A thought on killing planets

[Daynarr]

quote:

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But back to ground attack. There can NOT be a special target type of "WP" because WPs do not appear in combat. They are an attribute of a planet, and can only be hit by firing on the planet. What you don't seem to understand is that damage to WPs is NORMAL. Unaltered by any modifiers. Damage to population is affected by the "damage to kill one population" setting in the settings.txt file. If you crank this setting WAY up, to 100 to 1 or so, it becomes nearly impossible to 'glass' a planet as the phrase goes. So, if you then create a special power for weapons to CANCEL this ratio you have a weapon that will do more damage to POPULATION specifically than any other sort of weapon. 100 times more. Yet, it doesn't have an ACTUAL damage level 100 times higher than other weapons and so cannot be used to smoke planetary defenses as the current Planetary Napalm can be used. This creates the need for realistic specialization. You need standard combat ships to take on the planetary defenses, but then you need a dedicated bombardment ship to take out the widely distributed population and industrial complexes.

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You are quite right about WP. They ARE treated as ability on the planet (actually all cargo on planet is treated the same, only WP get to shoot back). The way I see it work is that they are some sorts of shield for the planet - they take all the damage first, and when all of them (and all other cargo) are gone, the planet population is starting to take the damage. Also, the damage vs WP is calculated diferently than the damage vs planet. Since the Weapon Platform (or cargo) is treated as ability on the planet like a shield on a ship, perhaps it would be a good idea to add new damage ability. I have considered 2 types of ability that would do the trick:

1) Weapon will do half or no damage against cargo on planet, like a quad damage to shields, but in this case no damage to WP. This ability would be used on planetary weapons only and would make them much less effective against the WP.

2) Also, it may be possible to add some sort of ability that will bypass WP (like a shield skipping weapon). I believe that the 'WP skipping' ability would be much easier to use for AI since it will just have to approach the planet with his bomber ship and bomb it. If however 'No WP damage' ability is used AI would have to wait with bomber until all WP on planet are destroyed by other ships and only then attack the planet (in short, it would require better fleet coordination for AI).

Of course this alone would not solve the problem of beam weapons doing too much damage to planetary population but I think your suggestion of raising the damage needed to kill one population in settings file would work just fine. However, I have been using 50 points damage for a while now and have seen some glitch that needs to be fixed in order for this to work properly. This is the glitch - when weapon that makes less damage than necessary to kill one population on planet fires on the planet, the damage gets rounded up to the amount necessary to kill one population. For example: If the damage needed to kill one population is 50 and I fire a DUC V on a planet (it does 40 points of damage) that damage gets rounded up to 50 points and you kill one population with that shot. That allows all weapons to kill 1 population with 1 shot no matter how high the damage needed to kill one population is specified in settings.txt file. The weapons that don't do enough damage to planet to kill one population with one shot should not be doing any damage at all to planet. If that is fixed, we would be able to specify how powerful a weapon has to be in order to kill population. For example: if we set the damage to kill one population to 100, all weapons that do less then 100 would be ineffective against the population. That would allow us to make normal beam weapons ineffective against the planet, if we want to, just by changing setting.txt file.

Actually, adding both new ability against Weapon Platforms (or cargo) and fixing that damage 'round up' could fix the problem.

Man, this is a long post.

[This message has been edited by Daynarr (edited 21 January 2001).]