Enable self-destruct and suicide run for all ships.

[CreepersNemisis]

posted on July 18th, 2013, 5:57 pm

Last edited by CreepersNemisis on July 25th, 2013, 4:52 pm, edited 11 times in total.

Have you ever had the pain of watching that last ship of your force, that's straggling away, get assimilated, slowly but surely, into your opponent's force? Ever thought "Man, if only I could just blow it up so nobody gets it..."

I've thought that too. A lot. What I really wanted to do more than just explode my dying ships, was to take out some of my enemies by detonating the warp cores. That would be really nice too, and more realistic than just passively letting your ships get captured. The dominion seem to be able to ram their hulls into the enemy ships, which is a useful feature, but it has no small area effect like it should, and besides that, it seems like if this is going to be a limited special feature, it's more of a Klingon ability than Dominion. You know, all that honorable death and stuff. Thinking about this gives me a bit of nostalgia, as I remember the old days in Armada I when I would go self destruct a few groups of sovereigns just to see if I could take out a starbase...

TL;DR:

• Make ships be able to self destruct, with a small area effect. (See edit 1, 3, and 4)
• Make ships be able to ram into other ships and self destruct on impact. (See edit 1, 3, and 4)
• At least let Klingon ships do this if nothing else.

Please take note of edit 2.

Are there any improvements or additions I can make to this idea? It is overpowered and/or unbalanced? Let me know in the comments, and if I find a good idea I'll add it in here as an edit. =)

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EDIT 1:
Myles brought up an excellent point. An instantaneous self-destruct can cause game balancing issues, as a skilled micromanager could destroy his own dying ships before an enemy destroys them, therefore not giving credit to his opponent's ships and not allowing them to rank up.

Therefore, I have proposed a solution to this problem: A countdown timer. This countdown timer is a required length of time before the self destruct takes effect. (See edit 5.) This allows opposing ships to destroy the ship before it activates its self destruct. As for ramming, the ship would ram into an opposing ship. Immediately before the engines propel the ship on an intercepting course, the countdown timer would start. If the ship impacts before the self destruct arms, then it does not cause an explosion. If it does not impact before the self destruct arms, then it will explode at the end of it's timer without impacting the enemy vessel.

EDIT 2:
shadow_from_afc brought up this point: You may accidentally misclick and destroy your own fleet. This can potentially change the course of the whole game. Personally I would refer to this as an "Epic Failure."

To fix this problem I have proposed a double-check system. To activate self destruct you must first enter a self destruct submenu from inside the orders menu. The only reason for being inside that menu would be to select one of the two ways to self destruct. You would not otherwise be in that menu and therefore could not misclick the self destruct buttons located within. Worst case scenario is that you misclick and enter the submenu, which does not trigger a catastrophic failure. Additionally there would be no hotkey for self destruct. Clicking the self destruct button after it has been triggered will cancel the self destruct, so even if you do misclick twice somehow, the situation can be easily averted. This last sentence relies on the fix in edit 1.

EDIT 3:
Another issue raised by shadow_from_afc is that the self destruct could be overpowered and be used to ruin fun. This can easily be fixed by not making the explosions overpowered. In fact, it would be best if the explosions were only moderately damaging, but not so underpowered that they did negligible damage to medium ships.

EDIT 4:
I think it's really good idea to only enable self destruct below a certain damage threshold, for instance 25%. All credit for this idea goes to Tyler.

EDIT 5:
Ray320 came up with the idea of making the countdown timer depend on the number of crew levels. For instance a ship with only 5 crew may explode after 1 second whereas a ship with 1000 will take like 10 seconds to evacuate. I would suggest some sort of curve scale, so that low crew ships(e.g. 100 crew) don't explode in 1 second, as a linear scale would dictate in my example. You would also be able to observer your crew levels dropping as the timer went on. This provides a good explanation for the timer, and is more realistic.

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Suggested Variations:

Y Wing Driver 1:

"An idea for A2 I have always liked was the idea of an 'evacuation' button - this would simulate your crew leaving a ship in critical concision. Crew would drain from the ship until it was eventually abandoned, and you would get half of your crew back. Of course, something like this would be pointless in FO because there is no 'crew' resource. Maybe you could get a tiny amount of resources back or something, but that wouldn't be too realistic.

This is my idea for 'self destruction':

Imagine that you are the captain of an Excelsior or Galaxy in critical condition. You know that your warp core is about to explode, and you know you will not be able to repair in time. So what do you do? You separate the saucer section. Now, your crew is safe, but your ship is slow and extremely damaged.

In other words, I think it would be cool if larger federation ships had a chance to 'survive' destruction. If they 'survived', a saucer section would spawn in place of the battleship. It would spawn damaged and shieldless, but the player would have an incentive to bring the vessel to safety - after all, if it survived, they could rebuild the entire vessel for a fraction of a cost, or decommission the saucer for resources.

It would be kind of difficult to implement that idea - stats would have to be changed slightly in order to reflect the vessel's survivability - but it would give me peace of mind to save a damaged saucer every once in a while!

