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Basically... I've re-written my ship balance formulae, which were written for 1.0, with a very new approach to address some of the feedback I recieved from other modders. My goal has been, and continues to be, to strike a balance between realism and gameplay needs, MP and SP. I do not worship at any one house- like DA, I'm trying not to offend the maximum number

Basically... I will be re-visiting the various spacecraft available in the Sirius Sector... and I'd like to know your thoughts on what things you might want to see changed, in an ideal world.

No matter how I slice this cake, btw... things will be different. I should say that in advance. The last versions of the Toolkit (and, in fact, the current version as of the one that's in beta now) had ships that had been substantially re-balanced, using a single, unified formula that I used to create similar, but more transparent (and, to be quite blunt, more game-balanced) gameplay to DA's original vision.

But, with the new formulas, I have given myself (and, hopefully, other game designers working with Toolkit) a lot more possible variety, in terms of how things work, without creating fundamental unbalance- at least, that is the hope.

It isn't just as simple as "Armor + Cargo = Mass, Energy, Manueverability". Now there are a whole slew of options available- and I am considering adding a few more.

So... here are a few things I'd like to hear opinions on:

1. How strongly do people think that a second Thruster should be one of the things game designers should be able to add to their ships, in a game-balanced universe? I am not really keen on this idea, but it seems like many newbie modders add a second (or third, or fourth...) Thruster to their ships fairly frequently, and I've been thinking about adding this option in, so that (at least in theory) people might add new ships to Toolkit using PROPERLY GAME-BALANCED STATS, for once... and get their double Thrusters. I doubt if the double-treble-quad thruster people can ever be convinced not to make lame, uber-stat ships anyhow, but ... should I leave this door open?

2. Should ships have different base speeds? Doing so is easy enough to accomplish. The question is, does that add anything to the game, if some ships are fundamentally faster than others? I've never really thought so, but many mods seem to make this a priority, also, citing "realism" as their reasoning. I find that a silly argument- there's no top speed for anything in outer space, other than the limitations imposed by the speed of light and stellar media, but this still seems to be a big deal to some people. Do I add it in? Or leave it out?

3. Should I allow ship designers to trade Mass for Turn Rate, and vice versa? This may seem like a minor thing, but it ain't. I had very good reasons to tie these things together in previous versions of Toolkit- but I now have some ideas about how I could seperate them again, and let modders play with things... without wrecking the game balance. New modders, please visit my Development Forum and read Dev's original articles, plus my notes, about how FL flight physics actually work... Mass is a really big deal.


Lastly, how does everybody see all of the Faction ships that are currently in the game as being? Basically, I'd like to re-establish some niches, and give different Factions different valid combinations.

For example, I see the Pirate ships (that would be the Bloodhound, Wolfhound, Mule) as basically being poorly armored but highly manueverable, for the cargo they can carry, and with enough power to make things work OK, but not great. They're a compromise design- part warship, part cargo-carrier... and like most compromises, this doesn't necessarily work really well for any one thing. What are your thoughts on this and the other ship "sets"?

I've left the FL ships very near their "stock" values since I started the Toolkit series, other than Energy outputs and physics... now we're down to brass tacks. Should I just leave them all alone, so that newbies won't be confused? Or improve things where they obviously need improvement? And what, in your opinion, could be improved? Obviously, I have ideas of my own, but I'm curious as to how others view things. And if everybody just wants me to leave well enough alone, I can do that too



I am going say a few things that I will not be adding , just so that we're clear. These things will not get added to Toolkit, because I think that they are inherently un-balanced and just plain bad ideas- even if they keep showing up in other people's mods. Don't even ask- I've been over these issues a billion times, and explained why I don't like these things... a billion times. Or so. Give or take a million:

A. Armor upgrades. No way, uh-uh, no how. Totally, completely unbalanced. No way to make it balanced, other than my "take the upgrade OFF and get more cargo" idea I came up with a couple of months ago. Which I still don't like, even though that does work, because it has no effect on the ship's Mass, and never will.

