New Mod: The Art of War Mod

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by dumbluck:
A few questions from my to do list (Man, it just keeps getting longer and longer...)

quote:

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---Make planet glassing with normal weapons next to impossible.

Can anyone point me to some threads/mods that demonstrate how this is done? I vaguely recall that it involved increasing the damage to kill 1m population and increasing the damage of planetary weapons. But I'm looking for specific explanations/examples to study.

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Here is one. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...=001062#000014

Basically though you have the idea with your comment above. Raise the damage to kill one pop to a very high level. High enough that standard ship to ship weapons have little or no effect. That change alone will make glassing planets almost impossible. Since planetary shields, weapons plats and other untis on the planet are damaged before any damage is applied to population, they will still be susceptable to orbital bombardment as normal. Then if you want players to have an option to glass the planet with specialized weapons, you raise the damage levels of the neutron bomb accordingly, or create some other weapon with the population only damage type. I do not suggest rasing the damage of other planetary wepons like the Napalm, cause that would make them extremely powerful against the weapons platforms. That's not what you want I think. You want the ship V Waepons platform combat about the same, but make it more difficult to glass the population once the planetary defenses are gone. Corrrect?

Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

The leaky shields are achieved with the crystalline ability.
Given a large amount of crystalline ability points, shots impacting the ship will have on average 50% of their damage absorbed.
0% = shield skipping OR armor skipping damage
20% = Quad to shields damage
33% = Double to shields damage
50% = Normal
66% = Half to shields
80% = Quarter to shields.

In some cases, such as vs very low damage weapons, the absorption percent can be higher that that.

If you make the shield generators "armor", or have leaky armor, you can have the absorption percentage fall as the shields take damage, and the crystalline ability value becomes important.

[dumbluck]

Geo: Correct. Thanx.

SJ: Ummm... so what do you put the CA ability ON? The hull itself? Armor? Shield generators (that would have to have the armor tag as well, right?)? All of the above?

[Captain Kwok]

SJ never really explains how he comes up with those darn numbers.

Dumbluck:

You would give the ability to only the shield generators for leaky shields.

Leaky armor is created by getting rid of the armor's damaged first ability and reducing regular components structure size. That way, the armor is still most likely hit first, but not always.

[dumbluck]

Kwok: That sounds like a lot of work! It will most likely go at the bottom of the priority list, if it even makes it on to the list at all!

[Suicide Junkie]

The components by default have pretty good hitpoint values for a leaky armor mod.

All you really have to do is alter the armor.
Make armor 1 be 1kt, 20 hitpoints, armor 2 be 3kt 50 hitpoints, and armor 3 be 7kt 100 hitpoints.
And of course, remove the armor ability.

That'll give you a pretty good start. If you do the division, you will see that the higher level armors have fewer hitpoints, but during combat they will leak less often, and overall will be better.

For shields, try dividing their output by 10, their size by 4, and adding a crystalline ability with the same amount as their new shield generation amount. 20-30 physical hitpoints would be good for the leaky armor effect.

As for getting the % numbers, 50% = 1 shot hits the shields, 1 shot hits the armor, boosting shields back to their original strength. Overall every other shot hits, averaging 50%.
If the weapon does quarter to shields, you need to hit it 4 times to drop the shields that you created when you hit the hull. Five shots per cycle, 4 of which are blocked by the shields. 4/5 = 80%

[dumbluck]

Dormant, but not forgotten.