Hi Everyone, this is my first post here, but I've been lurking for a little while, and I've played a few games. I've noticed some common questions and frustrations that have been addressed here and there, but the information is spread out, and while the guide to guide threads are nice, a lot of those guides seem terribly outdated, and/or full of misinformation.
So here's my attempt to gather some info, and hopefully have some of my own mistaken ideas corrected:
#1 - Fleet postures DO NOT WORK AGAINST PIRATES. This is terrible, because the defend posture would actually be useful against pirates, but it simply doesn't work. Fleets on defend, with fleet formation automation turned off, but the fleet itself automated, will respond to enemy empire ships, but will NOT respond to pirate attacks. Of course, this is only noticeable when the posture range is "nearby systems" or further, as obviously the fleet will auto-engage enemies within the same system regardless of fleet posture. Similarly, fleets postured for attack, with a pirate base set as the target will do nothing, although whether this would be helpful is debatable.
#2 - 1 weapons/energy/hi tech plant is enough for 30 construction yards, at least. Space ports above colonies DO NOT need any cargo bays. (No, not even 1 for freight delivery, as is often mistakenly suggested)
#3 - You should build enough labs so your Total Research Capacity matches or slightly exceeds your Total Research Potential. Actual Research Output is not something you should adjust your capacity around, it's just a final number after bonuses. Total Research Potential is based on population or GDP. Super Genius Scientist's 20% boost is applied to Total Research Potential, so it's even better than it looks!
#4 - Boarding pods are bugged, and every time a ship is destroyed while a ship is trying to board it, it will lose some boarding pods until it is refit, therefore ships with boarding pods will keep getting worse over time.
#5 - Sometimes when you try to get a protection agreement with pirates who are attacking you, something goes wrong (I believe it's when a projectile is on its way to a pirate when you make the agreement, so then the projectile hits, and the agreement is cancelled). When this happens, just keep trying, eventually it will stick. This does not indicate the pirates refuse the protection agreement.
#6 - When playing as a pirate, hidden pirate bases and related structures on someone else's colony drains their income and gives it to you. However, when you eventually take control of those colonies, those pirate structures take away your income, and it just vanishes into space.
#7 - On the design screen, there's a column labeled "Optimized". This column means nothing, and is always "no". Maybe the devs were trying to be philosophical, trying to let you know that nothing is ever perfect, and something can always be improved upon? (No, it's obviously a bug or unused feature...)
Collection of common info
RE: Collection of common info
I have not tested the AI mod in any detail, but one could imagine that the updated designs are more expensive to run, and the AI needs the extra cash from higher difficulty to make it work.
So in theory, by giving the AI "better designs", you could end up making it weaker.
So in theory, by giving the AI "better designs", you could end up making it weaker.
RE: Collection of common info
That's sort of what I was thinking, Bingeling.
RE: Collection of common info
I recall the optimised column directs the game to load player optimised designs from a dedicated sub-folder.
RE: Collection of common info
This only applies to ships with more than 1 boarding pod. Ships with exactly 1 pod are never subject to this bug, and I'm not 100% but I think ships with more than 1 pod which become bugged are never reduced below 1 pod.#4 - Boarding pods are bugged, and every time a ship is destroyed while a ship is trying to board it, it will lose some boarding pods until it is refit, therefore ships with boarding pods will keep getting worse over time.
[edit]
I am wrong about this. Single pods can, and do get bugged.
#8 - Ghetto construction ships (aka; a military ship fitted with construction equipment) have weird and potentially trap laden beahaviour.
A GCS can build anything a normal construction ship can, but the weirdness comes when the building is finished. Upon completion of a building by a GCS, the building "detaches" itself from the object it was built at and sits forever in whatever position it was in when it was completed, rendering it useless.
AND this also renders the object it was built at useless, as the game still thinks there is a building in position so no further ones can be built there even if the detached building in question is destroyed or scrapped.
A GCS can however build things in space or a nebula without issue (as they don't move normally), and can repair ships as well.
#9 - The long range scanner works on ships even though it looks like it doesn't. The display overlay only updates once it's been sat still for a few frames, but the scanner effect is always active as long as the scanner component has enough energy.
#10 - Ships can use multiple hyperdrive components to get "the best of both worlds".
Eg; a ship fitted with both a kaldos AND and equinox drive will use the short initiation of the kaldos to start its jump, but will then use the higher top speed of the equinox to travel.
However, this does not seem to apply to power consumption as the highest demand takes priority. So the calista-dal drive is still largely useless.
