Space Combat Design Philosophy
What is this? (Overview)
This document covers the philosophy of Monolith space combat. When adding content pertaining to space combat, make sure it follows these principals.
In Monolith, most conflict takes place in the starry abyss of the Colossus sector between multiple hulking chunks of metal bristling with weapons, and these conflicts should feel like what they are - Artillery battles. To this end, space combat should take longer than ground combat, with ships that are durable and capable of dealing lots of damage in turn.
General Space Combat Balance Guidelines
The golden rule: Maintainers have final say over balancing. Content may be exempted from these guidelines at maintainer discretion, but these guidelines are intended to help a prospecting contributor know what we look for in terms of balancing.
#1. The goal of these guidelines is to make space combat feel fun - not too short, and not too drawn out. Instant-kills and excessively lengthy engagements are to be avoided as much as possible. The ideal engagement time for space combat should be 2-5 minutes long, though this is obviously not a hard requirement - battles should feel like they take a proper amount of time for what they are, which means they are highly circumstantial.
#2. In general, higher-tech (harder to access) gear should have more gimmicks and “feel” higher tech. Factions with different themes can escape from this general guideline (e.g low tech factions can have low-tech feeling weapons at high research, high tech factions can have more early gimmicks, etc). Gear should still follow sensible progression though.
Artillery
Artillery is the main way vessels deal damage to each other, and is composed of many types of weapons - from WWII-esque chemical artillery, to futuristic lasers and railguns, to modern cruise missiles, “artillery” encompasses many things.
- Most artillery should deal a balanced amount of damage in regards to their constraints. A main battle cannon should have a long range and do a lot of damage if it hits, but it should take a while to reload, while a PD weapon should have a short range and consistent damage output.
- Missile-type and sufficiently heavy weapons (like spinal mounts) should require ammunition to function. Other weapons should not have ammunition as a hard requirement, but should accept custom ammo to change their combat niche.
- Ships should use artillery matching their theme - High-tech ships should prioritize using high-tech weapons, and vice versa for low tech bricks.
Ammunition
Artillery should be able to have their combat niches changed with special ammo. For some strong weapons, they may require ammo to function at all.
- Special ammo should have unique gimmicks - Ammunition that just buffs the projectile’s damage is boring and not a good special ammo.
- Special ammo should also abide to general guideline #2 - They should require some amount of effort to acquire in relation to how exotic their assosciated gimmick(s) is.
Armor
Armor balancing for vessels is much simpler than ground combat armor, and refers to the walls that make up a vessel’s outer shell.
- Hull should be durable to tank artillery shells, but still be able to be breached by a player with proper breaching tools, such as C4.
- Moreso a mapping guideline, but armor should have three different “tiers” - Reinforced, Plastitanium, and Reinforced Plastitanium, the former having lower health and the latter being much more durable. These should be used tactically to create dedicated weakpoints and strongpoints - ships should not be universally covered in the best armor without some other downside.