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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 4, 2016 13:58:09 GMT
Custom scenarios that players can share could be a good idea. It would also give people a reasonable excuse to use black box modules, to create harder/easier enemies as the scenario requires. Would solve OPs issue, and give us more stuff to do. I would love to see a scenario/campaign editor added to the game.
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Post by jonen on Nov 4, 2016 14:22:39 GMT
Scenario editor should have option to mandate things like: "Your fleet needs to include a missile carrier that, once all enemies are defeated, is still alive, capable of maneuvering and launching, with at least X amount of missiles with Y yield warhead and Z amount of deltaV." (Giving freedom for user to design their own missile carriers, while still mandating a specific number of specific capability missiles still available as a victory condition.)
Aka: Why doesn't Admiral Overkill just dump a load of missiles all over us at Vesta - she's got orders to save some for once you're dead.
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Post by Pttg on Jan 3, 2019 18:00:20 GMT
If you ignore travel and logistics, then medieval battles would take place between stationary castles.
CoaDE is designed to simulate space warfare, so your designs need to be able to perform adequately for space combat and at the same time be effective spacecraft.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jan 3, 2019 18:44:48 GMT
Regarding putting ships combat capabilities to the test, remember all those woes about Ceres and Vesta? Remember how people complained about the "learning curve becoming a learning cliff"? That's what "putting ships combat capabilities to the test" was like. The thing is, the virtual arms race happening on the forums has left all stock ship designs too far behind. There are enough cookie cutter builds or just simply great designs on the forum to make beating the crap out of stock ships not a challenge at all. I keep thinking it would be better if the campaign didn't allow you to roll out new ship designs on a whim. Nor do I find it particularly realistic. A hard campaign mode with optimised versions of the stock designs and doubled enemy fleet sizes (while retaining the original mass/cost budget for the player) would be awesome for the combat missions. I wonder if anyone would still be willing to go with that. At the very least I do have some stock module designs approximating particular stock design's mission and budget envelopes. They could also be converted to higher-powered designs easily enough. Scenario editor should have option to mandate things like: "Your fleet needs to include a missile carrier that, once all enemies are defeated, is still alive, capable of maneuvering and launching, with at least X amount of missiles with Y yield warhead and Z amount of deltaV." (Giving freedom for user to design their own missile carriers, while still mandating a specific number of specific capability missiles still available as a victory condition.) Aka: Why doesn't Admiral Overkill just dump a load of missiles all over us at Vesta - she's got orders to save some for once you're dead. I would definitely love to see any programatically testable victory and loss conditions to be allowed in COADE's missions. If you ignore travel and logistics, then medieval battles would take place between stationary castles. CoaDE is designed to simulate space warfare, so your designs need to be able to perform adequately for space combat and at the same time be effective spacecraft. And this is the reason why I am not particularly fond of Vesta. For me the missions afterwards are all more interesting because they combine combat and orbital mechanics, although they could use higher combat difficulty. Vesta is just a 0.5Mm rock with ignorable gravity well and you can build good enough stuff with just stock modules to not actually have to pay attention to it being there (although clinging to low orbit and making life difficult for Voitenko's fleet is definitely a fun way to do it).
Also, it's interesting to see how many people found On The Surface of Giants mission frustrating, given that it is relatively straightforward if you just keep in mind your orbital tricks (generalized bi-elliptic transfer, mostly), especially if you are willing to intercept retrograde.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 3, 2019 23:13:31 GMT
A hard campaign mode with optimised versions of the stock designs and doubled enemy fleet sizes (while retaining the original mass/cost budget for the player) would be awesome for the combat missions. I wonder if anyone would still be willing to go with that. At the very least I do have some stock module designs approximating particular stock design's mission and budget envelopes. They could also be converted to higher-powered designs easily enough. Scenario editor should have option to mandate things like: "Your fleet needs to include a missile carrier that, once all enemies are defeated, is still alive, capable of maneuvering and launching, with at least X amount of missiles with Y yield warhead and Z amount of deltaV." (Giving freedom for user to design their own missile carriers, while still mandating a specific number of specific capability missiles still available as a victory condition.) Aka: Why doesn't Admiral Overkill just dump a load of missiles all over us at Vesta - she's got orders to save some for once you're dead. I would definitely love to see any programatically testable victory and loss conditions to be allowed in COADE's missions. If you ignore travel and logistics, then medieval battles would take place between stationary castles. CoaDE is designed to simulate space warfare, so your designs need to be able to perform adequately for space combat and at the same time be effective spacecraft. And this is the reason why I am not particularly fond of Vesta. For me the missions afterwards are all more interesting because they combine combat and orbital mechanics, although they could use higher combat difficulty. Vesta is just a 0.5Mm rock with ignorable gravity well and you can build good enough stuff with just stock modules to not actually have to pay attention to it being there (although clinging to low orbit and making life difficult for Voitenko's fleet is definitely a fun way to do it).