RE: Collection of common info
#11 - When designing a ship, be aware that the ship's rated firepower is not necessarily an accurate reflection of its offensive power, as the firepower rating does not take account of either the rate of fire of the ship's weapons or the effects of engagement range. An extreme example of this can be seen with Death Rays and fully-upgraded Titan Beams; it takes about 62 fully-upgraded Titan Beams (372 size) to match the rated firepower of a single Death Ray (140 size) but only about 10 fully-upgraded Titan Beams (60 size) to match the theoretical maximum DPS of that Death Ray.
Accuracy issues can further exacerbate such issues, especially in an extreme case such as with Death Rays and Titan Beams; the variance in expected time to kill a given target goes up as the damage gets concentrated into fewer shots, which can make high damage-per-shot low rate-of-fire weapons riskier than low damage-per-shot high rate-of-fire weapons of equal or similar damage per second.
#12 - Speaking of weapons: It appears as though whether or not a weapon is in firing range is determined by the instantaneous range between the ship carrying the weapon and the target at which the weapon will be fired, not by whether or not the weapon's projectile can reach the target, given the instantaneous range to the target and the current velocity of the target, prior to expiring due to passing beyond maximum weapon range. This is typically not an issue, though it can sometimes become one in chase scenarios with high-speed late-game vessels.
Similarly, I believe, though I am not positive of this, that the damage lost by a shot is determined by the total distance traveled from time of firing to time of impact, not by the instantaneous range from weapon to target. Thus, ships will deal more than the expected amount of damage for the range at time of firing during closing maneuvers, and the pursuing ship in a chase scenario will deal less damage per shot to the chase than the chase will to the pursuit when both vessels are armed with identical weapons.
#13 - When selecting the defenses of a ship, consider the types of weapons you expect to encounter. Armor is relatively expensive both per component and per unit size invested by comparison to shield generators, and so it is in general better to invest more heavily in shields than armor when choosing defenses unless your expected opponents make heavy use of weapons which bypass shields (i.e. railguns and gravity weapons) or unless your primary concern with the design is survivability against space monsters. I believe that gravity weapons only bypass armor in that they can damage any component on the ship regardless of whether or not armor is present rather than always damaging non-armor components, so armor may still provide some protection against gravity weapons to more valuable components, if only because of how the presence of the armor components affects the probability that any given component will be randomly selected to take damage from a hit from a gravity weapon, though I am not certain of this and, depending on how the component struck is selected, the effect may not be very large (for example, if the probability that a given component will be struck is weighted by its size relative to the total size of the ship, armor components will only marginally affect the likelihood that a given component will be hit unless very large numbers of armor components are used for the design).
It may also be worth considering expected engagement duration and frequency when choosing which shield generators to use; longer engagement durations and higher engagement frequencies, which might be expected when fighting comparable empires or powerful pirate factions, tend to favor shield regeneration rate over maximum shield strength, whereas shorter engagement durations and lower engagement frequencies, which might be expected when dealing with weak empires and minor pirate factions, tend to favor maximum shield strength over shield regeneration rate. Shield regeneration rate should also be favored over maximum shield strength if the ships are expected to enter into engagements shortly after completion.
#14 - When choosing engagement stances, note that 'all weapons' and 'standoff' are effectively the same if the longest- and shortest-ranged weapons on the ship have the same maximum range; if you want torpedo-armed ships to take advantage of their higher close-range DPS against weaker targets, you will either need to add at least one shorter-ranged weapon to the design or use the 'point blank' engagement stance instead of 'all weapons.'
The 'evade' stance considers only the range of the weapons carried by the targeted ship and does not care about the range of the weapons on your own vessel. This can result in ships set to 'evade' an enemy target closing with hostile vessels (which, in turn, can result in the hostiles being able to fire upon your ships due to the non-instantaneous nature of maneuvers), and it can also result in ships refusing to move into firing range of a target. The only types of warships which I would suggest considering the 'evade' stance for are bombardment ships and maybe carriers, both of which generally have poor ship-to-ship capabilities.
Also note that the game only considers the rated firepower of the vessel and its target in their current conditions when determining whether something is 'stronger' or 'weaker;' the way range affects the ships' damage profiles, the rates of fire of the ships' weapons systems, and the strength of the defenses of the ships are not considered. While this is probably for the best from a computational complexity (and thus game performance) perspective, it also means that the engagement stance settings of a design may sometimes result in ships choosing poorly when selecting their desired engagement ranges.
#15 - Speaking of stances, note that the engagement range that a ship in a fleet action attempts to maintain appears to be determined relative to a single target, and that it appears as though that target will not be changed until the target is destroyed, the ship is given another order, or the ship is forced to flee from the engagement. This can cause issues for standoff-only designs (most or all of the armament consists of missiles and fighters) in engagements involving more than one hostile ship, as there is no guarantee that ship B, having been selected by ship A as ship A's target, will choose ship A as its target, nor is there any guarantee that ship A's maneuvers to remain at standoff range relative to ship B will keep it at standoff range relative to some hostile ship C.
