Some thoughts on capital ships

Well, obviously we've got 'em. But how do we use 'em?

I offer two suggestions for maps with cap ships included (remember, currently capital ships are static and do not move):

1. Cap ships of both sides target and attack all enemies within their turret's ability. This would provide a very exciting sort of "flak" to fly through. Since the cap ship guns are all turrets, their speeds can be controlled to reflect how powerful they are, i.e. less powerful anti-fighter guns can traverse relatively quickly and track small targets such as fighters, but their low level of damage would mean several hits are needed to shoot one down. Whereas massive high-powered canons meant to fire on other cap ships would traverse extremely slowly, meaning they could only really fire on another massive, slow moving object. So fighters would be relatively safe. But a fighter, even accidentally, being hit by one of these monsters would mean instant incineration. If the destruction of an enemy cap ship or base is the goal of the map, then the cap ships themselves would contribute to the victory.

2. Similar to above, but the cap ship weapons don't actually do any damage (0 points). You'll still have all the perceived danger, but the cap ships won't actually contribute to a victory. This might look strange though if someone get's hit, especially with a big bolt, and doesn't die. The players may also figure this out and stop fearing cap ship weapons.

Or, a third idea; we could combine the previous two and have anti-fighter weapons that do damage to fighters at short range, but the larger guns shooting at other capital objects do no damage.

Well, just a couple of thoughts to get the ball rolling on ways to use capital ships in the maps.

Any thoughts?

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The ideas and theories are all cool, but they are all way beyond the capabilities of Flux AFIAK.

As we've discussed before the "cap ships" aren't ships but AI controlled T-Gunstar objects. They won't fire the guns the way you want. You need to make the object (ship avatar), make the guns , put them on the object on nulls and then put it in the game. and see what happens. Then you can do as much as you can with what Flux has to offer.

It's cool to discuss theories how things should work. But we don't even have an object in the game to try anything out.

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I didn't know the turrets had a problem in multiplayer. Ok, I'll put something together that we can test with.

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Doh ! I don't know what I'm throwing myself into, but what do you think of this idea :

Let's assume we can have a cap ship on a map. Let's assume it has several working laser gun-batteries. I like the idea of an effective, lethal flak. What about making cooperative objective-based maps where one team has to destroy the cap ship and the other has to defend it ? I guess that is what you already have in mind.

But what if the flak would be so effective and fast that only the fighters (Awing, Xwing, TieF, TieInt) could evade it, and thus be able to approach the cap ship to take all the laser guns down, so that the bombers (TieB, Bwing) could get closer and launch their bombs, which would be the only way to take the cap ship down ?
(This would be easily done by giving the capship hull a huge resistance, and the bombs a huge power, so that the fighters'lasers won't do any noticeable harm (it would take ages for fighters to destroy the cap ship, and the autorepair would make their efforts a pain).

This would solve the problem MajorTom pointed out in another thread : "do you think anyone will play the role of a Imperial bomber pilot in a game if he can't in some way protect himself from enemy fighter pilots? (remember we only have a max of 5 players per team). My opinion is: If we decide to have only bombs on the TieB we might as well have not made it, because no one will fly it."

To achieve victory, the attacking side would HAVE TO fly these bombers(I still think they should have low-rate lasers, and ion cannons), even though they have a poor firing rate, a low top speed and low manoeuvrability. A cooperative teamplay will be required, allowing the bombers to rely on the fighters to cover them.
The fighters would have 2 tasks : destroy the flak guns to let the bombers approach the cap ship, and protect the bombers. The bombers would have to launch bombs, then rearm, over and over again to take the cap ship down. (maybe when reaching a critical state the fighters could then lend a hand when the cap ship is almost destroyed).

This would allow various strategies, depending on the skills of the team, 3 fighters + 2 bombers, or 2+3, or even 1+4 in a kamikaze attempt, ... Throw one or two assisting CUVs in the mix and you can have a wonderful fun cooperative gameplay.

Would this be possible ?
This coop objective based game will of course recquire a lot of beta test and tweaking (how powerful is the flak, how many bombs are required to take the cap ship down, are they unlimited, how good are the bombers at protecting themselves (if a bomber is able to take a fighter down with his cannons, the cooperative aspect will no longer exist),... Furthermove, being objective based, we have to define and tweak the defending team's objective ! Keep the cap ship alive 10 minutes ? Score 30 kills while preventing the cap ship from being destroyed ?

