beamdefence calculations bug?!

Suggest or Vote on new features here.

BeamDefence is only calculated by combatspeed. Is it okay for u ?

No. We should find a solution to fix it.
6
40%
Yes, it works fine to me, like it is now.
8
53%
Not sure.
1
7%
 
Total votes: 15

Jaded Tortoise
Posts:10
Joined:Thu Feb 09, 2006 5:11 am
Location:New Mexico

Postby Jaded Tortoise » Fri Feb 10, 2006 4:58 am

First off I agree there should be a bonus for small and penalty for large ships.

However your figure for difficulty is totally off.

ok a frigate has 25 space this is most likely in a 3x3x2.66 through 6.25x2x2 area obviously I can't give exact figures due to change of ship hull shape, and there highly irregular surfaces.
Now this gives a area from a distance of from 4-12 units in size of which you can hit depending on ship facing with an average of about 9 though if the ship is far longer than wide it would give nearer the 4.

now a doomstar has 1200 space this is always a round ship with a diameter of about 15 this gives an area at a distance of 173 units in size which you can hit.


In reply to stepnrazor. Yes small ships are cheap. unfortunately they use an enourmous amount of command points compared to combat value. and they are so quick to build you could at some late game stages build 10-50 on one planet in one turn except production maxes limit you to a single one anyway, and 1 frigate or destroyer will never be worth sacrificing a battleship or titan build for.

This would make it only a maximum of 43 times as hard to hit a ff, and an average of 19 times as hard.

in addition to this with a moving target which the ships aren't very often in the game (Most people are either running straight towards, or straight away or stationary) this all gets scewed. Personally as movement occurs so little in combat I think the ship movement speeds affecting defense is rather pathetic. I think orion3 may have even done this particular aspect better. as if I remember right (its been like 5 years since i played it) they had your defense go up based on how far you moved a ship in the last turn.

now to make it even harder to give percentages we come to another issue. lets say one person has 130 beam attack and the other 200 beam defense. then we add 30 beam defense. This just made it from a near 70% chance of hitting to a near 0% chance to hit (there is a minimum% hit) on the other hand if you had 130% attack vs 100%defense you still have a very good chance to hit. The problem with the way beam defense is done is it mixes a lot of unrelated factors together. Whereas seperate checks to hit vs different defense modes makes more sense.

I think that based on the way the game is done though some bonus would be good and might actually make a smaller ship fleet usable even late game. which would be a nice change.

User avatar
Time
Posts:220
Joined:Wed Mar 22, 2006 4:27 pm
Location:Orlando, Florida, USA, Earth, Human Empire

Postby Time » Thu Sep 03, 2009 6:57 pm

I re-read this older post reciently and wondered if anyone found a way to adapt these ideas to the game in the past couple of years, especially, with the new mods that have been introduced reciently.

ALEXD's idea of:

FF +10% (Hardest to Hit)
DD + 5%
CA 0% (No Change)
BB -5 %
Titan -10 %
Doomstar - 15% (Easiest to Hit)

seems like a good one.
MOO1 Fan, MOO2 Fan, MOO3 needed too many changes = hopeless, getting older waiting for a MOO4 (still).

Minor Annoyance
Posts:8
Joined:Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:22 am

Postby Minor Annoyance » Fri Sep 04, 2009 12:37 pm

Unless there have been mods that drastically change the way command points and maintenance work then making small ships better by being harder to hit is a lost cause. In MoO2 bigger ships are just plain better. I was actually going to do this for MoO3 but since I don't know how evasive missiles and fighters are I can't risk making capital ships harder to hit than they are.

Istrebitel
Posts:17
Joined:Sat Jan 09, 2010 3:25 am

Postby Istrebitel » Sat Jan 09, 2010 4:24 am

Battle pods increasing speed is just a miscalculation on the programmer's part, that should be considered as a bug not a feature.

Also, space for systems should never be equivalent to volume of a ship. A FF class ship could be just a platform with an engine, maneuver drives, pilot cockpit and a limited number of weapon mount points and equipment mount points (think of X-wing from starwars?). The space combined for weapons and engines could take roughly a 1/5 of the ship volume!
A doomstar class ship is a massive planetoid. It is made in an absoultely different way. Bigger weapons are mounted inside the ship, taking alot of inner space for the capacitors, coolant modules, or ammo serving machines. Think of Death star from starwars - the stellar converter took alot of inner space, not only the muzzle in a form of a circle. Smaller weapons are mounted on the outer surface. Special systems are also mounted inside. But, the energy source, engines, and the whole life support system (you need gravity generators here already, breathing environment, etc, unlike in a simple FF) takes considerably more space than a FF. You need the whole evacuation system, rescue pods, unlike a little FF who has a pilot in a space suit, probably with a jetpack and a simple catapult system to eject the pilot in case of immenent craft destruction.