#16 - Death Rays and Super Lasers are not necessarily worth the design cost and are probably best avoided, despite the impressive names and extremely high rated per-shot damage. They (in particular the Super Laser) have rather extreme size requirements which, especially earlier in the game, can make it difficult to create a design with adequate speed and defensive capabilities; on top of that, the superweapons' combination of high energy per shot and low time-average power requirements means that superweapon-armed ships can often have excess reactor outputs significantly higher than they can reasonably make use of, which may create a temptation to spend more size on power-hungry weapon and sublight drive components than is perhaps wise, which further increases the risk of making the ship too thin-skinned to be effective. The high size per component, high rated damage per shot, and low rate of fire of Death Rays and Super Lasers also conspire to create a very high variance in expected DPS (and therefore time to kill a given target) compared to other weapon systems, which can make designs which invest in Death Rays and Super Lasers very luck-dependent or necessitate a more significant investment into defenses to increase the probability that the ship will survive long enough to destroy its target. Super Lasers have the added issue that ships armed with them are capable of destroying planets, and destroying planets can cause issues for your empire's reputation and remove things from the game which you might have preferred to take over - e.g. Korrabian Spice, one of the ruin wonders, or those 300 elite ground units you just had your invasion transports drop on the planet a second ago - so I would suggest that if you have access to and want to use Super Lasers, you only use them on purpose-built planet-killers and you be very careful about what you target with them.
There have also been suggestions that Death Rays have inherently lower accuracy than standard blasters. I personally regard this as unlikely, though as I have not done any statistical analysis or data collection to test the hypothesis I cannot say with certainty that it is false. Regardless, I suspect that the nature of the weapon (its impressive name, large and arguably very visible projectile sprite, and high rated damage) conspire to make it more noticeable - and more memorable - when the weapon misses, as the observer, consciously or not, likely has higher expectations for each shot from the weapon than for shots from standard weapons. On top of that, the significantly greater volume and rate of fire of standard blasters as compared to Death Rays is in my opinion likely to make it difficult for a casual observer (i.e. one not carefully tracking the number of hits and total number of shots by each weapon system) to accurately judge the relative accuracy of the two weapon systems, especially in
On the plus side for Death Rays and Super Lasers, it's rather unlikely that any ship equipped with them will encounter anything that counts as 'stronger' until fairly late in the game (in fact, I'd expect most designs to regard themselves as 'weaker' if they engage something equipped with a Death Ray; a ship armed with just one Death Ray and nothing else will be considered 'stronger' than any ship with less than 1385 firepower, if the information in the game manual is accurate, which is roughly 48 fully-upgraded Titan Beams or 28 fully-upgraded Plasma Thunderbolts, which is a level of armament that I would not expect to see on a custom design of my own which was smaller than perhaps size-1000, and would more likely be found only on designs in excess of size-1200). I also wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that rated firepower counted more heavily towards rated empire military power than any other combat-related ship statistic, and Super Lasers offer by far the greatest firepower per size of any weapon system (nearly four times that of Death Rays, which themselves have nearly 50% more firepower per size invested than the weapon system with the next-highest score), so if you want to develop a paper tiger military that makes the computer think you're too scary to go to war with, Death Rays and Super Lasers do a good job of inflating that score (granted, 'paper tiger' might not be a perfect descriptor for a space navy which has a large number of Super Laser-equipped ships; such vessels are unlikely to be particularly good at engaging other warships, but if you can blow up the planets of the enemy empire rapidly enough that doesn't really matter). That being said, I would not recommend the use of either Death Rays or Super Lasers on your primary warships. Special-use ships and things that might be better served by looking scary than by actually being scary, maybe, but not the mainstays of the fleet.
#17 - The jump initiation time statistic is arguably more important than the rated hyperspeed of a hyperdrive for ships intended for protecting the system in which they're stationed and perhaps also nearby systems; ships equipped with Kaldos Hyperdrives can reach points within about 0.2 sectors of the starting point of the jump before ships equipped with Equinox Jumpdrives can, and are also capable of completing jumps to points within the starting system before ships equipped with Equinox Jumpdrives finish initiating their jumps. Granted, especially out near 0.2 sectors from the origin of the jump, the difference in response time can be pretty small.
