An intriguing thereotical development question

Afternoon.

Yesterday, I came up with a question (and a theory that could attempt to answer it), based loosely off of some other games (in story and in practice).

Would it be possible to create (or at least appear to allow for) a system where ships in battle can take semi-permanent "damage" to their systems, repairable only on planets?

For instance, let's say that the Confederation Cruiser Constitution gets into a particularly hectic battle against the Rebellion. All four of the patrol ships are destroyed; the Rebel attack also damages the neutron blasters, rendering them inoperable, takes out the entire shield grid, damages the engines to 50% working capacity, and disables the proton turrets. The Constitution is saved by timely reinforcements, but the extensive battle damage will require extensive refitting. It has lost its shielding, and most of its weaponry.

How could something like the above be simulated, if at all?

The best concept that comes to mind is the use of Keycarried escape ships, with similar appearance to the original vessel. One of the main problems with this concept is that you can't allow them to be launched manually, and this also creates some major technical problems, requiring several types of ships for every one vessel that might enter combat. You may choose to skip fighters and light vessels; however, this is only a small enhancement.

It also means that if you have fighters already, you can't allow the player to escape in them, or in escape pods. While this is perhaps a minor sacrifice, it's still worth mentioning.

More seriously is the graphical and interface considerations; it clearly wouldn't be a good situation to have such ships if it was necessary to continually retarget them, and if the ship was already going at a decent clip, there may be some issues with the spawning (preventing the damaged ship from looking convincingly like the original vessel that was destroyed; it must spawn in exactly the same place at the exact same speed to function properly).

I'm not really familiar with the concept of keycarried vessels, so this could be simple thereotical fantasy.

So, in summary: Is semi-permanent damage to ship outfits/other stats possible at all, and -- though unlikely -- could it be done elegantly, without significant believability issues in-flight? I find it doubtful that it, even if possible, could ever be done at minimal resource expense, but if it's possible, then.

Edit: Replaced "the only" up when talking at the beginning; I have no real clue what I'm talking about, and it isn't the only listed problem anyway; thus, it was clearly false.

This post has been edited by Consul Bob : 26 October 2007 - 01:10 PM

I doubt the keycarried ship thing will actually help you at all. The fact that a ship would be flagged as a keycarried ship doesn't change much, in fact, except for weapons. I also doubt that having your ship go boom and having an almost exact copy of the same ship pop as yours, going in a random direction, fits in your description of elegant.

The only "elegant" way I can imagine of this is going to be fairly resource intensive, might freeze the game through crons and is likely to be a pain to set-up perfectly. But here it is anyway.

Black "Display Beam underneath ship" PD Beam with a range barely a few pixels longer than the ship with fair reload time ( to avoid having stuff "break" too fast ). For this to work, it is also likely you will need to make most weapons into homing ones or for them to sub into homing weapons or at least all the weapons that can cause ship damage. Then, you will need to use "invisible" outfits to modify stats. Those outfits will also be ammunitions for the PD beam. And you might want to use crons to switch some of those outfits "randomly" with non-ammo versions so the order in which parts "break" is different from time to time.

That's pretty much the only way I can think of and I think if you sit down 2 minutes to think about it, setting something like that up is not gonna be easy or done quickly. Heck, thinking about, I'm not even sure if putting other mods on ammo outfits works but then you could use more crons to remove other outfits as the PD beam eats its ammunitions.

You could maybe simulate this if you're willing to have the battle extend through more than one system. If the ship was a special ship created by a "chase them off" mission, you could fight them down to "run away" conditions to complete it. Completion auto-starts a new mission, "chase the Constitution to the next system". When you get to the next system the new mission creates another special ship but using a different ship class, that presents itself to the player as a weakened version of the original (fewer weapons, slower speed, maybe even a new graphic that displays a beat-up version of the ship). You could continue that through as many variations of the ship that you liked.

Not really quite what you're after, but it pretends to be.

Hmm. Tricky. You could simulate the armor bit by making it so that armor doesn't regen at all, but I don't know about the rest.

It would be easy enough to simulate engine/shield recharge/reactor damage using mumblingsycho's method, but it would very hard to simulate broken weapons. You could somehow trigger a mission to run which would remove those weapons from the player's ship.

As you walk into the bar a vice admiral approaches you. "Hello Captain," he says, "Yesterday the Confederation Cruiser Constitution got into a particularly hectic battle against the Rebellion. All four patrol ships were destroyed; the Rebel attack also damaged the neutron blasters, rendering them inoperable, took out the entire shield grid, damaged the engines to 50% working capacity, and disabled the proton turrets. The Constitution was saved by timely reinforcements, but the extensive battle damage will require extensive refitting. It has lost its shielding, and most of its weaponry. Our scans indicate a rebel offensive coming to finish off the job very soon, and we've just committed the reinforcements to an attack in a different sector. Captain, the Constitution will not survive on its own, and the Confederation needs your help to drive off the Rebels and escort the Constitution back to the nearest dry dock. Can we count on you?"

Well, the above methods do work, but they don't address damage during combat. Mumbling's method seems the best way at the moment, but it's unfortunately clumsy, like I suspect the entire concept ultimately would be.

Thanks for responding! Keep it up.

- Bob

This might help somewhat.

It wouldn't help you get the effect of a currently targeted enemy ship to sustain damage, I don't think, but you could sustain damage yourself, as well as introduce other damaged ships into the syst. First, you'd have to have the invisible, "time-incrementing" ship NOT have 0 armor, but something >0. Also, make it a planet-type ship. Then, make one of your regular enemy ships that the player would be engaging fire a weapon that looks normal, but actually is a planet-type weapon with maximum blast radius. As the regular enemy is firing at you, he is also damaging this invisible ship. Once the invisible ship dies, a mission associated with it with the goal of "kill the special ship" is triggered. I believe that the OnSuccess field could then give or take away outfits to/from you, simulating battle damage. Or, it could be used to start another mission, that brings in a damaged ship to the syst. This second option is lame, in my opinion, as damaged ships wouldn't make much sense as a reinforcement.

It might work if you could legitimately "hide" the damaged ship in a bunch of others. You could then even have yet another mission that would send in an invisible neutral ship that could hail you from space. Call it a "report from your tactical officer" and have it explain that one or more of the ships out there are severely damaged and it might make sense to target them.