely welcome feedback once more information comes out.


I wasn't referring to failing systems, which I'm pretty sure is possible although the system resources concern me a little if we acted on that. Since we're more or less transferring values from ICW onto the ships in Sins, I was referring more to damage distribution on the target ship with hardpoints and then without hardpoints. The fact that ships are either at 100% firepower or 0% firepower, with nothing in between is certainly a factor but that's not the key one for pacing in EaW vs Sins.

In EaW, when you're targeting a ship, it's all going into one hardpoint. A full salvo from a ship can do a ton of damage, however once you have the shields down and you're only applying damage to individual hardpoints, once you surpass the hardpoint health in firepower being applied, the rest of the shots just go through the hardpoint and the damage done to that target by those weapons is maxxed out. I think everything from the Golan I up *technically* has the firepower in ICW to destroy a single hardpoint in one go without too much wastage if it were able to apply a full salvo onto a single target hardpoint. Once you take into account firing arcs it's only the Phalanx, Praetor and supers that can do it in one go, normally. Of course, this depends on the hardpoint in question and I haven't worked out the exact numbers from each ship on each angle, but you get the idea. It's a ballpark.

The difference in Sins then is that there's not that buffer applied by the hardpoints after the shields are down, and the map scale and therefore ship ranges are vastly increased, meaning where in ICW you couldn't get a full broadside onto a target from an Executor, in Sins the way damage is distributed you're likely taking the whole load of damage with no mitigation unless the ship dies, in which case I don't think their loss of damage effectiveness is any consolation to you.

End result: SSD is a bitch to fight in Ascendancy right now.

[Lord Xizer]

Oh thanks.

[Malanthor]

Aint one of the reasons that combat in sins is slow the way the shield system works, with the shield growing stronger as it takes damage, called shield mitigation. When shield mitigation starts at 20% and goes up to like 75% it essentially means a ship lives 3 times as long as without the rising shield mitigation crap. I assume not having it go up would be more fitting for star wars and would also serve to make combat go faster.

By the way i think i remember a sins modder, zombierus(something like that) that among other made sins of the fallen on moddb was talking abouth dooing a mod with ships that actually did less damage the more they got damaged in sins, maybe he have it figured out by now and you could use hes method or something. But im sure you are able to figure it out on your own, so no offence meant in suggesting it.

[Kalo]

Aint one of the reasons that combat in sins is slow the way the shield system works, with the shield growing stronger as it takes damage, called shield mitigation. When shield mitigation starts at 20% and goes up to like 75% it essentially means a ship lives 3 times as long as without the rising shield mitigation crap. I assume not having it go up would be more fitting for star wars and would also serve to make combat go faster.

By the way i think i remember a sins modder, zombierus(something like that) that among other made sins of the fallen on moddb was talking abouth dooing a mod with ships that actually did less damage the more they got damaged in sins, maybe he have it figured out by now and you could use hes method or something. But im sure you are able to figure it out on your own, so no offence meant in suggesting it.

Yeah, Rus. I'd love to play his Mod if I wasn't worried about crashing all of the time. His work is nice, but I haven't been able to play Sins mods without constant crashing.

[Lavo]

Yeah, Rus. I'd love to play his Mod if I wasn't worried about crashing all of the time. His work is nice, but I haven't been able to play Sins mods without constant crashing.

I figure I may as well ask the obvious; you've enabled a paging file for the partition Steam/Sins is on, right? As without that the game likes to crash much earlier than it should, this is particularly noticeable with large mods like Sins of the Fallen, and can even occur with the base game.

[Kalo]

I figure I may as well ask the obvious; you've enabled a paging file for the partition Steam/Sins is on, right? As without that the game likes to crash much earlier than it should, this is particularly noticeable with large mods like Sins of the Fallen, and can even occur with the base game.

I'm not even sure what you mean .

[Rovert10]

Me either.

[Lavo]

I'm not even sure what you mean .

I probably asked the wrong question then. Are you playing Sins on Windows?

[Kalo]

I probably asked the wrong question then. Are you playing Sins on Windows?

W7 64 BIT

[onlylogic]

The page file is probably activated on his system, windows takes care of it pretty well. Most likely at least. The problem for me was hard drive space. I was in the red and that is VERY bad for the page file. So it might just be you don't have enough space on your hard drive at all, in which case easy fix, delete crap you don't need till you're in the blue. Otherwise, there are plenty of youtube vids explaining what the page file is and how to modify it safely. And if you have an ssd it may be unwise to even have a paging file at all on that drive because it can arguably reduce the life of the drive. So I recommend using your HDD exclusively for this.