Also, even if mixed hyperdrives had the power requirement of the hyperdrive with the lowest power requirement or of the hyperdrive which provided the hyperspeed, I'd question whether mixing the Calista-Dal Warp Drive and Kaldos Hyperdrive would be better than mixing the Kaldos Hyperdrive and Equinox Jumpdrive as the gain in fuel efficiency just isn't that high, after factoring in the effect of the ship's static energy requirement; Calista-Dal + Equinox would probably also lose out over just the Equinox, as increased fuel economy and a marginal reduction in jump initiation time probably isn't worth the 9 size spent on the additional hyperdrive. I think, for the Calista-Dal to really become competitive with the Equinox and Kaldos drives, it would need at least one of three things: 1. It could be more of a true middle option between the Kaldos and Equinox Drives, for which it'd need a shorter jump initiation time (its hyperspeed is already okay for this). 2. It could have a higher hyperspeed so that its lower power requirement has a more useful impact on fuel economy, after static power requirements are accounted for. 3. It could be made into an unusually small hyperdrive, which could make it more competitive in single-hyperdrive setups and might make it the preferred second hyperdrive for dual-hyperdrive setups (an extreme option related to this would be to rework it into a backup or emergency hyperdrive - make it slow enough that you'd never use it as the primary, but if it were, say, size-3 it might be worth putting one onto high-value ships to make it less likely that those ships will lose their ability to jump to safety - though if that were done I'd be inclined to remove the requirement that it be developed before the Torrent Drive can be developed).
Accuracy issues can further exacerbate such issues, especially in an extreme case such as with Death Rays and Titan Beams; the variance in expected time to kill a given target goes up as the damage gets concentrated into fewer shots, which can make high damage-per-shot low rate-of-fire weapons riskier than low damage-per-shot high rate-of-fire weapons of equal or similar damage per second.
#12 - Speaking of weapons: It appears as though whether or not a weapon is in firing range is determined by the instantaneous range between the ship carrying the weapon and the target at which the weapon will be fired, not by whether or not the weapon's projectile can reach the target, given the instantaneous range to the target and the current velocity of the target, prior to expiring due to passing beyond maximum weapon range. This is typically not an issue, though it can sometimes become one in chase scenarios with high-speed late-game vessels.
Similarly, I believe, though I am not positive of this, that the damage lost by a shot is determined by the total distance traveled from time of firing to time of impact, not by the instantaneous range from weapon to target. Thus, ships will deal more than the expected amount of damage for the range at time of firing during closing maneuvers, and the pursuing ship in a chase scenario will deal less damage per shot to the chase than the chase will to the pursuit when both vessels are armed with identical weapons.
#13 - When selecting the defenses of a ship, consider the types of weapons you expect to encounter. Armor is relatively expensive both per component and per unit size invested by comparison to shield generators, and so it is in general better to invest more heavily in shields than armor when choosing defenses unless your expected opponents make heavy use of weapons which bypass shields (i.e. railguns and gravity weapons) or unless your primary concern with the design is survivability against space monsters. I believe that gravity weapons only bypass armor in that they can damage any component on the ship regardless of whether or not armor is present rather than always damaging non-armor components, so armor may still provide some protection against gravity weapons to more valuable components, if only because of how the presence of the armor components affects the probability that any given component will be randomly selected to take damage from a hit from a gravity weapon, though I am not certain of this and, depending on how the component struck is selected, the effect may not be very large (for example, if the probability that a given component will be struck is weighted by its size relative to the total size of the ship, armor components will only marginally affect the likelihood that a given component will be hit unless very large numbers of armor components are used for the design).
It may also be worth considering expected engagement duration and frequency when choosing which shield generators to use; longer engagement durations and higher engagement frequencies, which might be expected when fighting comparable empires or powerful pirate factions, tend to favor shield regeneration rate over maximum shield strength, whereas shorter engagement durations and lower engagement frequencies, which might be expected when dealing with weak empires and minor pirate factions, tend to favor maximum shield strength over shield regeneration rate. Shield regeneration rate should also be favored over maximum shield strength if the ships are expected to enter into engagements shortly after completion.
#14 - When choosing engagement stances, note that 'all weapons' and 'standoff' are effectively the same if the longest- and shortest-ranged weapons on the ship have the same maximum range; if you want torpedo-armed ships to take advantage of their higher close-range DPS against weaker targets, you will either need to add at least one shorter-ranged weapon to the design or use the 'point blank' engagement stance instead of 'all weapons.'
The 'evade' stance considers only the range of the weapons carried by the targeted ship and does not care about the range of the weapons on your own vessel. This can result in ships set to 'evade' an enemy target closing with hostile vessels (which, in turn, can result in the hostiles being able to fire upon your ships due to the non-instantaneous nature of maneuvers), and it can also result in ships refusing to move into firing range of a target. The only types of warships which I would suggest considering the 'evade' stance for are bombardment ships and maybe carriers, both of which generally have poor ship-to-ship capabilities.
Also note that the game only considers the rated firepower of the vessel and its target in their current conditions when determining whether something is 'stronger' or 'weaker;' the way range affects the ships' damage profiles, the rates of fire of the ships' weapons systems, and the strength of the defenses of the ships are not considered. While this is probably for the best from a computational complexity (and thus game performance) perspective, it also means that the engagement stance settings of a design may sometimes result in ships choosing poorly when selecting their desired engagement ranges.