Anyway, it is possible that other factions might use a similar 'saucer separation' system - except that they might use it more offensively. For example, I could definitely see a damaged Dominion battleship ejecting its engineering section during combat to damage a superior fleet. This way, you would still be able to collect experience from the surviving section of the ship, but self destruction would still be implemented.

Just my thoughts!" - Y Wing Driver

Dreyas 1:

"If the ability was only open to veteran ships, that would stop people from spamming suicide runs, while giving the ship a way to die honorably in battle! There would have to be a really cool-looking explosion effect to go with it, of course, and it would have to do a decent amount of damage. A damage bonus against stations with weapons would be a cool way to sacrifice your heavily damaged flagship for the good of the fleet, maybe to help take out an enemy starbase or platform." - Dreyas

Mr. Pistachios 1:

"You could prevent spamming by having enemy ships take damage from self destructs at a logistically reduced amount for each sequential selfdestruct source of damage.

Alternatively or additionally, make friendly vessels take damage from self destructs as well and implement a variable self-destruct time of 0-1s causing the majority of vessels to be destroyed by the first destructing vessel and there not self-destructing.

Finally, to fix the experience problem- the system could be altered to be based on how much damage a ship has taken versus how many ships it made go boom. Which in and of itself would make a intriguing gameplay element in that your ships get better as you suck it up. This would interact poorly with my second paragraph and nebulas though; but, it could be fixed by restricted "experiential" damage to enemy sources only." - Mr. Pistachios

posted on July 18th, 2013, 6:46 pm

not a fan of self destruct. it makes sense realistically, but it'd ruin gameplay.

also we didn't see any ships self destruct in the dominion war or at wolf 359.

for one, capturing would be almost impossible with self destructs. also no ship would get the experience for the kill.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 6:59 pm

not a fan of self destruct. it makes sense realistically, but it'd ruin gameplay.

also we didn't see any ships self destruct in the dominion war or at wolf 359.

for one, capturing would be almost impossible with self destructs. also no ship would get the experience for the kill.

You bring good points. Perhaps a countdown timer could be added to amend these difficulties.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 7:12 pm

You bring good points. Perhaps a countdown timer could be added to amend these difficulties.

that loses the realism element, as self destructing can be set with a short/small countdown, there's also the crude option of telling a security team to shoot the warp core with a phaser (forgotten when convenient in the shows). i think it's better to just pretend ships can't do it.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 7:16 pm

It is realistic, because overloading a warp core takes time, you know. Especially with fading and unreliable energy reserves. If I were a ship designer I would not just line the inside of my ship with explosives, ready to blow at a moment's notice. That's pretty much what it would take to instantly explode a freakin' starship.

Plus they fixed self destruct a similar way in Armada 1.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 7:26 pm

It is realistic, because overloading a warp core takes time, you know.

not really. turn off the containment fields in the warp core, all the antimatter will now touch the matter that the warp core is made of. also the antimatter ready to be put in the warp core is almost certainly stored somewhere on the ship, a constant line blurted out when the ship is near exploding is "antimatter containment is failing". all a self destruct would have to do is turn the antimatter containment off, like what happened to the Yamato, then explosion.

or detonate the photon torps stored on the ship.

you know, or just take a phaser to the warp core. blowing up a ship powered by antimatter is seriously easy, antimatter just loves exploding when it touches matter. it's like starting a fire with a cannister of petrol.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 7:35 pm

I'm actually pretty sure, that on any starship, especially federation, there would be a lot of time consuming security protocols, and manual switches, that would have to be triggered to create mass destruction like that. Besides, somebody could come up with some reason for a delay. The reason isn't terribly important, as long as there is a timer.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 7:51 pm

Even though it might be realistic, I do not like the idea because it has some problems.

On the positive side: it will prevent a ship be taken by the opposing side and give you the ability to take out an attacker. Nice for a last resort measure.

On the negative side: it will make micromanagement of a fleet more difficult.
It can prove even catastrophic in the heat of a battle. Just one false click and you can loose a whole fleet, or in a worst case scenario most of your main base.

I know that this can happen. In my own modded Armada2 version I integrated self-destruct with 4 different levels. Meaning 4 different strengths (small, medium, large ships and large stations/ very large ships)
It is nice to see an attacker go down together with your ship, but it sucks greatly when you loose the game just because of one false click.

Even though bringing a super-ship into an enemy base and blow it up there might be a nice strategy for some gamers, it will take out the fun off the game for the others.

So better do not integrate this feature. In the long run it sucks.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 7:57 pm

I'm actually pretty sure, that on any starship, especially federation, there would be a lot of time consuming security protocols, and manual switches, that would have to be triggered to create mass destruction like that. Besides, somebody could come up with some reason for a delay. The reason isn't terribly important, as long as there is a timer.

nope the computer controls the whole thing.

check out TNG: "Contagion", the yamato is destroyed because the computer shit the bed after it downloaded too much porn some iconian software. all the safety features can be turned off by the computer.

