Counter defenses

Time for my regular completely unreasonable gameplay suggestion:

A new set of components for warships designed specifically for punching through defenses. It'd add another set of stats for ships and fleets, in addition to attack and defense, boosted by special components. The counter defensive components would serve the purpose of nullifying the target ship's defenses in the given category. One way that this could be done is simply reducing the defense rolls of the target whenever a ship equipped with counter defenses makes an attack. Another way, one which would make an individual point of counter defense very powerful, is that counter defenses could strip a target of x points of defense in the same way as an attack can, except without doing damage... in that manner, an entire fleet would benefit from one ship loaded with counter defenses.

For nullifying armour, you might have some kind of spacial disruption component or a kind of micro-meteorite machine gun that prematurely cooks off reactive armour, or even just armour piercing shells. Nullifying shields would be a line of shield disruption or distraction techniques, and nullifying missile defenses could be dummy missiles or other such techniques to overwhelm the point defense.

What this would do is toss up the ship balance a bit and allow more of a rock-paper-scissors dynamic in ship combat. Defense heavy ships would counter attack heavy ships, but their defenses would be rendered useless by counter defensive equipped ships, which themselves wouldn't be able to compete as well with heavily armed warships.

More importantly, though, it allows another way to counter an opponent that is ramping up on defense techs (which, to be honest, is already incredibly easy due to the cheap cost and quick research of those components) without having to switch to a new line of weapons. If the techs were a bit more expensive than the defense ones, it could work very well.

At the very least, it WOULD make things more interesting.
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Reply #1 Top
I'm against this. Weapons already 'punch through' defenses - they wear them down. A Blackhole Eruptor being blocked by a Droid Sentry from an Aereon Missile Defense system will open up a black hole that sucks in several more Droids and lots of Aereon 'Hyper-Chaffe' - thus reducing the problem for further missiles to hit their target. This is shown in the game mechanism as well.

That's why you have top weapons doing 22/25/16 damage compared to top defenses absorbing 9/10/10. The defense modules may be smaller, but this is nullified since they get worn down. Defenses are smaller, cheaper, and less research-intensive in order to reduce the trouble of changing defense types for different opponents, who are using different weapons. Also, Luck bonuses don't affect defenses, which IMO, is a flaw in the game, but this gives weapons an advantage of a minimum roll that's not 0.

In order to justify these components, the defense-depleting feature of weapons must be removed and these modules must be made huge in shipboard size, larger than weapons themselves. And anyway, the AI will never understand what's going on with counter-defenses.

my regular completely unreasonable gameplay suggestion:
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Yup. I'd rather have the devs look into stealth/cloaking devices than this.
Reply #2 Top
Whoa!!!! (sorry to the original poster - your idea sounds well thought out/etc... but I'm not thinking it'd be the best idea imo - maybe more than just 3 weapons, but hey, that'll probably be GalCivIII)

I am liking the idea of Stealth/Cloaking devices though!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that sounds like a wicked idea that needs to be implemented... damn, that's a really good idea.

It'd obviously have to be a pretty time consuming tech, but then there would also be "detector gear", so there'd be two things to tech up for.


Great idea though!
Reply #3 Top
There's a whole thread revolving around stealth/cloaking - I think it's in the Ideas section or maybe Game Talk - can't remember at the moment.
Reply #4 Top
Honestly? I was just throwing it out there. I totally agree with you, cloaking would be a FAR more interesting addition. Heck, I think I'm responsible for a substantial number of the posts made in the cloaking thread you mentioned.

Technically, it seems like an easy thing to implement. However, since I don't believe that AIs handle sensor ranges and scouting properly as is, getting them to properly deal with cloaked ships would add a substantial problem for AI.