IMO, weapon systems should be procedurally generated, too. A bit of Borderlands in Space. A reason to explore and find a better pew pew laser.
Actually, there's a first-before-first thing. =)
Limited Ammo
With lasers and possibly missiles in the game, a wide array of weapons would turn into a nightmare of ammo micromanagement.
I suggest to ditch it. One value for "ammuniton" and the ship is set. Doesn't matter if it's using space shotguns or ICBMs.
With one value, this can be a strategy game where a supply ship can supply a fleet. All the stupid details of how many bullets of which caliber - that's what the admiral delegates.
A ship's ammo magazine would then be a factor in ship creation. A missile frigate with a small magazine could be devastating - but useless in a long engagement. A larger magazine would mean not being able to include other things...
The core meaning of ammo would be fully present: it would be limited. The micromanagement of it can go die in a fire.
Now first things first. To PG weapons you gotta start with properties, not numbers.
Candidates are
- DPS (different vs shields and hull?)
- Range
- Bullet speed (there is an almost linear relationship to accuracy - within sensible values)
- Energy efficiency ( = EnergyPerSecond / DPS )
How much energy I have to spend to cause x points of damage... - Ammo efficiency ( = AmmoPerSecond / DPS )
...if any - Instead of using ammo, some or all energy-based lasers can overheat, lowering the rate of fire with increasing levels of heat.
Could be a generic value of the ship, not of each individual laser. That way a huge ship could keep firing a tiny pew pew laser all day long.
Also would create the possibility of installing heat sinks. Getting rid of heat is a major issue in space and radiating heat makes you an excellent target and visible at very long range. - Accuracy!
How many degrees is the max deviation of the shot.
Often overlooked but a major issue in a 3D game with real collision detection. - Multi shot.
The space shotgun. Hitting moving targets is difficult and in an anti-fighter / point defense role, this would come in handy.
Should carry an automatic malus to accuracy to make it less effective as a "sniper gun".
DPS can basically stay as-is, divided between the projectiles, of course.
One would expect this with smaller lasers but there's no telling if some alien race might consider it a great idea to build a Big Bertha sized shotgun.
There is no practical difference between this and a high-ROF gun with low accuracy but it's a well-worn trope. =) - Rate of fire. This is mostly for looks and should (with a hefty dose of randomness) scale with DPS.
Basically this is just the factor which translates DPS and EPS into per-shot values.
Important stat to scale the number of projectiles in the air and therefore the amount of CPU power eaten by collision detection. - Turret range of movement.
There is no rule stating that every turret must be able to cover an entire 180° sphere.
If the tracking angle of Flak turrets were more limited, you would either have to waste a lot of space on Flak or accept that you don't have perfect coverage. - Tracking speed.
If your turret turns at snail-speed, you're not going to be hitting a maneuvering fighter at close range. - Continuous beam capital ship lasers 1
Another use of "tracking speed":
A continuous beam is fired at the enemy ship but the beam is locked in position while it is firing. While you might brush a fighter, it's going to leave the "static" beam quickly.
The only way for this weapon to be effective is to fire it at something big, where such a non-tracking beam stays on target for most of it's duration.
This could be amplified by the beam power ramping up to max so that it starts at maybe 20% damage and only reaches 100% damage output after 3-5 seconds.
Even if it has great bullet speed, it would be just about useless against fighters. - Continuous beam capital ship lasers 2 + FAO (Forward Artillery Observer)
The laser takes a long time to charge up. Then it fires for maybe 10 seconds. While it fires it cannot follow the target, making it hit & miss.
The range of this laser would be very very long so capital ships could have real long range duels.
The twist:
If a friendly is "laser designating" a target for the capital ship, the capital ship laser does move while firing. It slowly "walks it's fire" towards the designated target area.
If the FAO is forced to maneuver radically (evade fire), the link is lost. No more corrected fire. - Special effects.
Certain "bullets" could affect the target ship in creative ways.
- Lock controls completely or accumulate a reduction in maneuverability.
Any single hit may reduce maneuverability by 10%, which declines over 10 seconds or so.
Consecutive hits increase that to maybe 50% with diminishing returns because the higher the %, the faster the decay. - Shield piercing. Some or all damage is going straight through to the target's hull.
- Critical hit
% chance to disable a subsystem - Plasma warhead
The plasma cools with distance traveled so the damage declines with range.
Similar damage model to the space shotgun but as a single bullet so probably useful for small ships to attack a capital ship at knife range. - Area damage
Everything within x meters is taking damage - which could scale with distance.
Heavy explosives / warheads like that should probably reduce bullet speed.
Avoid damage models that are based on interaction of a damage area with the ship model, leading to ^3 exponential damage increases. It's not going to work. - Beacon
Getting hit by something heat-inducing like laser or plasma creates a hotspot on the target, making it more visible.
It can be targeted by missiles or other ships more quickly and at greater range. - Sensor degrading
A residual plasma cloud (or other AOE) temporarily weakens the sensors of the target. - Ricochet
A projectile on "final approach" to the target ignites a penetrating charge, blasting the penetrator directly towards the target. If possible, it orients itself so that the shell can also hit a nearby hostile target. Waste not, want not!
For all practical purposes, this happens on impact. - Miniaturised sensors
The bullet contains a tiny sensor unit that transmits data back to the ship, increasing sensor "penetration" along it's path.
Obviously this only makes sense with long range bullets but it could allow "targeted" fire beyond the ship's own sensor range and without requiring an FAO.
- Lock controls completely or accumulate a reduction in maneuverability.
- Cost of using in ship construction.
Can be raw materials / monetary cost and something like internal size or structure points to limit the total power of a ship. - Guidance System.
- RADAR guided.
Best acquisition range.
At long range, can target the wrong blip if several similar ships are close together. - Optically guided.
