Weapon's Balancing

[oZed]

I’ve come to a point where i have to go and start balancing all the new weapons that i have introduced into my mod. I was hoping we could start this topic to discuss various methods of balancing that you have all used, in my view this is one of the most aspects of a mod and if not properly done can ruin the whole thing. I have discovered a couple thing that i have found through looking at the original weapons, mainly Missiles at the moment this is:

Smart/tracking missiles always do half the damage of the similar explosive missile (of the same class)

EMP missiles always do one 30th (1/30) of the hull damage of their similar explosive missile (same class)

EMP missiles always do 2.7 times the energy damage of their similar explosive missile (or 1.35 of their hull)

Thats about it that I’ve found so far, i hope you all can share your techniques and finding that you have gain through creating your own mods

Ozed.

[FriendlyFire]

To be perfectly honest? Plug values that sound good to you (using mathematical formulae you figure out by yourself, everyone has their own favorite) and test test test test test.

The quality of your guess will only affect how long you will be testing, but if you test enough you’ll always end up with a working balance.

[Gisteron]

that’s right, creating weapons with new fx and names, that do the very same like vanilla keeps ofc every balance, but that is no real addition to freelancer. on the other hand, you can recreate the weapon system entirely after what it depends lonely on your thoughts and sensibility how balanced the mod becomes. in fact, if we look on vanilla servers in the past, everyone bought his eagle and captured some nomad weapons (or artifact weaps), so conclusively, vanilla balance is also not the very best. again, on the other hand, we have mods like the 88flak, where the weapons are largely different, but there is no best weapon, as there are probably 3-4 types (of guns), each represented in every house multiply and likely in the border worlds, too. FriendlyFire is right, your testing, your personal feeling about what is the best relation of power and challenge results in the best balance at least for your personal opinion. having some modding team you could balance even better, as everyone could put in his thoughts about it.

[StarTrader]

I wasn’t happy with the original FL weapons, because I had increased hull hit points and shield capacity, so here’s what I have done after long thought…

First of all I decided on a scheme - damage range for each class, and what ships should carry what weapon classes.

For example:-

Class 1 = 500-1200 damage per second.
Class 2 = 800-2000 damage per second.
Class 3 = 1500-3000 damage per second.
Class 4 = 2000-4000 damage per second (my Mars flier only).
Class 5 = 3500-8000 damage per second.
Class 6 = 7500-12000 damage per second.
Class 7 = 11000-20000 damage per second.
Class 8 = Reserved for special weapons
Class 9 = Reserved for special weapons
Class 10 = Reserved for special weapons

For myself I limited the classes too:-
Class 1 and 2 weapons to my Fighters,
Class 2 and 3 to Heavy Fighters,
Class 4 for my Mars Flier only,
Class 5 for gunships,
Class 6 for small cruisers and destroyers,
Class 7 for battleships, dreadnoughts and large/heavy cruisers. Class 8-10 are reserved for my Unique Special Weapons.

This is done very easily, by removing the unwanted classes from each ship’s hp_type entries in shiparch.ini. For the Mars Flier, it can only mount Class 4 weapons, and the class 4 weapons are all the Mars Flier weapons only. You can do similarly for the Class 8 to 10 weapons, having only those classes on the ship hp_type.

I wanted my weapons in the same class to do similar total damage per second, and weapons in my higher classes to do more damage than lower-class weapons.

To provide variety in weapon characteristics, I played a lot with the refire rates within the same class. As an example, one of my Class 1 weapons has a hull damage of only 30 but a refire rate of 20 per second, so the total damage is 600 per second. And another Class 1 weapon has a hull damage of 150 but a refire rate of 4, so the total damage is again 600. Choose your weapon!

My Class 5 weapons can knock out a fighter in one hit, with a hull damage of up to 8000, but the refire rate is slow, 0.5 seconds to 1 second. I have set it to 1 to 2 seconds for Class 6 with more than double the damage, and 2 to 4 seconds for the Class 7 weapons with 4-5 times the damage of the Class 5.

Here’s the easy way to set the weapon damage visibly…

1. I made a table in Excel (you can also use OpenOffiec Calc) showing each weapon’s energy and hull damage, and refire rate. I made calculated cells of (hull-damagerefire-rate) and (energy-damagerefire-rate) so that I can compare more easily the total damage of each weapon per second. You don’t have to do this, but my slower weapons do much more hull damage than the high-speed weapons. If you use TinyFish’s ini Editor you can copy the data in column format and paste directly into your spreadsheet.

2. I arranged the weapons spreadsheet in class order, and set the new total hull-damage and energy-damage per second by hand, to what I want for each weapon, in new cells to the right of the total damage cells for hull and energy.

3. Now, it is easy to set the hull or energy damage for each weapon with the formulae:
new-hull-damage=newtotalhulldamage/refire-rate
and
new-energy-damage=newtotalenergydamage/refire-rate

4. Then transfer these back into your weapon_equip.ini file. Remember you have to set the damage either into the [Munition] entry or into the [Explosion] entry for each weapon, be careful.

NOTE: Ensure that you sort the weapons in the spreadsheet back into the same order you copied them out of the weapon_equip.ini in the TinyFish Editor, or you will royally mess up your ini file! I usually make a “sequence number” in column B in the spreadsheet before copying the data into the spreadsheet, and enter the numbers 1 to xxx in it first, so I can resort it on that column easily. And then I paste the data from TinyFish into columns C onwards. Then to sort I select all the columns including B before sorting. Easy, but it takes a bit of practice.

Good luck.

[A Former User]

I think balance does not depend on increase in capacities.

Efficiency of weapons depends of target shield (if using shields in mod - graviton, proton, neutron - here on it it is possible to play

In additives it is possible to develop the types of guns and shields technolgies (“here and develop!”, you will tell

So imho need to balance only efficiency of guns

Sample file, credits Phil aka FireDragon