a script preference poll about game balance.

[ouch]

ok here's the little situation I have.

I made a missile boat script. What it does is you select the missile you want to use, and a missile used for screening said missiles. So for instance I prefer silkworms as the missile and wasps for the screen to confuse the bad guys turrets. The script then gathers a list of all the ships in the sector and checks if there are any enemies within 10k.

Now for the cool part... The script will take the hull and shield level of the target and calculate the EXACT ammount of missiles needed to kill said target with the missile's yield that you picked and then launch the entire salvo of missiles at the target. That alone would be extremely deadly and quite legit considering how fast you can push the missile launch button yourself and you know for instance one silkworm will kill most m4's. But if the target has turrets the script will launch a user specified amount of missiles that you selected for the missile screen. this is PER TURRET found on the ship.

So for example: lets say I picked silkworms as the missile and wasps as the screen. I also specified that I only want to launch one missile screen per turret found and to only interupt the main missile salvo launch 3 times.

now lets say I found an completely unshielded galion (it's an pirate capital ship in XTM) the script would calculate that it would take around 6 silkworms to kill the thing. It would also see that it has 6 turrets. the script would then launch missiles like so:

wasp,wasp,silkworm,silkworm,silkworm,wasp,wasp,silkworm,silkworm,silkworm,wasp,wasp

and the galleon would be no more. The only problem is that there is no way to get the ships shield recharge rate, so the script can't take that into consideration. so if that ship had shields it will severely damage the ship, but it might not kill it completely. the higher the yield on the missiles the less important this is though. (because you need less missiles, and naturally less time to fire those missiles)

another miscalculation is rounding. say a ship needs 6.4 missiles to kill it. the .4 will be dropped off and only 6 missiles will be launched off. however you can easily change a 0 to a 1 in the floating point script I'm useing. this way it will always round the remainder up so you would get 7 missiles launched in that instance.

imagine 10 destroyers, gone as fast as the missiles can poor out... (which is just shy of 1000 missiles per realtime minuate) Missiles you thought were harmless (like mosquitoes) now become the ultimate un-escapable anti-fighter weapon. imagine a capital ship filled with firestorms or hammerheads... you can see my problem...

this script was made to make harmless ships like frieghters part of your offensive force. but instead they become quite capable of wipeing out entire sectors single handedly.

right now you can specify 3 different timeings. one for the missile fire rate, one for a delay in between salvos, and one in between checking all the ships in the sector to fire upon. I could put a limit on these timeing or let the player regulate the firepower themselfs as you do currently. There is 3 natural problems that will cause people not to go too crazy though. for one there is a danger of chain reaction of explosions leading back to the launching ship. another is that hundreds of missiles flying around really impacts the frame rate. the other is that sending a wall of missiles at a cap ship will cause around 75% to 50% less damage than the same amount of missiles impacting it independantly. I don't know why exactly, but I think the game simply has a hard time calculateing a lot of explosions that occur at one time.

The timeings are necessary because you can adjust them to the roll that you want the ship to play. you can have it casually launch missiles at a constant rate with long firetimes as damage increasing/turret destracting support craft. or you can have it lead an attack by launching missiles everywhere as fast as it can, then waiting for a bit and then finish off any survivors. or you can have it kill individual ships slowly just to lessen the numbers for your laser equiped support craft.

You can also specify a nonvalid missile for a ship. so lets say you have freighter filled with wasps, and you only want use it to give the enemy's turrets something else to shoot at. you can specify a firestorm for the missile, and wasps as the screen. this way it will only shoot missiles that it actually has, and has the capability to shoot. you can also have a ship filled with nothing but silkworms and specify them as both the screen and the missile. this means it will spam silkworms at targets with bigger shields. (because they have turrets, it usually means it has decent shielding) perhaps you want both ships and use them to spam silkworms whiile the other distracts the turrets.

So the question remains, do you guys want the script to be limited, or do you want full controll? keep in mind you yourself can launch missiles extremely fast. And I'm sure we've all encountered the missile spam where the ai launches like 6 missiles at once at you, and you have seen your own ships do the same. There is a rather high, never ending cost to maintain the missiles for a ship dedicated for this. not to mention with the quantity of missiles you will go through, you will eventually suck the universe dry of them if you don't build your own factories. but in the sake of balance you have to ask yourself: "would I want the NPC ships to run this script with no limits?" Imagine playing the game as a pirate and you and your fleet attack a frieghter with even a mere 30 silkworms and 10 wasps stored specificly for this type of defence. what if it had hornets instead of silkworms? Or how about 1000 mosquito missiles?

When I add per ship class missile launching and make the calculations allow for and overkilling percentage (to counter the shield rechargeing). and allow the fireing rates to be adjusted according to the shield strength of the ship it's installed on. and possibly auto choosing missiles based on yeild, speed, range and the targets counter ability for that missile. practicly nothing will stop a ship with this installed except other missiles. UNLESS you slow the fire rate is slowed down to something reasonable. or you make missiles either cause less damage or take up huge amounts of space.

edit: Ok the people have spoken! there will be no limits imposed on the script. thanks folks!