Star Citizen: Ship Battles V1

Ship Battles V1

Patch 4.1.1 brought Invictus Launch Week 2955. We developed a new set of mission archetypes featuring ship combat to celebrate.

I worked with the design team to create our four new mission archetypes: Patrol, Ambush, Gauntlet, and Hunt. I did the first pass implementation of these new missions to get our tech into proper shape. I continued on to fully implement Patrol, while serving a supporting role on Ambush, Gauntlet, and Hunt.

I worked closely with art and engineering to develop supporting content. Art designed a new type of mission location, the Asteroid Cluster Mining Base. Engineering worked to clean up the pipeline surrounding voiced mission dialog. Both of these featured heavily across our new set of missions.

I also did a pass on difficulty balancing for space combat missions in general. I came up with a better way to label and organize our ship data, which fed into a new system I developed to dynamically pick more interesting groups of ships.

Patrol

Patrol missions take the player through a series of patrol points. One of five random events featuring ship combat happens at each point. Patrol was built modularly so that additional random events can be fed into the system as future content is developed.

Ambush

Ambush missions take the player to a location where they must hide their ship and perform a surprise attack on the enemies. Players can hide their ships in emission zones to aid their attack.

Gauntlet

Gilly's Advanced Combat Gauntlet Missions set the player against a defined set of enemy ships. These missions are intended for players who know how to fly, but want to learn how to engage in combat.

Hunt

Hunt the Polaris pits players against a very large force which includes a capital class ship. A Polaris has been stolen by an enemy faction, and players must work across their server to take it down. This is a server wide mission intended for large groups of players.

Inside Star Citizen

I made an appearance on the show "Inside Star Citizen". You can find me sprinkled throughout the following video as I discuss Patrol missions.

Mission Compossible

Space Encounter Balancing

Each ship in Star Citizen has a set of tags attached to it. Designers can query these tags to generate a randomized group of ships for an encounter.

 

Here is the original set of tags we used to define combat encounters:

This was a good starting point, but there were three major issues I wanted to address in this content drop:

 

Problem 1: Non-combat ships can spawn in as combatants. They are boring to fight against because they often come with very high armor values and no weapons.

 

Problem 2: Most of the higher difficulty ships are Gunship class or larger. This can lead to weird encounter compositions when requesting multiple Very Hard or Super difficulty ships.

 

Problem 3: Several newer ships were never tagged up with any combat class at all, which means they are missing from the combat pool.

 

I decided to solve these problems by adding an additional set of tags to the existing CombatClass tags:

We identified that groups comprised of one larger central ship, protected by an assortment of smaller fighters performed best in combat. This new set of tags allows us to randomly generate a group of ships that fits within our target parameters.

 

This is the set of tag searches we used for most of space combat:

Here is a modified set we used specifically for Support Attacked Ship. This encounter is special because the player must protect a disabled ship from being destroyed, and spawning in anything Gunship class or higher caused an instant fail. So we swapped out all the troublesome ships and replaced them with a higher number of smaller ships.