There is plenty of computerised safeguards to prevent antimatter containment turning off, but as it's a computer, it can be ordered to turn these systems off. presumably ordering critical safety features to be disabled would be something that required a security code. it's quite possible that tng era self destructs do exactly this. we only saw the enterprise in star trek 3 use explosives for self destruct. in voyager it apparently caused a "warp core overload", which can be interpreted as letting all the antimatter in the core run free to explode.

posted on July 18th, 2013, 8:11 pm

Even though it might be realistic, I do not like the idea because it has some problems.

On the positive side: it will prevent a ship be taken by the opposing side and give you the ability to take out an attacker. Nice for a last resort measure.

On the negative side: it will make micromanagement of a fleet more difficult.
It can prove even catastrophic in the heat of a battle. Just one false click and you can loose a whole fleet, or in a worst case scenario most of your main base.

I know that this can happen. In my own modded Armada2 version I integrated self-destruct with 4 different levels. Meaning 4 different strengths (small, medium, large ships and large stations/ very large ships)
It is nice to see an attacker go down together with your ship, but it sucks greatly when you loose the game just because of one false click.

Even though bringing a super-ship into an enemy base and blow it up there might be a nice strategy for some gamers, it will take out the fun off the game for the others.

So better do not integrate this feature. In the long run it sucks.

I see your points. If I'm getting this right:

• You might accidentally blow up your own ships by clicking wrong.
• It might ruin the fun because it's overpowered.

Well, I propose a conventional glass-box solution. You must click the button to open a self destruct menu, which has 2 options: Ram and Detonate. (Or similar) This way, if you accidentally click, it will open a menu instead of destroying your ships. Additional safety features include the ability to cancel the self destruct timer and also the fact that there is no hotkey for self destruct.

I would just not make the explosions very powerful to fix the second one. Like in Armada 1, it wouldn't be very effective.

I'll now fix my post, thanks for bringing up thee problems. =)

posted on July 19th, 2013, 11:05 pm

One of the only things I miss from Armada 2, now for gaming sake it can be limited to individual ships and not entire fleets, or limit it according to chassis size.

I don't think it will prevent boarding because in Armada 2 was possible to board with this enabled.

It could be activated with a password to avoid accidental clicks I don't know something like this.

posted on July 19th, 2013, 11:50 pm

I love the realism aspect of self-destruct, but I think the largest problem would be the fact that the attacking ships could not get XP. A countdown timer would solve that issue somewhat, but like Myles said, that would destroy some of the realism.

Also, in FO, the explosions would have to be nerfed significantly, especially for the Federation - imagine a fed warp-in attack that ended in the player simply self destructing all 3 ships.

An idea for A2 I have always liked was the idea of an 'evacuation' button - this would simulate your crew leaving a ship in critical concision. Crew would drain from the ship until it was eventually abandoned, and you would get half of your crew back. Of course, something like this would be pointless in FO because there is no 'crew' resource. Maybe you could get a tiny amount of resources back or something, but that wouldn't be too realistic.

This is my idea for 'self destruction':

Imagine that you are the captain of an Excelsior or Galaxy in critical condition. You know that your warp core is about to explode, and you know you will not be able to repair in time. So what do you do? You separate the saucer section. Now, your crew is safe, but your ship is slow and extremely damaged.

In other words, I think it would be cool if larger federation ships had a chance to 'survive' destruction. If they 'survived', a saucer section would spawn in place of the battleship. It would spawn damaged and shieldless, but the player would have an incentive to bring the vessel to safety - after all, if it survived, they could rebuild the entire vessel for a fraction of a cost, or decommission the saucer for resources.

It would be kind of difficult to implement that idea - stats would have to be changed slightly in order to reflect the vessel's survivability - but it would give me peace of mind to save a damaged saucer every once in a while!

Anyway, it is possible that other factions might use a similar 'saucer separation' system - except that they might use it more offensively. For example, I could definitely see a damaged Dominion battleship ejecting its engineering section during combat to damage a superior fleet. This way, you would still be able to collect experience from the surviving section of the ship, but self destruction would still be implemented.

Just my thoughts!

posted on July 20th, 2013, 12:16 am

Or you could simplify it and just have the ship eject a few dozen shuttles before the explosion, which fly to the nearest ships or stations, increasing their crew count.

Definitely going in the alternate versions section of the OP =) This is definitely unique, though it would be hard enough to implement... I'm not sure whether I like it or not =P

posted on July 20th, 2013, 2:31 pm

Do Auto-Destruct like STO does: only activates if the ship is reduced to 25% hull. You'd have to be damn fast to make any use of it, while capturing wouldn't be hurt.

posted on July 21st, 2013, 1:34 am

Do Auto-Destruct like STO does: only activates if the ship is reduced to 25% hull. You'd have to be damn fast to make any use of it, while capturing wouldn't be hurt.

This is a good idea. /me edits OP.