Random conjectures and questions.

[Taqwus]

a) What exactly is the effect of experience?

Ship experience appears to be added, point for point, to all to-hit chances. Unless I'm rarely fighting experienced ships (possible, given it's only been against the AI), it doesn't appear to reduce enemy's to-hit chances.

Fleet experience... I'm not sure about that one.


b) Suppose --
Your race A breathes oxygen.
Race B breathes methane.
Race B has a domed colony on a planet with a carbon-dioxide atmosphere.
Race B surrenders to you, or otherwise gives you the colony.

Then, you build an Atmospheric Converter on the planet. Does the atmosphere become methane, or oxygen?

One thing that I've noticed is that if you have more than one race on a planet, it'll be domed as long as a single pop unit needs it.


c) Anybody know how much damage ramming does? Perhaps it's proportional to the other ship's hull, but it might be interesting if remaining movement points matter.

It'd be mildly twisted if one could build a large, immensely armored ship (something like orgo armor might be good for the auto-regen) for the sole purposes of ramming smaller ships into oblivion.


d) If there are multiple troop transports in a battle, is there a way for them to ALL drop their troops simultaneously? If not, the odds seem like you pretty much have to wipe out almost an entire population (maybe even down to one bar) before you can overcome whatever militia they raise...

Pity. I'll probably miss the ability to play assimilator/slaver races ala MOO2 Telepaths. ;-)



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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Fionn]

I'd hoped somebody more knowledgable would respond as I've been asking the same questions to myself, especially about syncronized troop drops.

I have noticed one thing about ramming. I prefer for my badly damaged vessels to do whatever they can in their Last moments, plus I'm a naturally vengeful SOB, so I tend to ram a lot.

Based purely on what I've been seeing, remaining movement ability, size of the ramming ship, and the amount of damage it has already taken (modelling, I suppose, that damage components may have been blown completely off already or will at least crumple easier, absorbing some of the impact) all seem to affect the damage. I'm sure there's a random componet too, so I can't really tell you if what I'm seeing is accurate or is just seeming that way because of random flucuations.

I haven't yet had a ramming ship survive but I put that down to the fact I'm always using ships that are already on their Last legs to ram with. Because of that, I can't tell if the size of the ship being rammed has an effect on the damage taken by the ship doing the ramming.

I hadn't thought about a specialized ramming ship, aside from the cobalt warheads. Since it *seems* like remaining damage capacity has an effect and armor has a (fairly) high DC, the armored ramming ship might just work. Since the armor would be damaged first, it would even have a better-than-average chance of surviving.

I can even postulate new components (a Ramming Prow, perhaps, and a Reinforced Structure which might act as extremely cheap armor for absorbing only ramming damage) that'd flesh out the design. I'm not sure you can add a totally new component like that, with effects not already coded in, from editing the text files . . . or am I wrong? Even so, MM might consider adding it someday.

Hmm, I'm going to have to go play with ramming so more, I think.

[Iron Giant]

I got some big cargo ships trapped in a battle with a handful of my cruisers against an overwhelming enemy force.

While I was taking a pounding, I decided I may as well ram my medium cargo ship into an enemy cruiser: My cargo ship survived, the enemy did not.

Ramming seems to be very useful IF the ramming ship doesnt have a lot of damage (or if its going to die anyway...).