SE V: Unique Abilities And Ideas

President_Elect_Shang · #1 December 18th, 2006, 03:42 AM

I haven�t seen it yet Phonix-D. Then again as SJ pointed out (man am I glad I read all the new posts first) the AI is only as smart as the modder who tells it how to build those designs. For me I just find the hole in the design and build ships to deal with it. Then you are right back to an optimal middle of the road design. Sorry Phoenix-D but I�m not buying it till I see it. �It� being an AI that can recognize the flaw in my middle of the road design and adjust its designs to counter and exploit that flaw.

SJ at a -999% chance to hit I�m not seeing how you are calculating such good odds for the P-D to hit. Can you drop your formula here? I might try the CBMod again when it comes out for SE5.

Maybe I should dust off SE4 and try a MP game after all� MP experience allowed Kana to point out a flaw in one of my component ideas and I haven�t even finished the TC yet! Or maybe when I get far enough I can do a MP to track errors in the TC!

Phoenix-D · #2 December 18th, 2006, 03:54 AM

The odds are good because the fire a lot. At 50 fire rate you get 20 shots a second. That means even with a -999 hit chance you still get an average of one hit every 2 seconds.

I see a few problems, though:

-In Starfury, very fast projectiles had a tendency to randomly explode before hitting. This might have carried over to SE5.
-SE5 might not calculate very low hit possibilities correctly

Suicide Junkie · #3 December 18th, 2006, 07:43 AM

-999% should still equal 1% minimum.

The chance of scoring no hits at all in a volley of 50 shots is (0.99^50) = 0.605 Therefore the chance of scoring one or more hits is 39.5%.

The Poisson distribution will quickly find the value for exactly 1 hit, the probability of two or more hits is equal to the probability of one or more hits, minus the probability of exactly one hit.
Recursively, that finds all the probabilities I quoted.

President_Elect_Shang · #4 December 18th, 2006, 10:26 AM

I�ll take your collective words for it especially since I am not a math type person. To me -999% is equal to -9.99 which multiplied by anything (but another negative) is still negative. If you are saying SE5 will force a round off to 1% because it won�t accept a negative number that large; than I will have to accept what you say as I certainly have no way of telling different without some type of testing. All I know about the way SE5 handles negatives now is that -90 (the largest negative I have used thus far) is calculated as a negative and not rounded off. Now why and more to the point what are you trying to make here? Leaky PD to me is PD which allows some missiles to get through and others are stopped cold turkey. As far as I know that is what is in the game now; it is certainly what I have created with my system for StarFire. It works fine on the fighters, shuttles, pinnace, IDW, and HAWK Pods I use and especially those large swarming missile (seekers) barrages. Let me stop and go back to my coffee! First cup-o-d-morning!

Suicide Junkie · #5 December 18th, 2006, 10:31 AM

Nono, after all the modifiers are added together (in this case, the -999% means that the result is ALWAYS negative), the game restricts the accuracy to the range of 1% to 99%.

Except in the case of SE4's talisman, which gives you 100% accuracy.
Even against planets, 1 in 100 shots will miss completely, but its fun to razz somebody over it anyways when playing hotseat

President_Elect_Shang · #6 December 18th, 2006, 11:09 AM

It does? Now that�s not so good, I have one weapon which falls into the negatives at >=220. No wait that is fine, if I follow you correctly this weapon will have a 1% chance to hit which is how it should be if the mounting unit can�t bring the negative to a positive. Good that actually puts one concern to rest. Now what is the difference between leaky PD and the current PD? Both appear the same except you are using volume to stop rounds, which might look cool on screen but as you pointed out all that flak flying may stress the system and have a negative impact. On older systems like mine that may mean the irritation factor would be high enough that I wouldn�t play a mod of this sort; depends on the actual impact.

Suicide Junkie · #7 December 18th, 2006, 12:43 PM

Uhm, I thought I spelled the main benefit out very clearly...
(Lots of people quoted the post in its entirety too)

One missile might (13% chance) get through a storm of 4 PD. One PD gun might clear a pack of three missiles (1.5% chance).

With stock PD, it (almost) always kills the first N missiles in a pack, where N is proportional to the number of PD guns. All the rest get through... no luck or chance involved.