Also, it's interesting to see how many people found On The Surface of Giants mission frustrating, given that it is relatively straightforward if you just keep in mind your orbital tricks (generalized bi-elliptic transfer, mostly), especially if you are willing to intercept retrograde.
I'd be down for a longer, harder campaign. I'd prefer the creation of some gameplay mechanics to simulate an actual campaign like an economy or 'development time' for custom modules or a persistent fleet from one mission to the next, but just more of the same sounds easier to do and I'd be ok with that.
On the topic of programmable victory conditions I'd support this in a general sense but I could think of a potentially easier way to do it. Instead of also having to factor in creating a siloship with X, Y, and Z variables in addition to your primary combat fleet to do the actually occupying after the battle has been won, we already have a mission budget and we could assume that a siloship has already been included and we could be just given a siloship that we have to escort until the mission is completed. Less code intensive way of achieveing the same effect, less dev time required on the back end and more time could be spent designing the puzzle box of the missions. But yeah, more victory conditions would be nice.
I actually really like Vesta. Vesta has the only aggressive enemies in the stock campaign, which I feel is an immersion breaking issue and it should be addressed because I don't think actual humans commanding ships would just sit in one place 90% of the time when presented with a threat. Vesta also makes a good yard stick for testing a designs combat prowess if what you're testing is an armor profile or a weapon system or maneuvering engines and you just want to do many quick tests with small changes to only one variable. Plus if your gunship already has kilotons of reaction mass for it's NTRs and gigawatts of power for its railguns and lasers then all you have to do to give it lots of delta V is add an MPDT that uses the same reaction mass, then you only have problems with time limits and strong gravity.
On the topic of the original post, I can kind of understand the frustration. On the Surface of Giants is a puzzle that has basically no replay value. I successfully completed it once and golded it on the first success and haven't touched it sense. What I did was burn for a direct intercept and then launch a cloud of several hundred striker missiles, got the success screen shortly before what would have resulted in a very violent aero-capture. Don't think the missiles even properly detonated due to the high intercept velocity, pretty sure one of them just directly collided with the target. If I had to do it again without killing the crew I would do exactly the same thing, but with a silo-drone launched from a station.
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Post by doctorsquared on Jan 4, 2019 3:02:24 GMT
The only things that actually make Vesta "difficult" are the tight budget (relative to what the AI gets) and the fact that after fighting entirely passive enemies through the campaign, you finally get an enemy that fights back. Once you squeeze enough point defense into the budget and stop panicking about the waves of missiles and drones heading your way, the mission suddenly becomes pretty trivial (though the AI spitefully parking its ordinance when it realizes it's going to lose is annoying). I think what really bugs me though is that there are only what, three or four missions after unlocking module design? And very few missions where you can even bring custom fleets. The game feels like it's 90% tutorial. This isn't meant harshly, the game was made by one person and the amount of depth it has entirely justifies the length of the tutorial, it's more an unavoidable consequence of its situation than any fault of the developer. The real meat and bones of the game are the ship and module designers, and there the game really shines. It could be more with more time, money, and manpower behind it though. We've essentially got an amazing character creator, but very little game to put those characters through. Of course, my comments about the games' potential should also be taken with a large helping of salt, because I have a tendency to be overly ambitious. That said, I hope the game's success so far is able to fund future development to realize some more of its potential. If it doesn't work out, or it burns out later, I would like to suggest releasing the source-code if/when that happens, as a failsafe. If nothing else, I feel like this game could form the foundation of an amazing open-source project. It took me forever to realize that you could target specific individual subsystems just by clicking on them. - Stinger Drones just stop dead if you destroy their 33mm cannon and the 13MW Green and 100MW Violet stock lasers are great for destroying them.
