Tired of not having room on those escorts? =)

[Worgaus]

Unfortunately I between work and everything else, I haven't found the time to test this out. I'll probably be able to sometime this weekend. What time I do have I've been spending trying to figure out why the components I'm trying to add aren't showing up.

As far as how much damage light weapon mounts should do, my view of it is, if 2 of them do more damage then the next level up, then it really defeats the purpose of that type of mount. In all fairness, the damage of 2 light mount weapons should be less then a single normal mount. The only problem is, if you reduce damage too much, you can drag battles out interminably. So I think 50% is pretty safe to go with for balance purposes.

[This message has been edited by Worgaus (edited 22 December 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Worgaus (edited 22 December 2000).]

[Courageous]

One idea would be to have larger weapon mounts have increasingly higher difficulty targeting smaller ships. For example, a "spinal" weapon mount might do enormous amounts of damage, but be very poor at targeting escorts and destroyers, and be utterly incapable of targeting fighters and satellites.

C//

[Daynarr]

I was thinking about the same thing. In MOO2 player could only shoot ships and planets with large mounts. If you give negative chances to hit with those mounts in SE4 you can make fighters almost impossible to hit by large mounts.

However, I dropped the idea when I remembered that AI uses mostly maximum size ships and maximum mounts on them. It would make human fighters even more deadly against them.

[This message has been edited by Daynarr (edited 22 December 2000).]

[Tomgs]

One quick solution to that is to require the AI to put a few more point defence on their ships. That would take care of the satelites and fighters. Heavy mount weapons and point defence its a lot like MOO2 designs then. Now all we need are MIRVed missles to overwelm the point defences.

[Courageous]

Yeah; I'm with that idea. Perhaps it's just me, but as it is right now, the PD weapons make missile technology a dead end. For that matter, PD ought to be a mount, IMO. This is sounding more and more like MOO2 all the time.

BTW, am I the only one who really likes Null Space weapons?

C//

[Baron Munchausen]

You know, this discussion of "small" mounts reminds me of something. Wouldn't it be nice to have a "minimum size" restriction for all components? As it is, you can only set the requirement for mounts, not for the component as a whole. Maybe the "Capital Ship Missile" should not be mountable in a destroyer at all? Maybe the "Null-space" weapon should not be mountable in anything smaller than a cruiser? Things like that. There are such things in RL as recoil effects (with projectile weapons) or reasonable balance/maneuvering tolerances fo the ship carrying the weapons.

[Baron Munchausen]

The "to hit bonus" for Point-defense weapons is set in the components along with all the other standard weapon characteristics. It's called "Weapon Modifier" and for point-defense cannons it's:

Weapon Modifier := 50

Fifty percent boost cancels the fifty percent loss at a range of five (the PDC max range at it's final level). So, it still has 100 percent accuracy (discounting ECM or any bonuses that a seeker or fighter might have) at maximum range! Might be an interesting experiment to remove it, and see if this considerable loss of accuracy restores more "balance" to the effects of point-defense. Remember, it DOES still get the benefit of any combat sensors or crew bonus that your ship has, anyway.