(For some more tactical gameplay, some maps could also have a cap ship on each side, and each team would have to handle both defending it and destroying the other. But I am not sure it would pack more fun actually. I am a big fan of asymetrical objective-based gameplay (when the two teams have differents obejectives, such as attacking vs defending)).

I think that you're reasonably close to what was originally planned. The whole idea of the bombs and bombers was to have a ship that could realistically attack a capital vessel or base and actually do damage. And the bomber and CUV pilots get their own scores based on their performance which add to the total team score. This allows relative performance rankings instead of just "who got the most frags". Meaning you can now brag about being the best bomber or CUV pilot as well.

The flak idea is great. I think I suggested it myself a while ago. But I don't think we can do real flak in EoC. Not unless MajorTom can cause a missile-style explosion at the death point of a bolt. Then it would be awsome. You could have low-yield flak explosions going on all around you and rocking your ship when you get near a well defended target. But even if it is possible, I don't know how much the MP game would like the lag from all those explosions.

What you suggest about co-op play is possible, with human players. And we do have co-op missions. But the main problem, I believe, with what you're suggesting is that it's hard to get the bots to behave properly on a mixed team. I believe MajorTom is working on that. He can tell you more about it.

While we're talking about bots. MajorTom, I meant to ask you; would it be possible to add to the number of ships involved by giving each player a bot wingman, or pair of wingmen, all the time? This occured to me the other day. I don't know if it would work or not (is the limit for max players or max sims), or even if it's a good idea. But I thought I'd ask.

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Taurus, we already have the Coop game mode in the mod almost exactly as you described it.
A description of the game play “rules�, tactics etc. is in the folder StarWarsA1/Readme/Academy_Game.doc. (At the moment however we only have one map to play this game on). The so called “academy� on the map we have, can easily be replaced with a stationary cap ship model within minutes.

In our mod, the script we use, together with the objects on the map defines the game mode. Additional flexibility is provided by the package.ini file which determines the bot ship types you play against and a few other factors. The scripting is done and the concept proven for the coop mode.

Cap ships and special weapons:
The map.ini file allows us to place active and passive objects in the game extremely accurately. Therefore we can place a turret object in a position that makes it look like it’s part of the cap ship. The turret object would however have its own AI pilot and the advantage is that it can be given specific weapons with predefined functionality to allow us different types of weapons. The trade off is: each Ai pilot in the game uses about the same resources as 0.5 player ships i.e. the more turret objects we have the less players we can have.
The “Academy� game described above has, in a full blown game, 17 AI piloted objects and together with 4 players (maybe 5) you reach the capacity limit. To play it without lag you will need a high performance PC and a high bandwidth (cable) connection. An upper mid range PC should do it if you play the game alone (not online)

If we want this type of turret object supported coop mode we need to have the cap ships models and the avatars for the different turret objects. If you modellers want to make them it’s no problem for me to put them in the game (an hour to make and thoroughly test a few minor script changes and recompile it. A half hour to make .ini files for the turret objects and, since I have to do it manually about 2 or 3 hours of map work to position the objects on the cap ship. As a visualization: the 3 gunstars surrounding the Academy on the game/map described above could just as well be placed on the surface the “academy� model itself instead of being a few km away. You could however still target them separately.

The “specific weapons with predefined functionality� would be the weapon on the turret object. For example an object with miniature seeker mines (taken from the standard EOC game) that would work like flak, a long ranged slow, high power laser, and little fast firing short range lasers as anti-fighter guns.

We need:
A cap ship model (with only one weapon null for one weapon) and several turret or gun-like looking avatars for the weapons we want to position on the cap ship (each with only one null for one AI weapon).

Additionally:
If we could place objects for the map.ini with lightwave and then parse the .lws scene file it would probably save us 2 ½ hours of map work (if we use the current map.ini file). Using the lightwave/parsing procedure to create new maps would probably save me around 10 – 15 hrs per map.

You guys want to do it? Who will do what?

As soon as the models/avatars are available we can do the tweaking, but since I have lots of experience at setting up games like this it shouldn’t take long.

Second Chance:
Player specific Bot wingmen are not practical in MP because you as a player can’t give them orders and they can’t think or behave strategically themselves.

The "Assault" game is another Coop type game that’s already in the mod. It is more like a class based team fortress game where players vs. players with limited bot support. The objective is to destroy the imperial (or Rebel) base. That game is also described in the mod in StarWarsA1/Readme/Assault_Game.doc. We can talk about that after we’ve done the work on the Coop game.


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