Operator-induced reaction delay in acquiring targets.
Operator-induced "inertia". Turret may briefly continue it's movement before reacting to a target course change starting to track the target lead point again. - Artillery spotter.
If the gun can shoot beyond the ship's sensor range (we're thinking big 'round here!), and the ship uses second hand information from another ship, accuracy is severely degraded.
- RADAR guided.
- Guns "zero in" on a target.
The accuracy of a gun somewhat increases while the gun keeps firing. You can't just "aim carefully", then fire.
Speed of accuracy increase depends on how much of it's maximum traversing speed the turret is currently using.
If the gun stops firing, any such bonus is lost. (like when the magazine runs dry) Probably modeled by a constant decay that the increase must overcome.
Since the bonus is generated by firing, the turrets traversing to a new target carries no penalty from the maximum traversing speed. Only the traversing speed to "keep tracking" is relevant.
A capital ship "staying level" will be firing with higher accuracy... at the cost of not evading incoming fire.
Any such bonuses are temporary, limited by magazine size, so they don't become a permanent ability of a ship.
Capital ship guns can be inaccurate. They can have long ranges of maybe 20 km and still miss wildly at 10 km.
That makes Big Guns quite useless at knife range and against small targets, where they would have to traverse at their maximum speed to even stay on target... so they wouldn't be able to build up much of an aiming bonus.
At long range, where capital ships are motionless for all practical purposes, the long range batteries would come into their own.
Long range guns would have a bigger (potential) aiming bonus because for fast-tracking guns, it would turn into a nearly permanent bonus.
However, it would be a useful mechanic to have for anti-fighter guns. A fighter just shouldn't stop moving. Ever.
In most games you just fire as energy is available. With this system, reloading would be an actual consideration.
If you want to get the full effect out of a salvo, it is best to fire a full magazine.
Alternative / implementation:
With manually targeted weapons (like your ship's main battery) there could be brackets on the HUD that close in as the aiming bonus increases. Direct feedback on how you should be flying. No need for lengthy explanations when the system is immediately intuitive.
(it would still only increase with every shot, scaled to offset ROF-differences)
A weapon is simply called a "missile" if it has the "homing" property. Other than that there is no conceptual difference.
I created a Missiles thread earlier but it would be less useful for generic / PG implementation.
- Homing
While technologically it's complete BS (requires more technobabble =), I would suggest using missile technology of around 1950-1960.
Think Sparrow and Sidewinder - sprinkled with a few expensive "advanced" IFF / fire&forget missiles.
The reason is that you can simply get more gameplay out of these not-so-great early missiles.
You can make them powerful because it requires some effort - or risk - to get them to the target.
- Implies a value for turning rate. (thank you, Captain Obvious!)
- Automatically adds a considerable ammo cost.
- Heat seekers. If a ship is "running hot" from using a lot of energy lasers, a heat seeker would gain a target lock in record time and hardly lose it to countermeasures.
While simple in principle, heat seekers could become more useful as the battle progresses.
A clear departure from the usual static missile stats system. - Early RADAR guided missiles didn't have their own RADAR but required the plane to illuminate the target with the RADAR in it's nose, seriously limiting it's maneuvers.
The obvious advantage is that these missiles were passively homing. They didn't emit. Back then this didn't make much of a difference but it's something to keep in mind. - More modern HARM use a similar concept to home in on someone else's RADAR signal.
Shut down your active sensors and they don't see you any more.
(close enough for gameplay purposes - in reality it's a bit more complex) - Active (RADAR) homing. Think AMRAAM.
Your staple long range fire & forget missile. - Image Recognition. In Wing Commander these were the cool ones. Never lose track because they home in on a particular ship... type.
- IFF. Locks on any hostile or any non-friendly IFF signal.
Just make sure you don't have friendlies with a damaged IFF transponder. - "Wire guided".
Player manually controls the missile. Quite situational but who knows...
- Continuous acceleration.
These would be classic kinetic energy weapons that cause damage through their kinetic impact. The more they accelerate, the more they go boom.
Not so great at knife range where they hit like wet noodles. - MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle)
Horribly implemented in X3 because the engine was never trained to deal with it. Any weapon without counter is a terrible concept.
What could work is that at a range of x the missile fragments into y unguided warheads - using the shotgun mechanics from above.
Unlike with lasers this should come at a considerable total DPS penalty because guided delivery negates a great deal of the accuracy issue. - Terminally guided 1.
Some sort of scout fills the role of a Forward Artillery Observer.
Very long range missiles are fire by a far away capital ship towards that scout, way beyond the range at which the capital ship can even see the target.
Once the missiles get close to the scout, control is handed over to the scout who assigns targets for the swarm of missiles. - Terminally guided 2.
Alternatively, forward scouts can fire missiles with homing beacons at a capital ship, allowing long-range bombardment missiles to accurately hit a target.
This way is probably much easier to implement because the AI wouldn't have to make a good guess about a future situation.
Also provides more gameplay possibilities because once such a homing beacon is attached, the capital ship's buddies / fighters could attempt to take it out before the missiles arrive.
Very good motivation for having your own fighters around.
With procedural generation, a weapon can be "rolled" by picking random values for all of these values within a considerable range.
This results in a weapon of completely uncontrolled power.
Each individual weapon stat then has a point cost attached.
The points are added up and the resulting total is compared to the desired power level of the weapon system.
Every weapon stat is scaled by this factor and you have a genuinely random weapon of the desired power.
The point cost of each property is a matter of balancing.
Big can of worms and a premium candidate for distinct values to externalise to some text file. I guarantee lots of "weapon mods", "balancing mods", and whathaveyou, without the issues that come with "real" modding. =)
The desired power level would be another obvious balancing factor. Increase it and the game gets a lot more deadly.