Multiple death animations

posted on March 19th, 2012, 10:57 am

while technically true over the long term, i think more randomness in the short term isn't a good thing.

ie if you lost 3 games and won 3 games because of these dice rolls, then i would feel slighted in the losing games and embarrassed at winning in the wins.

IF and then if it would ever be implemented then the odds for a WC breach upon death would be small (probably 5% or so?) so other than this being some nice eye candy it should not influence balance one bit.

A little variation on death can be beneficial.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 11:31 am

IF and then if it would ever be implemented then the odds for a WC breach upon death would be small (probably 5% or so?) so other than this being some nice eye candy it should not influence balance one bit.

A little variation on death can be beneficial.

if it's just eye candy (doesn't destroy nearby ships) then I'm ok with it.

but if it destroys nearby ships then that's a 5% chance of chaos. and that 1 in 20 match where your fleet wins a battle but still dies because of a WC breach, that would be even more frustrating.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 1:37 pm

For modding purposes there is an explosion spawn weapon: RumbleExplode - The Hitchhiker's Guide to Fleet Operations

Thats awesome!   I might have to mess with that.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 5:07 pm

We all know what this means right?

If anything like a warp core breach is going to be implemented there MUST be an 'eject the core!' button.

I'm in favour of a special (and have previously suggested) that causes a warp core breach with a 5% chance to work or something. So a  ship does excellent engine damage always targeting warp nacelles, and vital engineering components. This weapon might also have a percentage chance to do area damage when warp core breach is successful.

Weapon: 5% warp core breach possibility.
100% area damage caused for very small radius, 50% area damage caused for larger area.

The warp core breach is never instantaneous, and allows for an 'eject the core' button, that does guaranteed MEDium area damage.

By ejecting the warp core, the ship becomes almost derelict. It will be under your control, but only a constructor can salvage it. It may continue to fire.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 9:14 pm

A warp core breach could be cool but i would hope that it wouldnt happen very often, other wise it could get quite annoying over time. Unless the ship was close to base/constructor it would be left to die sure it could still do damage to passing ships but its also an easy target.

Instead of ejecting the warpcore the commands could fail and you could do an abandon ship and maybe gain a little supply back once the pods made it to the nearest ship/station.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 11:06 pm

I get the impression that people don't get the concept of percentages.
A 5% chance is 5 out of a hundred on average!

Sure it can happen that two WC breaches happen shortly after one another, but that can happen even if the odds are only 1%.

Since the odds are reset every time a battle starts, the chances of seeing a WC breach in a game are slim to say the least, even with 5% odds.

Yes it introduces a wild card, some random chaos as some put it, but the odds of it happening are small and if the damage is limited to a small area there's nothing to worry about.

A WC breach is not an Omega molecule destabilizing and destroying a whole section.
I hope a small chance of a WC breach upon destruction of a ship is added in the near future.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 11:27 pm

don't patronise everyone who disagrees with you, we know very well what percentages are.

also it's less than 1%. it's around a quarter of 1%. but that's not the point.

random chance annoys me a lot. i fit the expectancy theory (by a guy with the coolest name ever: V Vroom) model very well, if the link between effort and reward is broken by random chance then I won't be motivated.

in 5% of games my actions won't have a direct influence on how well i'm doing in the game. that's why my family always end up at each other's throats when we play monopoly (also those bastards keep stealing my favourite site, orange)

posted on March 19th, 2012, 11:36 pm

It's not patronizing, but simply going by the comments.
The way you commented it looked as if you thought that even with a 5% chance it would happen all the time in battles. I explained it could, but that it would be highly unlikely.

To continue on a friendlier note, how is the chance of a WC breach different than a chance of missing a torpedo or pulse weapon? In each one of your action will not have a direct influence..

I understand that you don't like random chances, but they are already a part of the game and IMO adding a chance for a WC breach upon the death of a vessel could be mighty interesting.

posted on March 19th, 2012, 11:53 pm

the random chances in the form of torp misses are a completely different case. each torp missing doesnt change the course of a battle. and because there are many many torps fired "events", each event having relatively very little influence on the game, over the course of just one game it evens out really fast, like that old demonstration of the binomial distribution every maths teacher seemed to have, with the hundreds of beads falling down channels in a box to approximate the shape of a standard normal distribution. it evens out easily within each game. while the 1 event of a warp core breach has a massive effect, being a giant explosion and doesn't happen often. so it will even out only over many many games, which is too long to wait for fairness, it's not biased at all, but it adds unnecessary random chance to the game in the short term.

over 1 million games you'd probably lose as many games from warp core breaches as you won. but over 5 games you could lose 1 and win 0 because of it.

i've never heard anybody complain they lost a match because they were unlucky with torp hits.

posted on March 20th, 2012, 12:39 am

Neither have i.

