Ship and Combat balance?

Actually I would say rather unconventional, as the flight model in Iwar 1, which I would like to get closer to, was considered rather unconventional when it came out. It still is for the most part I believe. Wing Commander would be more on the other end of the scale of what we are looking for. Have you played I war 1 at all?

Have you played I war 1 at all

Yep.. I own the deluxe edition of Iwar, though it's been ages since I played it, being that XP (directX) doesn't seem to run the game very good, and I hate dosbox with a passion.

Actually I would say rather unconventional, as the flight model in Iwar 1, which I would like to get closer to, was considered rather unconventional when it came out.

Yeah, I still prefer a more newtonian model, like Terminus or JJFFE.

Whatever we do, we want to end up fun to fly. So maybe we should talk about what makes one flight model fun over another, then we will have a better understanding of what we are trying to build. I mean, what experiences make it fun, not what specific values make it fun.

What I am hearing is that being able to dodge bolts by player skill is critical to fun.

One experience I had while playing Iwar 1 was fighting patcoms with 1 shield, and making my pass on that unshielded side, doing a quick pivot and blasting them. Getting an advantage by planning and tactics is fun. Working in behind a destroyer was fun. Stringing out opponents so you didn't get mobbed was fun. In EoC, dying in a barrage missiles I couldn't do anything about was NOT fun.

What was it about Terminus that was Fun? (I never played).

There is a board game, Attack Vector Tactical, where your ship only has forward boost. Dodging is done by pivoting and boosting. Attack runs look kind of like a sailing ship tacking upwind toward a target. The current balance is more like that style. We could modify the ship values to make pivoting faster, and see if dodging becomes possible. Would you guys be willing to try out another version of this dodge by pivoting idea? (I am now calling it "pivot and boost").

Oh, one last thing, anyone have actual ship values from Terminus? It is handy to see the numeric values. Impressions from the flight seat can be incorrect. Better to have the real data.

It might be helpful to define terms here a little bit.

An Atmospheric Flight model has the forward thrust in control of the player, and the ship has very strong lateral thrusters, but they are not in control of the player. Ships make wide swooping turns. Star wars, Freespace, Wingcommander all used this model. The model is "newtonian" but the strong lateral thrusters make it feel like being in an airplane.

Halfway between Atmospheric and Newtonian. is what I would call EoC flight model. In this model the player has control of the lateral thrusters, and they are rather strong. The player can easily circle strafe targets. Iwar1 clearly gives the player this ability. And it was used in Descent. Again, the physics are newtonian, but the lateral thrusters reduce the feel of it.

Newtonian (by this definition) is when the ship can build up substantial intertia, not quickly canceled by lateral thrusters. It is now clear the NPC ships in Iwar were using this model (the player was not). Of course Iwar does have this feel with flight assist off. I have not played a game where the player does not have lateral thrust for dodging. If anyone has, I would be curious to hear about it.

Oh, one last thing, anyone have actual ship values from Terminus? It is handy to see the numeric values. Impressions from the flight seat can be incorrect. Better to have the real data.

The thing about Terminus is that almost every ship system was upgradable, from engines, laterals, armor, sensors, fuel systems and energy reactors, computers, weapons, ect. Basically you could strip your ship to it's basic hull and rebuild according to your preference and credits. I don't know if this is feasable in U.S. or not.

However, I'll go in the game and get the specs on a basic combat Talon-class small fighter.

[edit]
well the game doesn't really give any specs for lateral thrust...nor does the manual. Just acceleration, hull, stress, ect. Sorry

How do you edit the ship stats? Is it an *.ini file or something? Maybe I can help with the tweaking.

Before we do much tweeking, we are trying to pick a model we want to implement. Grab the PS graphics SDK from the downloads page. The document in there describes all the ship system and INI files in detail.

The ships are in sims/ships/default and sims/ships/player.

We are adjusting the acceleration values. They are in meters per second. There are three
(lateral x, lateral y, forward/back accel)

I took a quick look at a Terminus mod site. The engine and thruster values depend on upgrades, but the best of each that fits in a hull gives about 3 to 1 accel difference from main engine to thruster. So if the main engine was a 150m/s then the thruster would be 50m/s. What is not clear is what the m/s really is. I need to do the calculations to find out. I will do that this weekend.