B. Sensor upgrades past 5K. This is a feel-good item with minimal real-world value, so far as my tests can determine. I might as well offer dashboard ornaments. No matter what, so far as I know, there isn't any way to make the game engine spawn things significantly farther than 5K out, period. So why even bother offering people an item with no real use? My tests have indicated that longer Sensor ranges don't really help all that much at finding objects more than 5K away, either, with the one exception of Cargo spawned from dead things. Does anybody know anything that contradicts this? Does anybody have working proof that Sensors with 10K range actually detect things 10K away? If Sensor Upgrades past 5K actually detect Wrecks at their ranges, and I'm just missing a code trick, please let me know, and I'll add this feature to Toolkit. Otherwise... well, I could add it as a prestige item, but there's no point in putting a big price tag on it...

C. Cloak. Don't even bother asking. Do not post speculative nonsense in this thread. There is no solution. Period. No.

D. Sellable Engines. Another big "want" item with game-balance problems. I can do it- I could get Alcander's current patch and work it into the mod. I just don't see any point. Making ships faster through methods other than their base stats pretty much destroys whatever niche they're in. Combine that with Armor Upgrades, Upgradeable Power Plants, etc... and you basically have a ship that is the sum of its equipment, not its base values- and none of these things have any negative consequences to offset their positive values! In game-design terms, this is a permanent buff. Isn't a better, more-expensive ship, and better shields and weapons enough? Do we really want high-end players to be that much farther ahead of newbies? I am real, real dubious about this stuff.

E. Upgradeable Power Plants. I already have Power Upgrades, which are minor buffs at the high end of play, because I think that a minor leg-up is appropriate, and the high-end units are expensive enough that they're mainly a prestige item anyhow- by the time you can afford a Mark V, you have a ship that doesn't really need it. I think it should stay that way. I don't like the idea of Eagles with double their usual Power output.

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A. Armor upgrades. No way, uh-uh, no how. Totally, completely unbalanced. No way to make it balanced, other than my "take the upgrade OFF and get more cargo" idea I came up with a couple of months ago. Which I still don't like, even though that does work, because it has no effect on the ship's Mass, and never will.

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thats funny - i remember telling you that internals displace volume back in september
in a little post i called Volumemetrics - but i guess that was your idea :p

power upgrades - lots cooler when you can see them mounted on the ship as a hacked shieldgenerator,not only that but different classes of reactors can have different properties that make them uniquely advantageous with certain combos

i don't understand this obsession with mass you have - nothing adds mass to a ship, period.nothing.nothing nothing nothing

Just to add onto Argh's point on cloak...I do not want to lock this thread since it is a very useful thread. So if anyone posts about cloak, I won't edit your post, I will just delete it. That's a promise. I don't want useful threads getting clogged with forbidden topics.

I was planning to add the two thruster thing on the next mod that i will be working on. The plan is to give them only to light fighters, but they lose their mines instead. So in effect the thrusters take over the HpCM01 and HpMine01 hardpoints and the HpThruster01 turns into a countermeasure instead.
I'm not totally sure yet, i haven't done anything towards it except write a few pages of ideas.
I'm not sure about the no armour rules. The new unoriginal ships are all stronger against missiles than the original ones so maybe the original ships could get an armour scale mounted as part of its goods package? As long as it isn't a buyable goods the players would not be able to remove it (i'm not sure why they would want to but there you go..).
I was thinking that for my next mod maybe trebling the armour values of all ships and doubling the weapons or something. Its the kind of thing that needs playtesting to get right, but i'd like to make a bigger gap between the ships. Maybe even forcing players to fly the starflier for more than a couple of random missions.
One of the problems that i have is that light fighters really aren't very good when compared to heavy ones. They aren't much more agile and the lack of weapons limits the possible loadouts.
If you were to compare a well loaded defender verses a hawk, the defender would win every time. One thing that i have added on the mod i'm (still..) working on now is more combatty-Intercepter-trade versions of existing ships. If i was to compare a hawk with a 5/0 config 4x6, 1x5 (no CD) against the defenderthen the hawk would quite deservably be a better choice.
Freighters are a funny one too, they really ought to be different but its difficult to see how. I think they should carry more, but then it would be too easy. Maybe if it was a mod only for co-operative play on multiplayer then it would work as long as the ship was clearly unable to defend itself unassisted.
I do like the idea of the power upgrades where a player could stick with a lower class of ship and max it out to bring it up to compete with a higher class of ships. There needs to be some element of choice, as it is now its buy the Eagle or buy the Sabre and gain a useful turret. The ships would still be limited by the maximum weapon abilities set to the ship anyhow.
Very Heavies are tricky too, i've set the cheap ones to be slow and have worse performance (though this seems a bit unfair) and the more expensive ones, like 1.6 mill are the ships that have engines slightly faster than existing ships.