#15 - Speaking of stances, note that the engagement range that a ship in a fleet action attempts to maintain appears to be determined relative to a single target, and that it appears as though that target will not be changed until the target is destroyed, the ship is given another order, or the ship is forced to flee from the engagement. This can cause issues for standoff-only designs (most or all of the armament consists of missiles and fighters) in engagements involving more than one hostile ship, as there is no guarantee that ship B, having been selected by ship A as ship A's target, will choose ship A as its target, nor is there any guarantee that ship A's maneuvers to remain at standoff range relative to ship B will keep it at standoff range relative to some hostile ship C.
#16 - Death Rays and Super Lasers are not necessarily worth the design cost and are probably best avoided, despite the impressive names and extremely high rated per-shot damage. They (in particular the Super Laser) have rather extreme size requirements which, especially earlier in the game, can make it difficult to create a design with adequate speed and defensive capabilities; on top of that, the superweapons' combination of high energy per shot and low time-average power requirements means that superweapon-armed ships can often have excess reactor outputs significantly higher than they can reasonably make use of, which may create a temptation to spend more size on power-hungry weapon and sublight drive components than is perhaps wise, which further increases the risk of making the ship too thin-skinned to be effective. The high size per component, high rated damage per shot, and low rate of fire of Death Rays and Super Lasers also conspire to create a very high variance in expected DPS (and therefore time to kill a given target) compared to other weapon systems, which can make designs which invest in Death Rays and Super Lasers very luck-dependent or necessitate a more significant investment into defenses to increase the probability that the ship will survive long enough to destroy its target. Super Lasers have the added issue that ships armed with them are capable of destroying planets, and destroying planets can cause issues for your empire's reputation and remove things from the game which you might have preferred to take over - e.g. Korrabian Spice, one of the ruin wonders, or those 300 elite ground units you just had your invasion transports drop on the planet a second ago - so I would suggest that if you have access to and want to use Super Lasers, you only use them on purpose-built planet-killers and you be very careful about what you target with them.
There have also been suggestions that Death Rays have inherently lower accuracy than standard blasters. I personally regard this as unlikely, though as I have not done any statistical analysis or data collection to test the hypothesis I cannot say with certainty that it is false. Regardless, I suspect that the nature of the weapon (its impressive name, large and arguably very visible projectile sprite, and high rated damage) conspire to make it more noticeable - and more memorable - when the weapon misses, as the observer, consciously or not, likely has higher expectations for each shot from the weapon than for shots from standard weapons. On top of that, the significantly greater volume and rate of fire of standard blasters as compared to Death Rays is in my opinion likely to make it difficult for a casual observer (i.e. one not carefully tracking the number of hits and total number of shots by each weapon system) to accurately judge the relative accuracy of the two weapon systems, especially in
On the plus side for Death Rays and Super Lasers, it's rather unlikely that any ship equipped with them will encounter anything that counts as 'stronger' until fairly late in the game (in fact, I'd expect most designs to regard themselves as 'weaker' if they engage something equipped with a Death Ray; a ship armed with just one Death Ray and nothing else will be considered 'stronger' than any ship with less than 1385 firepower, if the information in the game manual is accurate, which is roughly 48 fully-upgraded Titan Beams or 28 fully-upgraded Plasma Thunderbolts, which is a level of armament that I would not expect to see on a custom design of my own which was smaller than perhaps size-1000, and would more likely be found only on designs in excess of size-1200). I also wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that rated firepower counted more heavily towards rated empire military power than any other combat-related ship statistic, and Super Lasers offer by far the greatest firepower per size of any weapon system (nearly four times that of Death Rays, which themselves have nearly 50% more firepower per size invested than the weapon system with the next-highest score), so if you want to develop a paper tiger military that makes the computer think you're too scary to go to war with, Death Rays and Super Lasers do a good job of inflating that score (granted, 'paper tiger' might not be a perfect descriptor for a space navy which has a large number of Super Laser-equipped ships; such vessels are unlikely to be particularly good at engaging other warships, but if you can blow up the planets of the enemy empire rapidly enough that doesn't really matter). That being said, I would not recommend the use of either Death Rays or Super Lasers on your primary warships. Special-use ships and things that might be better served by looking scary than by actually being scary, maybe, but not the mainstays of the fleet.
#17 - The jump initiation time statistic is arguably more important than the rated hyperspeed of a hyperdrive for ships intended for protecting the system in which they're stationed and perhaps also nearby systems; ships equipped with Kaldos Hyperdrives can reach points within about 0.2 sectors of the starting point of the jump before ships equipped with Equinox Jumpdrives can, and are also capable of completing jumps to points within the starting system before ships equipped with Equinox Jumpdrives finish initiating their jumps. Granted, especially out near 0.2 sectors from the origin of the jump, the difference in response time can be pretty small.