The comparison between torpedo miss chance and the chance for a WC breach with limited AoE is valid though.
As stated earlier a WC breach would not happen often and it would have only a limited Area of Effect.
Does this mean someone cannot get unlucky and lose a ship because of a WC breach?
Off course not, but IMO the chances of a WC breach happening combined with the loss of a ship by the AoE are slim enough to be compared to winning/ losing a battle because of a missed torpedo.

IMO you blow (pun intended) the impact of a possible addition of a WC breach with a limited AoE way out of proportions.

The dynamic environment of the game would (again) IMO benefit from the addition of a WC breach with a limited AoE.
It's not as if the addition of a super weapon is proposed.

posted on March 20th, 2012, 4:44 am

The point here is that it is extremely frustrating to get one's ships damaged by chance. A warp core breach could effectively turn the tide in a battle, especially early on with only a few weak ships. I want to lose because of my mistakes or my oppponent's superior skill, not because of random chance.
That addition of a potential source of frustration (and believe me, it will get frustrating *really* fast!) adds *nothing* positive to the gameplay. Fleetops is after all a strategy game and in a strategy game I want to be able to calculate my probabilities of success. Otherwise it's not a strategy game anymore, but a game of dice.

I've only seen arguments that say why that feature would not be so bad, none that say why it would be good. What is the benefit besides "wouldn't it be cool if it'd be like in the TV show"? Because the novelty wears off really fast.

posted on March 20th, 2012, 4:59 am

These all seem like points that can be fixed.

If we made it part of a special feature, of a late game unit, nothing would happen early on.

Or, we could make it that the only chance for it to happen is if the ship is already at zero shields, and either really damaged hull or badly damage engine subsystem.

If the only way for a ship to have warp core breach is if its engine subsystem is already disabled, then your ship was probably dead anyways ... if you were facing a skilled player.

Between the two sides, I think there are ways to fit this in.

Place requirements, or put it in as a late game feature somehow.

posted on March 20th, 2012, 9:52 am

But *why* fit it in? Just to make it "like tv show"?
I just see the point of such a feature.

posted on March 20th, 2012, 10:01 am

Neither have i.

The comparison between torpedo miss chance and the chance for a WC breach with limited AoE is valid though.
As stated earlier a WC breach would not happen often and it would have only a limited Area of Effect.

i don't think it is a valid comparison, you say in the quoted text that the wc breach won't happen often, torp missing/hitting happen very often. hence taking a 10 minute period and looking at whether torps miss or hit, you'd get roughly the expected figures. if you took a 10 minute period and looked at how many wc breaches there were, it would most likely not be 5% of destroyed ships had a warp core breach. it could be 0% if none had one, or 20% if 5 ships were destroyed and 1 wc breached. the chances of any 1 or more of those 5 ships wc breaching is around 1/4.

Does this mean someone cannot get unlucky and lose a ship because of a WC breach?
Off course not, but IMO the chances of a WC breach happening combined with the loss of a ship by the AoE are slim enough to be compared to winning/ losing a battle because of a missed torpedo.

if you make the wc breach do little damage/area of effect then it's not a very believable wc breach is it? wc breaches are massive explosions, we're talking michael bay level explosions. ships on the same screen as a wc breach should be destroyed. otherwise it's a ridiculously up wc breach.

granted if the wc were made pathetically weak, then things would be a lot more manageable. still a wc breach would damage some of your ships and force you to repair when you didn't need to before. could cost you an expansion, which would probably change the course of a game. even with pathetic damage i'm still not a fan of it.

maybe if the ship started glowing and flashing to indicate wc breach in 30 seconds, then both players could run away and hide from the explosion.

posted on March 20th, 2012, 1:22 pm

random chance annoys me a lot. i fit the expectancy theory (by a guy with the coolest name ever: V Vroom) model very well, if the link between effort and reward is broken by random chance then I won't be motivated.

in 5% of games my actions won't have a direct influence on how well i'm doing in the game. that's why my family always end up at each other's throats when we play monopoly (also those bastards keep stealing my favourite site, orange)

That is a very good point, however there is a simple way to get around it. 5% chance of warp core destabilization, 90% chance of regular explosion, 5% chance of... something good.  Ship contains the breach and it does not blow up.  You receive salvage back from it.  Something that balances the chance of it going badly.

Besides, I think a WC breach should only be destroy a ship, or severely damage it, if its shields are down and its point blank.  Otherwise it could simply damage the shields of nearby ships.  It doesn't have to be a proverbial nuke.  It could be much less damaging because ship safety measures have gotten better since the dominion war and they are not as dangerous and don't spread antimatter quite as far.