Mafador could you add a new type of weapon?

[thorfrog]

Malfador could you add area effecting weapons? In other words weapons that effect a 2,3,4 block radius. I'm trying to add weapons like multiple warhead missiles, pulse bLasts, poximity mines, a true Wave motion gun, ect. Is this possible in this engine?

[Suicide Junkie]

Or at least a second "damage at range" entry, for those shots that miss. (for splash damage)
Could be set to zero for weapons such as DUC's, or even higher than direct hits for "improbability cannons", whose damage is inversely related to your accuracy

Typical area weapons could be set to do 1/4 damage when they miss.

This small-scale type of splash damage would have the coding advantage of hitting only one ship (the targetted one), and would require only a small change (that misses do damage just like hits, with a different amount)

[Cyrien]

As long as we are talking about new damage types to enter, lets see the following:

Damage on the way
IE: anything it hits on the line of fire on the way to the target takes damage.

Radius Damage on Impact
It shoots out hits the target and then detonates with a radius damage affect that may hit those around it.

Radius Damage regardless of Impact
It shoots out and detonates with a radius similiar to above but if it misses it goes out to max range along the line of fire and then detonates still.

Damage to shoot
Weapon shoots ship shooting takes some damage

Damage regardless of miss
You miss the miss still does some damage

And Last but not least (for now) different levels of armor and phase piercing.
IE level 1 armor piercing goes through standard armor but energized armor prevents that but null space is level 5 armor piercing and thus penetrates even that. Repeat examples for shielding.

That is all.

[Suicide Junkie]

Multilevel Phased-ness and piercing power would be sweet for modders, and should be fairly easy to implement.

DOTW: What do you do about squares the shot only skims?
unless the shot is exactly horizontal, vertical or diagonal, there will be squares that the shot goes through "just a little bit"

RDOI: How would you stop friendly fire with the crazy manoevering that the fleet AI does? "Optimal range" would have to check for loaded RDOI weapons on your other ships, and avoid moving to point blank with the enemy.

DTS: Similarily, the "destroyed on use" ability working for weapons would be good.

Also, having multiple weapon abilities in one component (and in one shot) would be awesome. You could have Trek style 90% normal, 10% shield skipping. You could have a small repulsor beam effect when BIG guns hit a ship.

[Phoenix-D]

Cyrien, interesting ideas, but I flinch at getting the AI to comprehend that firing an full-beam effect weapon past it's own ships is a bad thing..

Phoenix-D

[AJC]

I would like to see at least the capability for defenses against every type of weapon damage. Even if its not in the released game , I would like to see it put into the Abilities.txt file. It would be nice to be able to create a mod with the options to use a defense for every type of weapon.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yep, yep! I've requested all of these repeatedly in the beta forums and out here in the public forums. The "Engine Pulsar" from MOO, for example. And simple collateral damage to adjacent ships when one blows up. And the "lightning shield" missile defense. That's probably a no-no with missiles as unbalanced as they already are... I wanted multiple levels of armor effectiveness and armor-piercing too, instead of just the one "ignores armor" ability. We need 'Neutronium' armor that cannot be pierced by anything... Best idea we ever had in the beta forums was a settable modifer for each weapon for its damage to shield or armor. So, you could have all sorts of variations in weapon effectiveness against shields or armor. It would probably require a complete re-write of the combat engine to implement this.

MM is just too busy with bug-fixing to add new stuff right now. I hope we'll at least get drones before the "SE IV Gold" re-issue that seems to be in the works. Space monsters and/or pirates would also be a nice bonus. Especially with an intel project to create them against your enemies. But all these fancy new weapon effects seem likely to be put off for SE V.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 18 October 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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I would like to see at least the capability for defenses against every type of weapon damage. Even if its not in the released game , I would like to see it put into the Abilities.txt file.
It would be nice to be able to create a mod with the options to use a defense for every type of weapon.

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Have you ever tried P&N ?
There is currently a defense against every specialty weapon, except for Engine-destroying.
(Armor skipping, weapons-only, shield generators only, even null-space)
And the engine destroying weapons are hampered by the fact that every captial ship will have 30 to 40 engines rather than 4 to 6 (thus requiring lots of hits to disable).
My next release will also include explicit Engine defenses you can add on.
Of course, defending against every possible type of attack will be very expensive and space-consuming.

[Phoenix-D]

How did you get the shield defenses to work? I still haven't got the stupid things to actually take the hits..

Phoenix-D

[Suicide Junkie]

As of P&N v2.3c, the description of the Buckytube gel claims to have shield-protection, but it dosen't work. It has been changed for the next Version.

The shield defenses that DO work are the Heavy Shield Generators and the Hardened mini shields.

Both have high physical strength, and so resist shield disruptors well. The HSGs have 200 hitpoints, and so will only be destroyed by a Massive-mount Shield disruptor IV or V, from point-blank range.
HMSGs have 20-40 hitpoints, so you will only lose one per hit, up to 7 from a Massive mount, SD V at point blank. Even then, you only lose 7 components, for a maximum loss of 455 shield points.
Remember that Massive mounts only fit on Baseships or Battlemoons. You shouldn't be going to point blank range with them