ZOMG! I'm not dead! No I am not... I'm just a zomgbay. But anyway, I figured I would add my $0.02 to this (hopefully extensive) discussion, since Freelancer ship balance has been something I have tinkered with for almost two years now. This may all be too much too late, but for whatever reason I feel like writing. And so that is what I am going to do.

First off, these two: "D. Sellable Engines." and "E. Upgradeable Power Plants." These are part of the larger issue of customizable internal equipment in general. The only way to make a mod with such customization balanced is to make power plants, engines and whatever else (tractor beams, I guess) take up cargo space, with more beefy stuff taking up more space. As mentioned, this would lead to ships essentially becoming the sums of their parts, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Basically, the ship you fly determines how much space you can allocate to internals, which determines the size of engine and powerplant that you can field; try to mount something too big or too small and you can end up unable to shoot, or worse unable to move. Seems like a spiffy idea until you consider that there are a whole lot of different types of ships in the vanilla game. With ships basically acting as shells with gun mounts, you could probably get away with something like five ship types total; in other words, you're probably going to end up with a whole lot of ships that are so similar as to be basically the same thing with different outside appearances. Sure, you could dink around and add some variety, but I think the redundancy issue would still be a gnawing one. Well, unless that's what you want in the first place, I guess...

You could try to include armor in with the other internals, but I totally agree that there is just no way to make armor upgrades balanced. If they were straight additions to your hull strength, sure, but as they are multipliers they are an utterly retarded addition to any mod seeking real balance at all levels of play.

On the topic of providing some variation between ships of different regions: definitely do it. This gives players a second dimension of flexibility; sure, you can go light or heavy to suit your playing style, but what if you could also go bretonia or border worlds in order to get closer to the design philosophy that suits you best? If there is already some of this present in the current Toolkit, great, but the more obvious the variety, the more experimentation people will be able to do and the happier they ought to be. Of course, it also makes balancing a NIGHTMARE, but that should be old hat for you now, right? Anyway, basically what I'm getting at is that if you're looking to build some equations for how to set certain stats of ships based on their other stats, go with different equations for each region.

Since I'm really not sure what kind of input you're looking for, here are some of the numerous concepts for providing (balanced) variety that I have come up with over the years. I'm not suggesting you use all of these, or even any of them, but hopefully they will spark at least some creative inspiration.

- Ship stats tied to ship size, at least to some degree. This concept was originally spawned long ago by my indignation at the weakness of the Wolfhound given its sheer largeness. I mean, seriously, that thing is as big as most freighters in the game. There were other things that irked me, like how the Titan was even beefier than the Sabre despite being much smaller. Now, certainly not all ships are created equal, and some are bound to have superior parts installed and overall better construction, but there is a limit to how much you can cram into a package (or alternately there is a limit to how crappy the parts are that you expect your pilots to fly with). Also, a bigger, beefier ship is probably going to have more mass and rotational inertia than a smaller ship, and because we're stuck dealing with drag it would probably make sense to give the big ship a lower angular and/or linear velocity as well.

- Less difference between HFs and VHFs. This is mostly just a direct consequence of the above concept and how most VHFs are just HFs with small extra parts slapped on.

- Thrusters built into the ships. If you have greatly varying linear drag on your ships and you don't want people taking a thruster designed for a big ship and sticking it on a little ship, don't have any buyable thrusters at all! Also, doing this is a great way to provide some regional flavor to ships; for example, you could make Kusari military fighters have short-burning but high-output thrusters, while Rheinland military fighters take the opposite approach, with long-burning but low-output thrusters. You could even do this for some ships and leave thrusters mountable on other ships, if you wanted to leave this level of customization in the game.

