Zarel wrote:3drts wrote:Consider 1 cannon that does 150 damage every 5 seconds, and another cannon that does 55 damage every 2.5 seconds.
Mount them both on the same tank chassis (lets give that chassis 150, 250, or 300 hitpoints), the 150 damage tank dominates.
Now have the opposition be a force of more numerous light vehicles/infantry/zerglings/whatever, all with 55 hp or less.
This requires a significant number of units to have 55 HP or less, which doesn't make for a very fun game if units die so quickly. Battles would be over too quickly to be fun
Well, few games have weapons that do 150 damage in one shot, if they have units with only 60 hp. Such weapons are all special attacks (SC yamato cannon- 260 damage, marines 40 hp, zerglings 35)
Consider one cannon doing 50 damage every 4 seconds, and one gun doing 10 damage every second.
The 50/4 has 20% more firepower. Now Imagine a group of units with 60 hp.
The 50/4 sec unit takes 8 seconds to kill each one(2 reloads per enemy), the 10/sec takes only 6.
(for the very first unit, it will be 4 and 5 seconds respectively, as the first shot is already loaded)
The heavier cannon takes 33% longer to kill the small unit, despite having a 20% higher firepower rating.
These won't kill units much faster than siege tanks already kill marines or zerglings in starcraft, and would be on units you have fewer of. Starcraft has its share of units that go kaput easily.
Now lets say both these weapons are fired at an enemy armored vehicle with 150 HP (like the SC seige tank), and say.... 3 armor.
The 50/4 weapon does 46 damage per shot, 4 shots are needed, for 12 seconds to kill 1v1 (first shot, then 3 reloads).
16 seconds for each one thereafter.
The 10/1 weapon does 7 damage per shot, 22 shots are needed, for 21 seconds to kill the first, 22 seconds for each one thereafter.
22/16= 37.5 % more effective against the 150 hp, 3 armor, chassis units.
Now, without using arbitrary damage modifiers, we have a two weapons with different purposes. One weapon is 33 % more effective against low HP targets than the other, despite the other having 20% more firepower (and this 20% is realized when enemies have HP with multiples of 50, and no armor).
When some armor is added, the balance falls even more in favor of the heavy, slow firing cannon (within certain thresholds, adding 1 armor will still require the same amount of "additional shots" from the slow firing cannon as 3 armor, for units that take less than about 15 shots to kill, so a 50 hp 1 armor unit, is still killed easier by the rapid fire gun, despite having armor, as the rapid fire cannon now needs 6 shots for 6 seconds, the slow firing cannon now needs 2, for 8 seconds - there is a range where armor values just make them resistant to rapid fire weapons, without favoring the heavy hitting slow firing weapons).
And of course, there are concepts like splash damage that also make some weapons more suitable against smaller more numerous targets (particularly if the splash is applied against armor first).
I don't have a problem with weapons that can "one shot" other units, RTS's involve many units, and two units that can "two shot" a unit have the same effect as 1 unit that can one shot.
Lots of units in HW could be "one shotted" by other units - pretty much anytime an ion beam came into contact with a fighter, it exploded, I think the same went for corvettes (if not from a single ion beam contact, then from the full weapon complement of a heavy cruiser or destroyer with their turreted ion beams that could keep the beams on target without turning the whole ship)
Then there are other aspects of balance, particularly evident with space RTS's that have capital ships, where even with many, many units cannot one shot the enemy- if the capital is equally effective in terms of aggregate firepower and armor, as the swarm facing it, as the battle goes on, enemy firepower decreases, and the capital wins decisively. So you can balance this with added firepower for the small units, and added speed, making them tactically more flexible.
Capitals in HW were just generally too slow to be used as resource raiders/defenders, or if hyperspace jumping was used, they were too expensive.
Give the fighters a speed, and firepower per RU advantage, and they may still lose to capitals, but are the best option for killing weak targets quickly, and leaving before help arrives.
If you accept "one shotting" then you can really achieve different roles for units without arbitrary modifiers.
Consider a 1,000 damage, 10 second reload weapon, vs a 40 damage, 1 second reload weapon.
Now put them both up against 110 hp enemies,
One weapon kills every 3 seconds, the other every 10......
And obviously the unit with the 1000 damage weapon is priced higher than the 50 damage weapon, and would likely come on units with more HP than those with the 50 damage weapons.
Then you can easily have a 3 tier balance system...
Without putting much effort into it (as I said, its harder to do balancing without modifiers well)
30-150 hp units, with rapid firing 5-25 damage weapons, cheap..... and countered by
500-1000 hp units with 30-60 damage, rapid fire weapons, moderate cost.... countered by
1000+ hp units, with 1000+ damage slow firing weapons, expensive.
Rather than damage modifier co-efficients, you end up with "overkill co-efficients"
Basically, how much damage is wasted by the killing shot being overkill, compared to the total HP of the unit.
One can get the highest co-efficients with 1 shot kill weapons (arbitrarily close to 1.0, as in a 1 hp unit, and a 9,999,999,999 damage weapon)
With 2 shot kill weapons, this can get arbitrarily close to 0.5 (5,000,001 HP unit, against a 5,000,000 damage weapon)
With 3 shot kill weapons, this can get arbitrarily close to 0.3333
4 shot.... close to 0.25
And so on.....
The problem is this sort of balance is much more complex and varied, and harder to do.
A high damage low ROF weapon high generally have a high overkill co-efficient against low HP units, but that co-efficient is different depending on the exact strength of the enemy unit.
The balance/overkill factor also changes with upgrades (occasionally, these upgrades will cause thresholds to be reached which alter balance).
Thus I understand why it is generally not done. But when a game manages to pull it off, I give them kudos.
There was a reason HW heavy corvettes had higher damage, slower firing weapons than the multigun corvettes, and also a reason that multigun corvettes didn't always focus fire on the same target. The heavy corvettes, while still being a fighter counter, were also intended as an anti-corvette ship type as well. Multigun corvettes were even more effective against fighters, but lost to heavy corvettes.
Of course, the multi's were also much faster than the heavies, allowing them to intercept fighters much better (the multi's nearly being able to keep up with attack bombers).
*edited to remove long discussion about tactics and balance specifics of HW*