Range Attenuation!

[Baron Munchausen]

Reducing damage by X percent is the Damper Field from MOO. I've asked MM to implement that many times.

Ok, I see what SJ was pointing out then. Yes, the damage that over-rides the EA rating doesn't get reduced but carries through 100 percent. This is the bug I was complaining about. If EA really absorbed the rated damage it would then make torpedos and other high-damage but low fire-rate weapons much more valuable again.

As for the topic drift, Tenryu, we're still on topic. I started the thread on the effects of range attenuation. Emissive Armor is deeply entwined with the issue of range attenuation. It was Emissive Armor that made torpedos really useful in SE III. Now that beam weapons are so strong in SE IV the torpedo is far less important...

[ July 01, 2002, 18:01: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[DirectorTsaarx]

As long as the other beam weapons suffer the same attenuation; ISTR that the APB was "beefed up" in one of the patches so the PPB wouldn't seem like such an uber-weapon.

What about the Meson BLaster? The point of that one is that the damage doesn't decrease at all over the full range - would that damage have to be decreased as well, or is it sufficiently lower than the torpedo damage? (Yeah, I could look up the numbers and form my own opinion, but I'm more interested in what everyone else thinks about it).

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, the Meson BLaster presents a challenge because it cannot be easily 'balanced' by Emissive Armor as it was in SE III. Mounts come along with light cruisers and throw the balance out. MM has got to do something to improve armor, and Emissive Armor in particular. I'd prefer that there be mounts FOR armor, which increase Emissive Ability in the same proportion as weapon power. We've been requesting it, and there have been some new extensions for mounts recently. We'll just see what happens...

Apparently the shorter range was supposed to be the new 'balancing disadvantage' for the MB. It used to be the longer range weapon in SE III. If the AI was smarter in combat and actually executed strategies like 'maximum weapons range' properly it might have worked. I don't think it does, though. We need armor fixed/improved.

[ July 02, 2002, 05:27: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Marvin Kosh]

I like the idea of Emissive Armour actually turning away some damage. Remember the Excalibur in the Crusade series? Deflects 90% of incoming weapons energy. I would give my right arm for a ship like that

And as for the Vorlon-enhanced main guns, well..... I think there's enough weapons already in the game that you could pick to represent those, except they don't have the after-effect of killing ship movement for the equivalent of a minute.

I think there should be additional tracks on the Chemistry tech tree to allow for new types of alloy which would either introduce new armour types, or enhance existing ones. For example, you could use a thinner armour that allows for more space inside the ship's hull, but provides the same protection as a much more primitive alloy. And costs more

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, it's easy enough to mod lots of new armors and tech trees to reach them. The problem is that you also have to create huge numbers of individual components for each variation in the tech tree. I hope that the new mounts will allow much cleaner tech variations in armor especially. The primary characteristic of armor is its 'size/damage ratio' after all. Mounts have been able to modify these characteristics all along. Now that you can restrict mounts to certain component families it will be possible to have a tech tree of stealth armor or emissive armor based on one set of components and have several researchable mounts to create the variations in size or size/damage ratio.

And I'd still like to see now abilities for armor. I just recently had a 'light bulb' go off about the 'skips armor' damage type, for example. Why should all armor be the same? If we had 'levels' of armor and armor skipping like we have cloaking and sensors we'd be able to create some really cool armors and weapons. So I emailed MM about possibly making 'armor 1', 'armor 2', 'armor 3', etc., and 'skips armor 1', 'skips armor 2', skips armor 3', etc...

Plain old armor like steel or titanium starts at '1' of course. Crystalline armor could start at 2 and go up from there. Other armors like 'neutronium' might be impenetrable with level 9 or something.

[ July 03, 2002, 23:53: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Marvin Kosh]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Other armors like 'neutronium' might be impenetrable with level 9 or something.

I was thinking about that actually.... if you had like, a superdense armour (like neutronium for example, you can't get much denser that that) maybe there should be a movement penalty.... even though it wouldn't need to be really thick, it would add a heckuva lot of mass

[Fyron]

The same should be done with Shields and Phased Shields.