- Reducing the efficiency of guns as they get bigger. If you remove level restrictions on weapon mounts, which I have a habit of doing, it would be nice if there was an incentive for a startracker to mount three level 2 guns rather than one level 6 (or whatever).

- Limiting the number of weapons in the game. This is the other strategy I started favoring later on. Really, having four or more types of basically the same weapon never really sat well with me, so I decided to flatten things out and give each region just a few types of weapons (for example, the Outcasts would just use Krakens and Wyrms). If you ever find yourself running out of weapon hardpoint types, this is a great way to free a whole bunch of them up. However, it does kind of kill the joy of progressively mounting more and more powerful weapons on your ship (though as you get a beefier ship you can at least support more and more weapons simultaneously).

- Limiting the number of hardpoints on the ship that can support missiles. From a construction standpoint it makes sense; it's a lot harder to provide an ammo feed than it is to provide a power coupling.

- Civilian ships should never be more dangerous than military ships. Ever. All you people who got sick of seeing 99% of the level 30+ people on vanilla servers in Eagles should understand.

- Outlaw ships probably shouldn't be more dangerous than military ships, either. Considering the amount of funding that can be dumped into R&D, the house militaries ought to have the best lewt.


If you were planning on going all-out with regional differences (you should, really you should), this is the general strategy behind how I tried to provide variety in one of my more-developed mods from... a while ago. Here's to hoping it gives you some ideas. Also, the intention is that you could translate these general ideas into mathematical relationships between ship stats if you were so inclined.

- Civilian: cheap and nothing great, outclassed by similar ships of all other regions but not so hopelessly crappy as to be... well... hopeless. But not something a hotshot pilot would want to fly for long.
- Liberty: ships are somewhat fast in exchange for durability; there is a trend toward specialization of ships (heck, just look at the Liberty cruiser...).
- Bretonia: the "average" of the universe; basically, the yardstick by which other region's ships are measured (you have to compare against something, right?). The balance equations for bretonia ships would thus be "standard" ones, whatever those might be. For some reason I always view the brits of Sirius as being the most likely to adhere to the middle-of-the-road philosophy.
- Kusari: small and agile but flimsy. Really, their ships are quite small, it just wouldn't make sense to me if they weren't the most nimble.
- Rheinland: tough but not quite as agile.
- Bounty Hunter: built to take on single targets, so maneuverable and with a lot of firepower but not very durable.
- Pirate: I actually have a tradition of calling these Independent Worlds ships, since they are flown by some pirate groups that I don't think would normally cooperate to come up with ship designs. With that in mind, these ships would be designed to capture a market of people looking for really tough and fairly powerful ships that were not overly expensive; however, in exchange they give up speed and agility.
- Border Worlds: built for a hit-and-run style of fighting, so fast, fairly tough and heavy hitting but with lower maneuverability.
- Corsair: built more for swarming, so more emphasis on maneuverability. Sure, wings wouldn't really do anything in a vacuum, but you wouldn't have drag in a vacuum, either.

And now it should be more apparent why trying to provide variety for each region is a balancing job from hell, and one I have (perhaps foolishly) attempted several times. If I wasn't neck-deep in work on Tides of War I probably would have finished one or two of these rebalance attempts by now. But anyway, I can't stress enough how important I think it is for ships from different regions to behave differently. Anyway... I guess I'll stop writing now, this post has gotten ridiculously long.

First off, my apologies, Cold_Void! My memory is not what it should be- the credit for that (as well as some other innovative features of 1.3, I should add) is yours- I've merely been implementing technologies others have unearthed, as usual.

I will offer some detailed commentary later on- I'm still at work- but I am glad to see so many detailed responses

Here, let me lay some of my cards on the table. This is not quite complete, but close.


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CIVILIAN SPACECRAFT
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Civilian Spacecraft may weigh up to 500 tons (that's "tonnes" for you Metric folks). "Spend" tons in the following ways:

1 ton = 50 hitpoints, 4 cargo or 10 Power / Sec.
5 ton = one gun slot
4 ton = one turret slot (this is because turrets are generally less powerful at the high end)
100 tons = Second Thruster (ships get first one for free)
150 tons = one shield slot (ships get first one for free)
MineDroppers, the Guided Weapon slot, and CounterMeasures are all "free", but ships may not have more than one!

