Ammunition Effects - Making Damage Types and Resistance Profiles more interesting

[Luwc]

I would like to explore the possibility of adding effects to different weapon charges depending on their damage type.

The idea came based on two experiences I have made.
A) The ingame description of the Ammunition does many times not at all relate to how they actualy work. Example : Titanium Sabot rounds are supposed to pierce through Armor plating and damage the hull directly. However this does not occur as far as I am aware.

B) (Larger) fleet fights are still based on vast amount of logistics to keep the ships alive. While the good and right use of logistics, especially in small / mid scale fights makes for some exciting brawls it would be nice to see the targeted ship, while still alive at least be incapacitated by the damage taken, this could be in form of the weapon effects mentioned below. The primary target would be kept alive by logistics but still be largely incapacitated. This can be negated by further logistics (remote hull reps, cap transfer) and carrying nanite repair paste to patch the vessel up and get back into the fight. Potentially while still on the field. This would change the dynamics of fleet battles and could make for even more and exciting battles small scale to the most massive fights.

Now please consider that I haven’t really thought much into how this could and would be balanced or the severity of the effects. Also considering ship resistances which then would also increase the resistance to the according effect. I am just literally throwing the ideas out there. Where I had multiple ideas I made multiple versions of a possible effect.

Before we get into it some notes.

• Effect severity would be based on weapon and charge size. Getting hit by VW beetle (XL Charge) would ofc cause a more severe effect than getting peppered by small charges.
• Effect severity would be based on hit quality. i.e. a wrecking hit has the potential for a more severe effect than just shrugging of a grazing shot.
• Effect severity would in addition be based on chance i.e. RNG.

So…

EM Damage Effect :

Version 1 - The Cap Drain : EM damage would drain the targets capacitor (potentially very OP)

Version 2 - The fried Electronics : EM damage would randomly debuff Sensor Strength, Scan Res and/or Locking Range, Drone Control Range and Drone Tracking and a minor debuff to shield resistances for a brief amount of time.

Thermal Damage Effect :

Version 1 - The heated modules : Thermal damage would potentially heat damage random modules, maybe even burning them out without the target ever pressing the overheat button.

Version 2 - The Armor DOT : As the “plasma” sticks to the armor and hull it would have the chance to apply a small dot (damage over time) effect to Armor and once Armor is gone to hull. For balancing purposes not stackable.

Kinetic Damage Effect :

Kinetic Damage would pierce through armor plating (not shielding) and directly apply damage to Hull HP. However imho for balancing reasons a ships hull should only be able to reach 0% (destruction) if the Armor is gone as well. Making a thicc armor buffer, active reps or shield tank a good counter.

Explosive Damage Effect :

Most explosive damage charges are described as having some sort of nuclear warhead. These are causing shocks to ripple through the ship. Explosive charges are knocking tracking systems of balance, debuffing weapon tracking, range, fall off and general missile projection.

[Gerard_Amatin]

I’m not sure if this is a good idea.

Adding extra damage effects on top of weapon types, resistances and damage types might be a layer of complexity too many, especially when the current system works fine without those extra damage effects.

Extra damage effects will be really hard to balance, especially when certain weapon systems are locked to one or two damage types, which means you directly tie these special extra effects to those weapon systems.

Where currently certain damage types are less effective than others as result of target resistances, your suggestion will make such differences between effectiveness more extreme. I don’t think we need that.

Also, some of your effects are way too strong. Imagine using your version of kinetic damage against an armour fleet: your fleet will alpha all of their ships by ignoring armour before reps are able to land. While that is a valid strategy with bigger fleetsizes, your suggestion would make even smaller armour fleets easily deleted.

Next: what is the point of bringing specialised EWAR shipds or even modules, if you can just pewpew someone for a similar effect? Your suggestion makes damage modules compete with EWAR modules.

While I like the idea of more uniqueness between the damage types, I would suggest you keep the effects small and unrelated to other existing effects like energy warfare or other ewar.

I like the idea of thermal heating modules by the way.

[Luwc]

Thanks for the input.
I must admit I had the old mass effect titles at the back of my head (ME1 and to an extension 2) where different effects could be applied and even combined.

[Scoots_Choco]

The word “interesting” is already in the title, lol.