Ship and Combat balance?

I am changing a lot of the values for accel and lats, as well as rotational accel tonight, as we ran into a few unforseen issues. Some of them are things you have noticed, but others haven't reared their heads yet. Jon just did a quick run over the values before uploading 11.2. I will give them a more thorough going over. We need to make the values 'safe', get comfortable and balance the safe values, then work on tweaking things once we understand just what requirements we have of ships. Expect 11.3 to have a bit of a vanilla feel for ships.

There are some combat AI behaviors I wanted to describe in this thread so everyone knows it.

Hold Facing behavior seems to be the AI default. The ship points its nose at the target and tries to hold that orientation no matter what the target does. If you accel forward, it backs up. If you run, it chases. This behavior works well when the AI ships shields take a lot of damage. It can be frustrating as a player because the combat devolves down to "who has the most guns and shields". Fighters that use this behavior commit suicide, but it works well for corvettes and cap ships.

In the modded game with the AI having an exact match to player ability, the player can find themselves unable to manuver against the AI. In a sense, equal is worse when the AI has this behavior.

Swooping behavior seems to be used by fighters. The AI makes high speed passes on the target, zooming away and then turning. This is kind of the behavior we wish the AI would use all the time, since it makes combat more fun and dynamic. And mimics what the ships would be like if they had strong forward thrusters, but little reverse thrust.

Tail Biting behavior is where the AI tries to get behind you and then opens fire. This behavior works well when the AI is attacking cap ships. And I think the fighters do use this sometimes.

Missile Boat behavior holds position and launches all missile weapons. I have not studied this behavior closely. Sometimes it seems to close range, which is a bit suicidal.

Gunstar holds position and just shoots at targets that get near. Works well for cap ships with turrets.

I expect we will need to modify the AI behavior from default hold facing if we are going to use some of the combat balance ideas put forward.

Shingen, I was just doing a quick fix to keep the freighter from crashing. And do not seem to have done a very good or complete job of it either.

Bolt speed and ship acceleration are directly related. The faster the bolt, the more acceleration a ship needs to dodge the bolt. The AI uses predictive fire, so ship speed has no impact on dodging, only change in speed (acceleration). Except when you are outrunning the bolts of course.

Here is a table to show the relationship.

Across the top is rates of acceleration. Down the left side is bolt speed, and range from the firing canon. If you are further away, you have more time to dodge.

The middle values are the how far you have dodged from where the AI was targeting when it shot the canon bolt. You have to have dodged 1/2 the width of your ship, or the bolt hits you. I use a value of 100 meters for ship width, or 50 meters to dodge.

At an acceleration of 0, you dodge 0 meters and always get hit by every shot.

At an accel of 25, you can dodge shots at 15km (max range of weapon) but not at 3km or 1km. Basically, this weapon might be rated at a range of 15km, but effective range against moving targets is 3km.

At an accel of 200, you dodge every shot at every range. Unless your ship is 2km long, then you get hit at every range.

The smaller the ship, the easier it is to dodge. You can see that a fighter with an effective profile of 10 meters, and an accel of 150 would be amost impossible to hit.

Interesting. So what are the vanilla EoC accel rates then?

Hey, I just tried out the Gattling cannon for the first time. The new graphics look great. (or if those are the old ones, they look much better for some reason).

Yep, those are some new graphics I whipped up. I only tweaked the Gattling, worrying that changing too many might not really be worth the time. I wanted to give them a smaller profile graphically. I felt the old ones were a little big.

About those accel values. The changes I made to ships accel etc. for 'safety' purposes left some of the smaller ships with high acceleration. I pushed them up because otherwise, most ships would have had nearly the same acceleration. I could feel the difference in a quick play test afterwards. It doesn't make hitting things any easier. Still tweaking to be done methinks.