Kusanoki Chronicles

No system is perfect and there are some minor and less minor tweaks that can be made to the game engine to make the game even more enjoyable for players and especially to assist new players in getting more heavily involved in this side of the game. This will be a longish post but for those less interested in rambling verbiage I shall highlight the specific suggestions in red so peeps who want to come move straight to the suggestions and their reasons. Current Situation  Serious combat in game is hard mainly because of the effort involved and the ramifications. The effort is partly game engine and partly players the ramifications are all player caused. One of the biggest player caused issues is an unwillingness to fight unless you have a huge pre-ponderance of force. This leads to a lot of alliances and shifting tactical situations which is actually a good thing. What isn't is the automatic increase in threat that can happen. Let me provide an example. Affiliation A sends its 20 war...

This ship was obviously hit be a lot of anti-matter missiles  Next in our series of tests of the battle system we will look at possibly the most popular ship killer in game with Missiles. We won't be looking at the dreaded anti-matter missiles as I don’t have any. Or even high mark missiles for that matter. Our two test subjects will be the same two ships as last time. I am not sure if the shielded exploration vessel even noticed the attack in the last post so it is still aimlessly wandering around doing science stuff. The scout ship though has re-armed and gotten rid of all the light photon guns equipping instead with a  single missile launcher, Magazines and ammo. In practice no warship carries a single tiny weapon like this and you will see ships with 100-200 missile launchers all trying to overwhelm the point defence of a defending ship. In this case the defending ship does not even have point defence (plus we want to see what the weapon 'does' not what it does if it ge...

The last blog post covered a full days battle with two relatively crap warships hammering each other. For the next series of posts we are going to get more nuanced which has the plus side of me not blowing up quite so much of my own expensively acquired gear in the process. My  two warships used in the last engagement are refitting post battle so to continue the test I have temporarily changed my starter exploration vessel and scout ship into ships at least capable of fighting. They both have normal/heavy hulls and some armour so I made one (without even a naval officer) have lots of shields and the other will endeavour to attack with a single weapon. Considering the amount of defences it is unlikely to do much if anything to the attacked ship but will allow us to ascertain how the defences cope with different weapon types. This test will cover two of the weakest combat ship weapons in the game - the Light Photon Gun Mark IV and a Photon Scatter Gum The Attacking Ship This is basic...

This is how I picture the starter warship of the 'Broadsword'  class We have now covered a fair amount of basic detail concerning combat which is all very esoteric so I shall now run through some test battle reports in some detail to show what actually happens and what conclusions can be drawn - hopefully these conclusions will reinforce this series of articles basic assumptions but you never know.  Test Battle Alpha  The scenario is that two new players have set up their own combat ships and bumped into each other both being ready and willing to fight. This battle will therefore validate/invalidate some of their design decisions. Both players managed to source some decent Photon Gun Ivs and they have decent Mark Targeting Computers and a few Shields at that level I have set up what we shall term as our 'Blue' ship which is an NHS flagged normal hulled, medium armour patrol ship. It has pretty good shields, poor speed, poor scintillators (only Mark I) and no less than t...

Bet they wished they had fitted that armoured bridge before this point. In the last post we dealt with what happened when an attack finally did the stuff it was intended to do and damage the opposing ship. That post dealt with the split of the attack between hulls and internals and more specifically dealt with damage to the hulls. This post covers what happens with the damage that strikes internals. Internal damage is very much a double edged sword. As a plus any damage that hits internals is not potentially making your ship explode (with some notable exceptions) 1 but equally is wiping out what makes your ship a combat ship instead 2 When damage is apportioned internally it randomly hits an internal item and that random choice is based on three things.  Targeting - If the initial attack hit with one of the permitted targeting types then it will hit something belonging to that target group i.e target weapons and something in the weapon group will be hit Location - Some items are...

Having passed scintillators, shields and armour our damage has now hit the areas with more capacity for destroying the ship. Any damage getting to this point gets split into two. One section hits the juicy internals and basically damages and destroys stuff. The other section hits the hulls. To a certain extent this is another damage sink but the more hull damage a ship takes the more chance a ship has of being blown up and basically exploding.  We will cover internal damage in the next post so this will concentrate on the hulls and how the damage is apportioned between the two. Before getting into the damage it would be useful to cover how hull choice can impact a warship. The first decision a budding warship builder has to make it 'what hull type' and to be honest for the majority of front line line of battle ships Heavy Hull is the only real choice 1   For other warship types then other choices come into play. I say other choices but the only real other choice is 'Normal ...

There are several different armour types out there with some (Light Plate) mainly used for fast ships not expecting to slug it out and others (Korondite Plate) mainly for stealth with much the same intention. We will not focus much on these as they are often attempts to avoid combat and we are concerning ourselves with a generic ship that slugs it out over several days. For these sort of warships there are two armour types that are head and shoulders above the rest and these are Armour Plate and Ablative Armour Plate.  Let us take each in turn. The most common is Armour Plate which is the workhorse of armour types and the most common you will (probably) have and encounter for major warships that are not toolkit smaller types designed for specific tasks. The basic Mark I armour provides a default armour depth of 80 and each mark increases this by 20 so Mark II = 100, Mark III = 120 and Mark IV (this is described as Advanced Heavy Armour on Battle reports) at 140. Since armour uses t...

   A Star Trek type Shield in place Shields are the second layer of defence and are one of the least 'seen' in primary line of battle combat ships. I am a fan personally but their main issue is that to get a large enough protective shield layer takes up more space than a Heavy hulled ship can spare. Plus when the most serious opposition uses Photon Batteries or anti-matter missiles then shield efficiency decreases rapidly. They are both useful and possible to carry in a normal hulled warship so it is still worth looking at. A shield functions much as every space tv/game shield you have ever seen does. Everything shot aimed at the ship must be dealt with by the shield and the more that is absorbed the weaker that shield gets.   There are three numbers to pay attention too with regard to shield and these are its Factors/Depth and recharge. The recharge is just how much the shields will refresh for the following day battle and as naval ships rarely waste space carrying ...