Another corollary to this is that there is arguably a reason to develop the final upgrade of the Kaldos Hyperdrive; mixing a fully-upgraded Kaldos Hyperdrive with a full-upgraded Torrent Drive produces a hyperdrive with a jump initiation time of 4 seconds, a hyperspeed of 36250, and a power requirement of 125. I think it's a bit questionable whether reducing the jump initiation time from 5 seconds to 4 is worth the higher power requirement and the additional research costs, however.#10 - Ships can use multiple hyperdrive components to get "the best of both worlds".
Eg; a ship fitted with both a kaldos AND and equinox drive will use the short initiation of the kaldos to start its jump, but will then use the higher top speed of the equinox to travel.
However, this does not seem to apply to power consumption as the highest demand takes priority. So the calista-dal drive is still largely useless.
Also, even if mixed hyperdrives had the power requirement of the hyperdrive with the lowest power requirement or of the hyperdrive which provided the hyperspeed, I'd question whether mixing the Calista-Dal Warp Drive and Kaldos Hyperdrive would be better than mixing the Kaldos Hyperdrive and Equinox Jumpdrive as the gain in fuel efficiency just isn't that high, after factoring in the effect of the ship's static energy requirement; Calista-Dal + Equinox would probably also lose out over just the Equinox, as increased fuel economy and a marginal reduction in jump initiation time probably isn't worth the 9 size spent on the additional hyperdrive. I think, for the Calista-Dal to really become competitive with the Equinox and Kaldos drives, it would need at least one of three things: 1. It could be more of a true middle option between the Kaldos and Equinox Drives, for which it'd need a shorter jump initiation time (its hyperspeed is already okay for this). 2. It could have a higher hyperspeed so that its lower power requirement has a more useful impact on fuel economy, after static power requirements are accounted for. 3. It could be made into an unusually small hyperdrive, which could make it more competitive in single-hyperdrive setups and might make it the preferred second hyperdrive for dual-hyperdrive setups (an extreme option related to this would be to rework it into a backup or emergency hyperdrive - make it slow enough that you'd never use it as the primary, but if it were, say, size-3 it might be worth putting one onto high-value ships to make it less likely that those ships will lose their ability to jump to safety - though if that were done I'd be inclined to remove the requirement that it be developed before the Torrent Drive can be developed).
RE: Collection of common info
Similarly, I believe, though I am not positive of this, that the damage lost by a shot is determined by the total distance traveled from time of firing to time of impact, not by the instantaneous range from weapon to target. Thus, ships will deal more than the expected amount of damage for the range at time of firing during closing maneuvers, and the pursuing ship in a chase scenario will deal less damage per shot to the chase than the chase will to the pursuit when both vessels are armed with identical weapons.
I can verify this behaviour.
I spend a lot of time tooling about using supply ships as specially outfitted pirate hunters, and such ships not being terribly swift in sublight means they tend to get into standoffs with pirate supply ships (especially early game) where each ship will try to pursue the other, while it's opposite will try to keep distance.
This leads to the pursuing ship getting mauled as it is flying into the weapons, while the pursued ship remains mostly untouched as weapons fire fizzles out before it hits.
This can be abused if you have more than a minimal amount of patience.
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Retreat1970
- Posts: 1125
- Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 11:09 am
- Location: Wisconsin
RE: Collection of common info
It's in the components.txt
Value5=damage loss per 100 units range
Value5=damage loss per 100 units range
RE: Collection of common info
The problem with treating this as confirmation of the game caring about total distance traveled by projectile instead of instantaneous range to target at time of firing for the purposes of computing damage per hit is that "X damage lost per 100 units range" is a valid description of both systems. Whether the game is using instantaneous range to target or total distance traveled at time of impact for the range used to compute damage lost is left ambiguous by the statement; you'd need a qualifier such as "X damage lost per 100 units range traveled" to remove the ambiguity in the value definition.It's in the components.txt
Value5=damage loss per 100 units range
Yeah, that's the general kind of situation that lead me to believe that the game cares about total distance traveled rather than instantaneous range difference for damage per hit. You also don't necessarily need patience to abuse it; a high ship speed and standoff or evade can do it automatically, though somewhat unreliably (especially if the opposing vessel also wants to fight at standoff range, or if it's a fleet action). I just haven't paid enough attention to what happens in that situation to be sure of what's going on, and uncontrolled cases like pirate attacks on resupply ships also have the issue that you don't necessarily know exactly what both ships have.I can verify this behaviour.