- The Siloship, Cutter, Fleet Carrier and Corvette all have decoy blast launchers right around where their fuel tanks and crew modules are. A stock 100MW Violet Laser or enough stock 13MW Green Lasers pointed at them will cook off the flares inside killing that pain in the ass USTA admiral that made me go through that mission with his own explosives.
Also, I agree that the orbital mechanics missions are a bit of a pain because the controls are pretty imprecise and it's not hard to completely screw up your burn because you dragged one of the handles a little too far. It'd be nice if I could just click the radial/tangential/out of plane handle and then type in how much dV I want to expend, that way I can roughly get to where I want to be and then fine tune. The biggest thing to remember with most of the stock vehicles is that they have pathetic acceleration so in planetary gravity wells you're going to have to burn way more fuel to make larger course corrections.
Common wisdom is that you want to move into a wider orbit and make any major burns out at the orbital apotheosis where you're further from the center of gravity and can make said burns at a lower cost. However, the other option is to give your ships the ability to accelerate at ~1G which decreases the amount of time that the engine needs to fire to accelerate to your new velocity. This can be used to put you into retrograde orbits which stock enemy ships are very weak to since they can't turn to face you quickly.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Jan 4, 2019 5:06:43 GMT
I still remember failing repeatedly to beat surface of giants.
To this day I still remember my first time beating it... by throwing the tanker at the station instead of the missiles.
Got a gold rating for it too!
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Post by tepidbread on Jan 4, 2019 9:35:04 GMT
I still remember failing repeatedly to beat surface of giants. To this day I still remember my first time beating it... by throwing the tanker at the station instead of the missiles. Got a gold rating for it too! This sounds great. How did you manage to get it to hit? In my experience AI guidance does not work very well for ramming.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Jan 4, 2019 17:22:27 GMT
I still remember failing repeatedly to beat surface of giants. To this day I still remember my first time beating it... by throwing the tanker at the station instead of the missiles. Got a gold rating for it too! This sounds great. How did you manage to get it to hit? In my experience AI guidance does not work very well for ramming. I just went to the orbital map, once I ran out of missiles, then used the generous amount of Dv to put the tanker into the same orbit as the station... retrograde orbit.
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Post by Apotheon on Feb 5, 2019 21:24:10 GMT
I agree... the orbital bullshit scenarios made me quit CDE and I only started playing it again after a year. And they almost made me quit playing again. Hello everyone! I want to present you the best site for sex Dating. Click on me. Приветик всем! Хочу представить вам лучший сайт для секс знакомств. Нажми на меня. Thanks, but the government fucks me every day!
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Post by doctorsquared on Feb 5, 2019 23:09:15 GMT
On the Surface of Giants confuses me because while the station's weird, low orbit makes for a great defensive position (matching orbit quickly consumes a lot of dV, going the long way takes a while and gives time for reinforcements to arrive) plus being down low makes mining gasses from the atmosphere easier, it seems like a really bad location for a refuelling depot. You're sitting in a large gravity well in an out of plane (compared to most planets) orbit and most tankers don't have 1G of acceleration so you're going to burn a lot of dV just getting into position and leaving it.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 5, 2019 23:18:54 GMT
I agree... the orbital bullshit scenarios made me quit CDE and I only started playing it again after a year. And they almost made me quit playing again. Well, it's a space game. Set in space.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Feb 6, 2019 6:55:18 GMT
On the Surface of Giants confuses me because while the station's weird, low orbit makes for a great defensive position (matching orbit quickly consumes a lot of dV, going the long way takes a while and gives time for reinforcements to arrive) plus being down low makes mining gasses from the atmosphere easier, it seems like a really bad location for a refuelling depot. You're sitting in a large gravity well in an out of plane (compared to most planets) orbit and most tankers don't have 1G of acceleration so you're going to burn a lot of dV just getting into position and leaving it. I don't believe in defensive orbits.
