Damage Mod for Traffic

Damage Mod Addition

Adding destroyable subsystems is not planned until traffic, but I wanted to write down the main ideas now.

The purpose of the damage mod is to slow down autorepair and to not repair destroyed subsystems forcing the player to repair ships in some other way.

The behavior will be different from the Damage Mod coded by Flamineo.

It will work like this:

Subsystems have a number of hit points. They also have a percent of hit points where they stop working (typically 50%). This is coded into the Flux engine and controlled by the INI files.

Normal autorepair will repair hit points of damage to subsystems slowly bringing them back to full health. This is the behavior that we all experience in the standard game.

The Damage Mod will replace the autorepair system. It will also give back hit points to repair subsystems. However, if a subsystem has below 10% of hit points left, it will not repair the subsystem. The subsystem is considered “junked�.

Repairing junked subsystems requires a repair ship. The repair ship docks to the damaged ship and then conducts the repair. A repair ship deducts a “spare part� from the player’s inventory to “replace� the junked item. The hit points of the junked item will be returned to maximum and the damage mod will see it as repairable again. (Notice that this does not involve adding or removing subsystems from the ship. It just changes hit points. This makes it very simple to code, but the game play effect is the same).

These spares are sold as generic parts. They are cargo items, not actual ship systems. The reason is that AI ships may have many, many types with subtle differences, but we have a very limited inventory system.

The damage mod will be applied to all ships in the game. It will be possible to injure or destroy AI ship subsystems. This will allow new tactics against cruisers etc.

For those familiar with the current Damage Mod, some features will be removed. The concept of “containment� will be removed. The damage mod will no longer deduct items from inventory, the repair ship will handle that. The damage mod will not have a limited supply of repair points. It will repair systems until they are all “junked�. These changes drastically simplify and focus the damage mod.

Effort needed to implement these features.

First, a cargo type for each major kind of subsystem will need to be created and made available for sale. For instance PBC Parts, Beam Parts, CPU Parts, Reactor Parts, etc.

Second, code needs to be added to save the current damaged state of all ships in the game.

Third, repair ships need to be added as pog objects. And player hirable repair ship wingmen need to be created.

Fourth, the damage mod must be trimmed down in features to match this design.

All sounds really nice to me. I can probably help set up tasks 1 and 3 when the time comes. The rebalance we are currently using already slows down the repair speed dramatically (to about 20% of it's former speed), so we can probably use that after balancing it from beta testers and or Unstable Space itself.

Would we then integrate these generic parts into the economy as tradable items?

Also, this seems like it could lead to players being able to salvage systems off of incapacitated ships? And or repair abandoned ships by 'repairing' the junked systems?

I am not sure how they would be traded yet. Depends on how we are able to split equipment from cargo.

I was thinking that we would add the Junkyard station into the cluster as a supported station type. A player could buy discounted spare parts at that station. And that is where the player could sell battle scrap. The junk yard would launch Salvage Operations that would wander around cleaning up the system of scrap. Systems without junkyards would slowly pile up wrecks.

Rather than salvage systems, I think the player might be able to salvage these spare parts. That would make them valuable, but you wouldn't end up with 100 PBC cannons in inventory. Instead you would end up with repair parts for 100 cannons. We could essentially have the Repair Ship work in reverse. If you dock to a ship, you can Strip the ship. It reduces the subsystem to 10% hit points and generates a spare part. For this to work, we would need to have rules about when ships are abandond (say after reactor is junked). At that point, the crew launches life pods and the ship faction turns to Empty. Ships with Empty faction can be salvaged.

You could use a boarding party to take over a ship and then scrap it. We would have to consider how that might work.

It opens up some other gameplay options with Fleet Operations. We could record some combat damage as "need repair". These ships can be saved if someone repairs the ships. And the player could do it, for a handsome fee. We might even consider making certain types of the player ship have this ability. For instance, the Tug might be able to do repairs. That could be one reason that it is used so much in the cluster.

If the parts trade as standard items, then player pirates could steal them, which would be pretty cool.

I imagined a salvage ship as essentially a repair ship in reverse as well. You could also say for salvaging, only systems that are 90% undamaged, or someother high number, are able to be salvaged as working parts. Though your idea of turning them into parts rather than actual systems seems good.

So this means the only difference between a system at 10% and one at 0% is the 0% one can't be repaired by any means short of full replacement, correct..?