I spend a lot of time tooling about using supply ships as specially outfitted pirate hunters, and such ships not being terribly swift in sublight means they tend to get into standoffs with pirate supply ships (especially early game) where each ship will try to pursue the other, while it's opposite will try to keep distance.
This leads to the pursuing ship getting mauled as it is flying into the weapons, while the pursued ship remains mostly untouched as weapons fire fizzles out before it hits.
This can be abused if you have more than a minimal amount of patience.
Also, the weapon projectiles fizzling out before hitting doesn't necessarily mean that the projectiles lose damage based on total distance traveled, only that there's a check of some kind for whether or not the total distance traveled by the projectile has exceeded a maximum weapon range. Imbalance in damage per hit when the instantaneous range between ships is the same at the time each weapon was fired and the weapons in use are identical, however, would show that the game cares about total distance traveled by the projectile rather than instantaneous range to target at time of firing for the purposes of damage per hit (alternatively, if you know the exact weapon used by both ships and are taking note of the damage per hit, you can get at least an approximation of the range that the game used to determine hit damage, and if those ranges do not match, that would also confirm that the game cares about total distance traveled by the projectile rather than instantaneous range to target at time of firing for the purpose of computing damage per hit).
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Retreat1970
- Posts: 1125
- Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 11:09 am
- Location: Wisconsin
RE: Collection of common info
Quick question then: Epsilon has a range of 300, damage of 13, and a loss of 3 damage per 100 (whatever). Fired at max range it should do 4 damage to the target. Is anything I said true, or am I not getting it? Thanks.
RE: Collection of common info
I think you're not getting the distinction between scenarios. Say that we have a torpedo platform and a target; we'll use the Epsilon Torpedo you described for the torpedo platform's armament, and we'll assume that the range to target is 300 range units at the time the torpedo is fired. Assuming that the game cares about instantaneous range to target at time of firing for the purposes of computing damage dealt per hit, any torpedoes fired by the platform at this point should deal 4 damage to the target, assuming they hit, regardless of how the target moves. Assuming that the game cares about total distance traveled by the weapon projectile for the purposes of computing damage per hit and that the target moves directly towards the torpedo platform at a rate of 50 range units per second from the time the torpedo fires to the time the torpedo hits, the torpedo should deal about 8 damage - the torpedo moves towards the target at 60 range units per second and the target moves towards the torpedo at 50 range units per second for an overall rate of closure of 110 range units per second, giving the torpedo a flight time of about 2.73 seconds and a total distance to cover of about 164 range units.Quick question then: Epsilon has a range of 300, damage of 13, and a loss of 3 damage per 100 (whatever). Fired at max range it should do 4 damage to the target. Is anything I said true, or am I not getting it? Thanks.
In both scenarios, the torpedo is losing damage with increasing range; the question is whether the range in question is the range to the target at the time the weapon is fired or whether it's determined by the total distance traveled by the torpedo at the time it strikes the target (there are also other possible ranges which could be used, but these are the most obvious choices). Based on what I've observed within the game, noting however that I have not carefully tested the behavior, I would be inclined to say that the game cares about the total distance traveled by the torpedo rather than the instantaneous range to target for the purposes of computing damage dealt per hit.
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Uncle Lumpy
- Posts: 165
- Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 8:55 pm
RE: Collection of common info
Aeson,
Thank you for the explanation, as well as All of your explanations.
I have not tested, nor have I paid all that much attention in game play how this might work. I've always gone on the assumption that it was actual distance traveled to target and not distance to target when fired. IMHO that only makes sense, and it's also logical based on Real Life (F=ma). A bullet fired from a rifle, say, does lose "DPs," or Force, appreciable more at its extreme range. A target at the extreme range of the fired bullet, moving away from the firing rifle, should be struck be an infinitesimally (but calculable) smaller amount of Force upon impact based upon its actual distance from the rifle when struck and not upon its, relatively, shorter/closer distance when the rifle was fired.
I've been playing Retreat1970's mod (Hi, Retreat!) since summer, and using Nuclear and then Anti-Matter missiles. They lose no damage over distance traveled. If it has 65 DPs when fired, then it has 65 DP's at the end of its range of 1200 units distant. Great stuff!
Firestorm torpedoes! We don't need no steenking Firestorm torpedoes. We gots Nuclear missles. [:D]
Thank you for the explanation, as well as All of your explanations.
I have not tested, nor have I paid all that much attention in game play how this might work. I've always gone on the assumption that it was actual distance traveled to target and not distance to target when fired. IMHO that only makes sense, and it's also logical based on Real Life (F=ma). A bullet fired from a rifle, say, does lose "DPs," or Force, appreciable more at its extreme range. A target at the extreme range of the fired bullet, moving away from the firing rifle, should be struck be an infinitesimally (but calculable) smaller amount of Force upon impact based upon its actual distance from the rifle when struck and not upon its, relatively, shorter/closer distance when the rifle was fired.