Therefore, the exact sizes of the ship remain to be seen and could not be just calculated based on free size for equipment and weapons.

Aside from that, lets see:

We have a same speed moving FF and BB. First of all, game does not take into account maneuver. IIRC total combat speed determines how far a ship can turn. This means that same speed BB can follow the same curve a FF can. It has same acceleration.

That makes it HIGHLY unreallistic thing to ever happen (unless the FF is equipped with some crap and BB with a brand-new high-tech ultra fast engines, boosters and maneuver drive).

But if that is so, then it is indeed harder to hit a FF than a BB because of its size. If we approximate both into a spherical shape, and assume the beam is circle-shaped too, then indeed the ship must move "beam's radius+ship's radius" to evade the shot targeted at its center.

Another matter arises here - the beam radius. Indeed, to dodge a weapon like stellar converter (a beam that destroys the planet, enveloping, which means, has enormous size) or anything that is enveloping (means, the beam covers the whole target ship, unlike laser kind weapon, that projects a ~constant diameter line into the target) both FF and a BB would have to move similar distance to evade it. Like, it the plasma beam can envelop a BB, it could easilly be times bigger than a FF, making FF size irrelevant to the chance to dodge it. Both FF and BB would have to move similar distance to evade the beam.

My conclusion:

Therefore, there should be indeed beam defense bonus based on ship's size.

This bonus should, however, be negated by weapon's modifications.

Some weapons should have built-in abilities to negate part of it or all of it.

An Enveloping weapon would negate it completely or almost completely (i suppose this is why you don't dodge stellar converter... too big!). A heavy mount should as well eat like 50% of it, due to the size of the beam being bigger.

Some weapons should have built in modifiers to the ship size defense bonus, that lower it by certain amount. Weapons like MD or basic Laser should be those that other weapons are valued against, as they have the least beam diameter of all weapons in the game (by their working principle, MD accelerates particles, which means small size, laser is a coherent light, smaller diameter=more energy concentrated in one point=more damage). Death ray is for sure bigger than a particle emmited from MD, so it should negate part of the beam defense due to size.

Although, the game is the game. And it simplifies alot to protect the player from huge horrible equations to do in order to judge the effectiveness of his fleet.

Minor Annoyance
Posts:8
Joined:Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:22 am

Postby Minor Annoyance » Sat Jan 09, 2010 11:18 am

Like, it the plasma beam can envelop a BB, it could easilly be times bigger than a FF, making FF size irrelevant to the chance to dodge it.
It was my thinking that a plasma beam sort of set the ship (or shields) "on fire" and the damage spread around the ship. That's kink of what the animation looks like. The plasma torpedo and the SC do seem like they're big enough the cover the whole ship with though.

Istrebitel
Posts:17
Joined:Sat Jan 09, 2010 3:25 am

Postby Istrebitel » Sun Jan 10, 2010 9:29 am

Well, having little specific details on the weapon's functioning (a thing i suppose MOO2 misses alot, i'd love to read a little book on the construction specs of the doom star, and i think fans would love that alot, stuff like ufopedia from X-Com) we are left only to guess.

But i suppose that to think logically, the increased penalty for range indeed must come from the spread of the beam, being shaped as an arc, not as a line, an arc that envelops (delivered from the term envelope - to encase something inside) the target.

Of course we dont see that in the game nor we see stellar converter enveloping the target as well (just a bigger beam) but i suppose that is the old time's graphic limitations. Much easier to animate a constant width graphic sprite that either repeats itself in width (continious) or moves around (normal projectile fire).

Making a truly enveloping kind of beam animation would require much more advanced coding. Stretching the sprite on the one side like you would do now to make an arc instead ofa beam was not only heavy calculation for those times, but also produces an unpredicted result, mostly bad quality and unwanted pixelisation. I would make a set of different width beam 1 pixel long sprites that could be combined to make an arc, then the program would have to calculate the width of the beam at each said place and insert the correct width "layer", constructing the beam image like putting rings on a pole, like towers of hanoi. Yet that would probably look not that good as well.

Therefore we are left with typical beam animation and a text mention of "enveloping".


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