Total power (capacity) = Power / Sec. X 20

The tons then are used to determine the ship's overall handling characteristics, per the following rules:

Torque references go up or down, depending on the following factors:

steering_torque = 2000000 - [1500 X (Mass)

So here are the baseline stats for every ship, before doing Mass calculations:

steering_torque = 2000000, 2000000, 2000000
angular_drag = 1000000, 1000000, 1000000
rotation_inertia = 100000, 100000, 100000

Therefore, a fighter with a mass of 250 has stats like this (or a multiple, for things that can turn quickly but where we want them to have "stiff" collision behavior):

steering_torque = 2000000 - [2000 X (250) = 1500000

torque = 1500000
drag = 1000000
inertia = 100000

Here's an example:

Starflier:

1000 hitpoints = 20 tons (round up)
20 cargo = 5 tons
3 gun slots = 15 tons
Power, 100 \ Sec. = 10 tons, 2000 capacity

Total Tons = 50

Therefore, the Starflier's stats look like this:

(ship)
mass = 50
hitpoints = 1000
steering_torque = 1900000, 1900000, 1900000
angular_drag = 1000000, 1000000, 1000000
rotation_inertia = 100000, 100000, 100000

(power)
charge_rate = 100
capacity = 2000

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MILITARY/PIRATE FIGHTERS
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Military/Pirate Fighters follow different rules, to reflect their different role in the Freelancer game world. Very simply, they are penalized very heavily for taking up tons with Cargo, but are given cheaper Hitpoints and Power. This puts Pirate ship designers in a bit of a bind- whether to make your Pirate ships Civilian, with all of the weaknesses thereof, but with cheaper Cargo, or whether to end up with heavy, non-manueverable beasts with lots of everything .... is up to you!

Just like Civilian ships, the top limit on Mass is 500. This is to keep things from getting... ah... *ridiculous* on the high end, trust me!

1 ton = 100 hitpoints, 1 cargo or 20 Power / Sec.
5 ton = one gun slot
4 ton = one turret slot (this is because turrets are generally less powerful at the high end)
100 tons = Second Thruster (ships get first one for free)
150 tons = one shield slot (ships get first one for free)
MineDroppers, the Guided Weapon slot, and CounterMeasures are all "free", but ships may not have more than one!

So, let's look at the Starflier, as a Military Fighter:

1000 hitpoints = 10 tons (round up)
20 cargo = 20 tons
3 gun slots = 15 tons
Power, 100 \ Sec. = 5 tons, 2000 capacity

Total tons = 50

Note how they came out the same way? This is because the Starflier sits at a crucial spot in the game design (duh). Let's look at a Pirahna, as a Civilian Spacecraft and a Military / Pirate Fighter:

Civilian Calculation:

2600 hitpoints = 52 tons
35 cargo = 9 tons (round up)
4 gun slots = 20 tons
Power, 200 \ Sec. = 20 tons

101 tons total.

Military / Pirate Calculation:

2600 hitpoints = 26 tons
35 cargo = 35 tons (round up)
4 gun slots = 20 tons
Power, 200 \ Sec. = 10 tons

91 tons, total. As you can see, this means that it's better to make this a Military / Pirate ship.

Let's look at a Freighter. This is the Liberty Freighter (after new balance, of course):

Civilian Calculation:

3200 hitpoints = 64 tons
150 cargo = 38 tons (round up)
3 gun slots = 15 tons
5 turret slots = 20 tons
Power, 350 \ Sec. = 35 tons

172 tons, total.

Military / Pirate Calculation:

3200 hitpoints = 32 tons
150 cargo = 150 tons (round up)
3 gun slots = 15 tons
5 turret slots = 20 tons
Power, 350 \ Sec. = 17 tons

234 tons, total! Well, it makes very little sense to make this a Military Fighter, unless you want the benefits of Military / Pirate Shields (not a minor benefit, mind you).