I've been playing Retreat1970's mod (Hi, Retreat!) since summer, and using Nuclear and then Anti-Matter missiles. They lose no damage over distance traveled. If it has 65 DPs when fired, then it has 65 DP's at the end of its range of 1200 units distant. Great stuff!
Firestorm torpedoes! We don't need no steenking Firestorm torpedoes. We gots Nuclear missles. [:D]
I once heard there was a garage, which some said was air tight.
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Retreat1970
- Posts: 1125
- Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 11:09 am
- Location: Wisconsin
RE: Collection of common info
One recollection I have, and I have not played for some time now, is that the torpedo graphics actually fade out at distance. If that has anything to do with what we're talking about, then the distance is calculated at firing. Right? It's hard for me to work things out.
Uncle Lumpy: I'm glad you play my adaptation of Mordachi's mod. He's the mod genius, I just made it as hard as I could. I wish Twigster could have finished his AAR, but I understand why it becomes a chore. I'd do another one, but I'm fighting personal stuff, and I don't think I could mentally do one.
Uncle Lumpy: I'm glad you play my adaptation of Mordachi's mod. He's the mod genius, I just made it as hard as I could. I wish Twigster could have finished his AAR, but I understand why it becomes a chore. I'd do another one, but I'm fighting personal stuff, and I don't think I could mentally do one.
RE: Collection of common info
What you're suggesting is actually very, very hard to do outside of heavily-simplified special cases such as the torpedo platform and target example I gave earlier. If you want to do this accurately, you'd need to be able to predict everything that affects the target's maneuvers for up to several seconds into the future (with unupgraded Epsilon Torpedoes, five seconds if the rated maximum range is the range at which the projectile disappears, or somewhat more than six seconds if the projectile disappears at the range at which it would do 0 damage). It'd be much easier to just update the projectile sprite every few frames; hit damage (or a common variable controlling the both the fade-out and the hit damage, or a total distance traveled variable) could be updated at the same time, or the projectile could carry a timestamp to allow for easy computation of total distance traveled (and thus damage lost) at time of impact. Using instantaneous range to target at the time the weapon is fired to set hit damage is perhaps a bit more computationally expensive than updating a variable every few frames or using a timestamp due to the form of the distance formula in Cartesian coordinates but is also much easier than predicting the future accurately, and anyways it looks as though the game uses the instantaneous range to target for the purposes of determining in-combat maneuvers and whether or not weapons can fire so at least part of the computation is already being performed (granted, for these purposes you can skip taking the square root in the distance formula, which reduces its computational complexity, whereas you'd need to take the square root for the damage computation).One recollection I have, and I have not played for some time now, is that the torpedo graphics actually fade out at distance. If that has anything to do with what we're talking about, then the distance is calculated at firing. Right? It's hard for me to work things out.
I would suggest a great deal of caution in applying this analogy to weaponry in space, and moreover I would suggest that Newton's Second Law, while applicable, is not a very good way of explaining why bullets lose energy, or "damage," with increasing range in real life. Bullets lose energy with increasing range primarily due to aerodynamic drag, which would be negligible over any reasonable engagement range in virtually any region of space except maybe near planets or other massive bodies ("near" meaning at relatively low orbital altitudes, e.g. LEO for Earth) as space is a near-total vacuum. Radiation pressure and interactions with electromagnetic or gravitational fields might produce effects similar to aerodynamic drag, but would likely have negligible impact except on projectiles with very long flight times and moreover would not necessarily reduce weapon "damage" with increasing range unless you're factoring hit probability into "damage."IMHO that only makes sense, and it's also logical based on Real Life (F=ma). A bullet fired from a rifle, say, does lose "DPs," or Force, appreciable more at its extreme range. A target at the extreme range of the fired bullet, moving away from the firing rifle, should be struck be an infinitesimally (but calculable) smaller amount of Force upon impact based upon its actual distance from the rifle when struck and not upon its, relatively, shorter/closer distance when the rifle was fired.
RE: Collection of common info
Aye, a 'chore'... however, a vastly satisfyingly one. [;)] It truly is not over yet. [;)]
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RogerBacon
- Posts: 724
- Joined: Wed May 17, 2000 8:00 am
- Location: Miami, Florida, U.S.A.
RE: Collection of common info
Weapon damage loss over distance is based on the distance the weapon travels and has nothing to do with the range to target when fired.
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RE: Collection of common info
ORIGINAL: Damiac
#2 - 1 weapons/energy/hi tech plant is enough for 30 construction yards, at least. Space ports above colonies DO NOT need any cargo bays. (No, not even 1 for freight delivery, as is often mistakenly suggested)
Don't you loose out on Trade income if your spaceport has 0 cargo space alongside your trade module?