Ship and Combat balance?

Bozobub, your comments on the Tug made me realize something. In the game Pirates! the player begins in the easiest to sail ship, the Sloop (at least that is what happened to me). Starting in the sloop makes the game much easier to learn. You can dodge quick, sail better upwind, run away from big ships. Now, it does not carry many weapons or crew, so you will want to upgrade. But that is just the thing, as you upgrade, the game gets harder. Basically, you don't upgrade into ships that are easier to sail, you upgrade into ships that are harder to sail. The players skill is ment to improve, and take over from the ship.

I think one of the reasons EoC did not do very well is that the player starts in the Tug and the tug cannot fight. So the start of the game is an exercise in frustration. If you are patient, you get a better ship and the fighting gets easier. But who is patient? I think the Pirates! approach is a much better one.

Your comment on the Tug is a good idea of how to implement that approach. Make the tug a good start ship, easy dodging, fast, etc. But no real weapons to speak of and pretty useless sensors etc. The starting player will have a fighting chance, able to dodge, but not have the weapons to really push home a fight. That makes learning easier, but still puts value into the upgrade path.

on that note, I changed the Tugs stats to (25,25,150) and it seems to handle alot better. The (150,150,450) was just too strong for this flight model.

GrandpaTrout, we could also follow your thinking in introducing the player to progressivly more difficult 'flight models'. As you say the ships would become more powerful as you upgrade, but perhaps also more difficult to fly skillfully. The tug could be slow, but with very strong lateral thrusters (one look at the design of the ship makes this obvious) Once you move up to the patcom or the dreadnaught you get a ship that is very fast, but lacking lateral thruster strength.

Just some thoughts. I like your suggestion though. It makes some sense.

Yet...we have to be careful. In pirates, which I am have been playing recently, I haven't yet found a reason to upgrade past the sloop. It is just too easy to sail and I can beat any ship on the seas with it. My only impetus to upgrade is just to have a big huge cool ship.

I altered the default tug accel stats to (25,25,150), the patcom's to (15,15,225), interceptor's to (30,30,275), and 6-pod freighter's to (15,15,100).

The collision problems seems to have disappeared and combat handling seems more responsive and more enjoyable to play. Just some comments as I continue the journey.

Posted by GrandpaTrout:
Ok, looking at the values in Terminus, the accel is in meters per second. So forward accel is 568m/s. That is just huge compared to EoC. Nothing accelerates that fast.

ok wait a minute. You are saying nothing moves at 568m/s, but in LDS you are moving way faster then that. If you can suspend believe enough for LDS to be feasable, then a tug with 500 thrust should be no problem.

However, Terminus has a vastly different flight model then EoC, so the values are also different.

Posted by cambragol:
In regard to Terminus, GrandpaTrout, as your calculations surmised, the ships accelerated very VERY fast. Combat as I recall it involved tiny blips zooming past each other.

Well that depends on how you played the game. Matching speed and vector were vital to a successful pirate career in Terminus.

If you couldn't control speed and course (and match it to your target), then you either didn't have a grasp of the flight model or didn't know how to use your ship's capabilities. No offense, but that was one of the things about Terminus.

Almost all of the weapons in Terminus were close-quarter projectile based armaments. You had to close to target in order to hit anything.

Once you learned the flight model, the ship became an extension of your mind...like your arm and hand. Control was all in the lateral thrusters.

I meant that nothing in EoC or Iwar has a thruster accel of 500+ m/s, not that it was not possible. What I am trying to do is turn impressions of how different games combat worked into real numbers so we can make some rational judgements and comparisons.

Thanks for working on the collision issue. I would guess that there are some minimum accel levels that the AI must have to work correctly. 15 m/s would not suprise me, since so few of the ships in EoC have values that low.