Lastly, let's look at a "big daddy"- a Very Heavy Fighter. Here's the heaviest of the original Freelancer fighters, the Corsair Titan:

24000 hitpoints = 240 tons
70 cargo = 70 tons
6 gun slots = 30 tons
1 turret slot = 4 tons
Power, 950 \ Sec. = 48 tons (round up)

392 tons, total! This is one big, well-armored, dangerous ship... but it's not terribly manueverable. Kind've like flying a fusion-powered brick

Just wondering, have you considered trying something other than linear equations? This is just idle speculation, but you might end up with better-balanced if you try something a bit fancier out. For example, rather than adding (1/50) * hit_points to mass for a civilian ships you could instead add (1/50) * (hit_points^1.1). This would provide for "increasing marginal cost", I guess you would call it; the more powerful you want to make your ships, the more dearly you have to pay. You could also go with something like hit_points^0.9 to give you "decreasing marginal cost."

On that note, I might as well point out that the current setup of making steering_torque = 2000000 - 1500 * mass already gives you decreasing marginal cost. To illustrate: the maximum angular velocity of a ship is steering_torque / angular_drag, but since angular_drag is a constant you can really just focus on the behavior of steering_torque. Let's say that you have a ship with a mass of 100 and a ship with a mass of 200. The first ship will therefore have a steering_torque of 1850000 and the second will have 1700000. This means that the second ship turns at about 91.9% of the rate of the first. If you compare ships with 100 and 300 mass, the second ship turns at about 83.8% of the rate of the first. 100 and 400, 75.7%; 100 and 500, 67.6%, etc. I presume this is intentional, but back to my original question, I'm wondering if you've considered arranging things to give you a different overall behavior.

Yeah, I thought about doing it that way, but...

1. I'm trying for flat curves across the board. This keeps things simple, which is a major goal- if relationships are kept simple, then maybe, just maybe, people will actually use them, as opposed to just ignoring any concept of balance.

2. I realize that this means that higher-level ships are fundamentally unbalanced at higher levels- thus the way that the manuever curve works... in short, you can have a ship that's very powerful, but it will steer very poorly. Which, in MP terms, means that if you don't kill your opponant during the opening volley, you're probably dead, given the way that weapons work now that the curves have been flattened out.

DA used such curves as you're describing, but they actually ended up breaking most of their rules in the end, to make high-level ships worth buying. I am hoping that the end result of my new formulae will actually end up being a better relationship between the various factors, without introducing things that are inherently unbalanced. As I move forward, I will be looking very harshly at my Energy output formula as currently written, to make sure that even fairly twinkie designs aren't beyond the levels of reasonable balance.

Hi Argh

I have set scanners to 7500/5000 and your right about picking things up at over 5000. But after you engage an npc and they run you can track them up to 7500 away before they go off your scanner. So thy may not work picking them up coming in but work great if they are leaving the area.

Also if you put scanners of say 10000/10000 on stations and weapons platforms, and ships the npc's will use that and see you coming and what you’re carrying. That maybe a little extreme but it seems to work well, they may not need that much range but it seems better, for example a police patrol will scan you well before you can land on a base and come after you and many times force you to drop cargo or fight.

Edited by - flybyu on 12/1/2005 6:10:00 AM

okie, read half the first post and lemme see what i have to chip in on the matter:

1. Dual-Thrusting is a must, eg the patriot, though it may be good at tturning and shooting before the hf can turn prob is that it cant get outta the place fast enough, you may also wish to slow down thrusters slightly, i have sped them up in my mod and a ship with 2 goes too fast to be hit at all

2.possably, if no 2 thrusters a small additional impulse speed wouldent go amiss

3. i think turn rate is a lot more important than mass actually, mass has never really made much difference, unless less than 40 or something the the ship turns into a jumpy thing.. i think

4. faction ships... well the Outcasts and Corsairs ships are way too good, i think it would be good for the main 4 houses to have cap ships IF you could get them to work, this would add much attraction to the main houses as at the moment a centurion(i think) and a banshee are not too attracting compared to the eagle which EVERYONE uses at the moment.

Now lemme read the rest of the stuff....

so i could have a civvie ship
500 tonnes
50 guns
2 sheilds
7500 hp

?? have i understood this correctly? (yes i am aware you cant actually have that many guns lol)

Erm... yes... but you didn't buy any Power, so those 50 guns aren't going to be able to do anything

ahhhhh okay!

Well it all looks allright, you puttting it into a prog to calculate it for you?