Star Voyager Damage System

Recently I wrote a post about discovering a secret way to achieve near-instant victory in the notoriously difficult game Star Voyager for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I've been continuing my efforts at reverse engineering aspects of the game, and so far it's been rather enlightening in explaining quite a lot about why this game is so difficult. Today I'd like to talk about the damage system that the game uses.

Your Ship's Systems

Your ship has the following 5 systems:

1. Shields
2. Radar
3. Laser Cannons
4. Engine
5. Life Support System

Each of these systems can be damaged during combat with the enemy aliens. You can also take damage to these systems if you end up in an asteroid belt. When a system is damaged, it'll show on the Map screen on the lower left (unless it's the Life Support System). You'll also see the damaged section flashing on the image of your ship on the right. In this screenshot, everything appears fine...

Shields

Your Shields are your only means of defense outside of your piloting skills. You should immediately leave combat if your Shields are damaged, since they will become disabled. Suffice it to say that working Shields are supposed to negate 50% of the incoming damage completely. That's a good enough reason to leave and live to fight another day when they aren't available. (We'll skip other details about shields for now.)

Radar

The Radar uses the right display of the cockpit to show contacts behind you, and it draws a reticle on your HUD for forward contacts. You are well able to pick off motherships and fighters that aren't even rendering by using this forward marking system.

Laser Cannons

The Laser Cannons are your main means of engaging in combat. Once your Laser Cannons are damaged, they cannot fire. It's time to go get repaired.

Engine

The Engine will operate sluggishly once damaged. In my experience, you can maintain combat status with a damaged Engine. You'll probably want to do this if you're down to the last enemy fighters of an enemy unit with a dead mothership. Otherwise, the enemy you were fighting will regenerate to full health after you warp out, and that isn't fun.

Life Support System

The Life Support System will deteriorate over time once damaged. You do NOT have a lot of time to do much of anything except find a station and repair. Otherwise, the Life Support System is a passive system that does nothing while operational other than helping you breathe.

Damage and Repairs

Your Shields, Radar, and Laser Cannons do not operate once they are considered damaged. As noted above, Engines and Life Support will continue to operate, although you have limited time to repair the Life Support Systems.

You repair these systems by warping to a station and docking with it. All of the friendly stations can repair this damage completely, except for the Shields, Laser Cannons, and Life Support System. These three systems must be repaired at your Home Base Station. Your Home Base is easily distinguished in 3D from the other friendly stations by its bright blue color. It's located at coordinate (A,0).

The Hidden Damage Mechanic

Often it seemed to me that during a playthrough, the same systems would get damaged in the mid-to-late game. It felt like the enemies were targeting specific systems each playthrough, or perhaps my repair crews weren't doing such a good job fixing me up to get back into the fray.

Much to my surprise, this was partly true.

Incoming damage is processed a bit like this:

1. If Shields are on, use the Random Number Generator to drop 50% of all incoming damage (theoretically, at least).
2. For the damage that hasn't been dropped, use the Random Number Generator to obtain 1 number with 8 possible values.
3. If this randomized value is anywhere from 1 to 5 inclusive, then the damage goes to the specific system in that slot. For values outside of this range, congratulations -- the damage was absorbed by plot armor.
4. Invisible damage to systems is capped per system. Once the system meets its cap, the damage becomes visible. Your Shields will turn off, or your Engines will become sluggish, etc. etc.. This is the kind of damage your ship will report, and the kind that has immediate alerts and consequences.

(The bright side is that after step #4 occurs, damage calculated in step #3 for this slot is now ignored; you have extra plot armor until you repair or die.)

From here on, I'll refer to the invisible damage as Minor Damage and the visible damage (the kind that the game warns you about) as Major Damage.

Minor Damage Table

RNG Value	System Hit	Minor Damage Cap	Major Damage Result
0	N/A	N/A	N/A
1	Shields	5	Disabled
2	Laser Cannons	8	Disabled
3	Radar	5	Disabled
4	Life Support System	8	Disabled. Eventual death.
5	Engine	5	Sluggish
6	N/A	N/A	N/A
7	N/A	N/A	N/A

Repairing Minor Damage

All stations, both Home and friendly, repair only half of all your Minor Damage across every system per repair session. Interestingly enough, this means friendly stations can repair Minor Damage even for systems whose Major Damage they can't.

An Example of Minor Damage

Let's say that you got into a desperate combat and barely survived. You defeated an enemy, but he left you with Major Damage to both Shields and Engines. Your Minor Damage will be capped at 5 for both systems. Let's say you also, unknown to you, obtained 3 hits to your Radar, and 6 to your Laser Cannons, and 5 to your Life Support System.

You know that you can't repair Shields at a friendly station, so you warp to your Home Base and dock with it. This repairs the Shields and Engines. Now you think you're fine, but your ship is still worse for the experience.

System	Minor Damage Before Repair	... After Repair	Hits Left
Shields	5	2	3
Radar	3	1	4
Laser Cannons	6	3	5
Engine	5	2	3
Life Support System	5	2	6

You should be able to see the problem. You think you're fully repaired, but Your Shields and Engines are more susceptible to being damaged again, each requiring only 3 hits instead of the usual 5. Your Laser Cannons, one of the two strongest items in the game, are now just as weak as your Engines used to be when you started the game!

But It Seems Fine

Since Minor Damage is a hidden mechanic, another danger is that you may be inclined to run into multiple battles when you shouldn't. Consider what it would mean if, instead of taking any Major Damage, you took 4 hits to the Shields, 4 to Radar, 7 to your Laser Cannons, 4 to Engines, and 7 to Life Support. Yes, it's improbable, but the point is that you wouldn't see any damage for the time being. The moment you get into the next battle, however, everything on your ship might very well be falling apart!

Strategy

In terms of what Minor Damage means for strategy, you should seek to repair between battles, unless you know you didn't take any Minor Damage. To ballpark it, figure for every time the screen showed you getting hit, you took about half of that amount in Minor Damage spread out among your systems. If you know you got through combat without a scratch, great! If you have the fuel to spare as well, you can continue onward to fight another enemy.

If you took a lot of hits in combat, get to a repair station immediately. If you're going into a tough battle and already have some battle damage, visit two different repair stations. Also, keep in mind, if your Life Support or Laser Cannons have received Major Damage, it'll take four repair sessions to fully repair everything back to new. You may not have time for that.

Conclusion

Star Voyager only tells you about Major Damage, when a system either stops working or begins to work sluggishly. Hidden by the game implementation is what I call a Minor Damage bookkeeping system. Major Damage only occurs to a system once that system takes too much Minor Damage. Every time you dock and repair, only half of each system's Minor Damage is repaired, meaning your may be more likely to sustain Major Damage in subsequent battles unless you repair multiple times.

In my opinion, having a more complicated damage system made the game more interesting. Hiding this mechanic, however, I think may have been the mistake that made this game feel unfair and too difficult. Knowing about the Minor Damage system allows players to better strategize between getting repairs and saving time.