I think the ship that fires first is whichever gets the first turn where it moves into range and fires. If two ships are heading for each other, the faster one is more likely to get that first attack, but it really depends on how positions line up. If only one ship is attacking and the other is doing some misc job, the attacker will get the first shot. A simple test: attack an idle Q with a Boreas; the Boreas will get a round of fire for free, and will only take its first damage on the second round.Honved wrote: OOS combat is resolved at longer time intervals. The faster ship fires first, fires ALL of its guns once, and if the opponent survives, it then fires back with all of its own weapons.
Rate of fire is included in OOS damage calculation. If you mod a weapon to have 10x higher RoF, you will see 10x higher OOS damage. (I used to also think RoF might not matter, until I modded it to test it myself.)Honved wrote:Rate of fire does not matter, each gun fires only once.
Range is generally ignored; ships move to within 500 meters and attack. Laser towers have extended range (Plasma Beam Cannon range + 500 meters), and I recall reading orbital platforms do as well (though I never owned one of those to motivate testing it, and didn't see anything for this in the code I've looked at).DrSuperEvil wrote: 2: OOS combat is simplified in that lasers do not require energy to fire and are assumed to all have 10km range.
Multi-hit is somewhat factored in, since OOS bullet damage is set differently than IS. For instance, Plasma Burst Generator damage assumes 20x hits when OOS, bringing it up to around 2/3 of HEPT OOS damage.DrSuperEvil wrote:The damage dealt by lasers uses different values per second and ignores effects like multiple hit and fragmentation.
I think it is as pjknibbs said, 30 seconds when not watching, 5 seconds when watching. Or that is the intention; in practice, a round of combat occurs whenever the sector updates, which will be: when you open the sector map, 5 seconds after the last update if you are watching the sector map, 30 seconds after the last update if you stopped watching the sector map. Combat rounds are not adjusted for how much time actually passed.DrSuperEvil wrote:Each round of combat is every 10 seconds if you are not looking at the sector using the sector map and every 3 secdons if you are.
This gives rise to some oddities, like rapidly opening/closing the sector map to greatly accelerate OOS combat, or shield regeneration overpowering weapon fire during 30 second rounds. In my experience, if a trader comes under attack and has a script that is capable of retreating (most trader scripts are), then you should avoid opening that trader's sector map and triggering another combat round. The trader has a much better chance of escaping if it can get a full 30 seconds to regenerate shields and move away or jump before the next combat round occurs.
(Side note: I have some test notes from a while back that experienced 60 second OOS combat rounds when not watching, though a recent retest was seeing 30 seconds. So I am not 100% sure on what was going on there.)
A couple other things worth mentioning:
A missile fired in an OOS combat round will suppress normal laser fire. Since one missile is often less damage (maybe drastically so) than several seconds of laser batter fire, you generally want to avoid equipping OOS ships with weaker missiles, and should probably avoid missiles on M1 or M2 ships altogether. Mosquitoes are okay; they have low enough damage to not be used for combat.
Traders that get attacked OOS may turn to fight if they are equipped with any lasers. Unarmed traders do a better job fleeing. This may be less of an issue with jump capable ships; I don't use those enough to really know.