Hitting something (as in just achieving intercept rather than matching orbit and phase) is always cheaper than getting there, so technically you can always just drop a bunch of missiles or drones almost straight down by cancelling their orbital velocity around Neptune and bust a brain trying to figure out exact burns to achieve exact intercept at tens of km/s perpendicular.
When going places tends to take days to years busting brains is always going to be the more affordable and practical option than burning delta-v and drones/missiles don't need their return ticket - no one will get angry if you just drop them into Neptune after use.
If anything a defensive orbit would be the highest possible one, where you can wiggle your plane and apses cheaply.
Ok, for low-mass bodies low orbit might be a good defence as it allows physically hiding behind the body in question as the gravity is too weak to fix your trajectory if you don't want it to.
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Post by bigbombr on Feb 6, 2019 8:52:42 GMT
I don't believe in defensive orbits. Hitting something (as in just achieving intercept rather than matching orbit and phase) is always cheaper than getting there, so technically you can always just drop a bunch of missiles or drones almost straight down by cancelling their orbital velocity around Neptune and bust a brain trying to figure out exact burns to achieve exact intercept at tens of km/s perpendicular. When going places tends to take days to years busting brains is always going to be the more affordable and practical option than burning delta-v and drones/missiles don't need their return ticket - no one will get angry if you just drop them into Neptune after use. If anything a defensive orbit would be the highest possible one, where you can wiggle your plane and apses cheaply. Ok, for low-mass bodies low orbit might be a good defence as it allows physically hiding behind the body in question as the gravity is too weak to fix your trajectory if you don't want it to. I fully agree. You don't even need a 'proper' orbital insertion around the body in question, you can just smash into the target at interplanetary velocity.
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Post by airc777 on Feb 6, 2019 15:22:38 GMT
On the Surface of Giants confuses me because while the station's weird, low orbit makes for a great defensive position (matching orbit quickly consumes a lot of dV, going the long way takes a while and gives time for reinforcements to arrive) plus being down low makes mining gasses from the atmosphere easier, it seems like a really bad location for a refuelling depot. You're sitting in a large gravity well in an out of plane (compared to most planets) orbit and most tankers don't have 1G of acceleration so you're going to burn a lot of dV just getting into position and leaving it. I don't believe in defensive orbits.
Hitting something (as in just achieving intercept rather than matching orbit and phase) is always cheaper than getting there, so technically you can always just drop a bunch of missiles or drones almost straight down by cancelling their orbital velocity around Neptune and bust a brain trying to figure out exact burns to achieve exact intercept at tens of km/s perpendicular.
When going places tends to take days to years busting brains is always going to be the more affordable and practical option than burning delta-v and drones/missiles don't need their return ticket - no one will get angry if you just drop them into Neptune after use.
If anything a defensive orbit would be the highest possible one, where you can wiggle your plane and apses cheaply.
Ok, for low-mass bodies low orbit might be a good defence as it allows physically hiding behind the body in question as the gravity is too weak to fix your trajectory if you don't want it to.
This is a bit outside the usual scope of the game but the more you go up in power levels the easier it gets to do perpendicular intercepts, because eventually the sphere of influence of your railguns and lasers become so large that it only really matters if you are on the same side of the planet as your target.
But on low, 'defensive' orbits: how would you go about attacking a stellar laser? Say your target is a pair of or small array of multiple kilometer wide foil mirrors in very low orbit of Sol using Sol's upper atmosphere as a lasing medium. Say this particular laser is on a scale where it has an effective range of something like 250 terameters (so Mars aphelion) with usable beam coherence and energy per meter squared. Say you've settled the Jovian system and the asteroid belt and you have a decade to develop a solution before a new array comes online and it becomes a serious threat. What do?
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