Posted: Mon, 9. Jul 07, 11:57
What is fun is a personal opinion. However, what happens OOS can affect the "amount" of fun, one way or other.
wyvern11 wrote:so these are some of the results we think we found so far from my point of view
(to be continued or disagreed if necessary )
- OOS combat comes in two slightly different flavors - watchin sector-map
and not-watching sectormap. if sectormatch is watched, then combat timestep is 5 seconds. if not, it is 30 seconds
- although it looked otherwise on first notion, it makes no difference to combat outcome if one watches via map or not. the same combat with same damage-rates seems to take 6 times longer
- independently every 3 seconds shield recharge is calculated from shield generator strength after known rules and added to overall shield
- missile usage and damage is taken into account. for capital ships only torpedoes might affect the outcome, but in 1:1 situations are easily overpowered by heavy guns
- player possession of larger numbers of capital ships seem to affect strength of hostile races. it looks as if scale is tipped such that losses occur almost twice as often. how this is achieved by game remains unclear yet
and now some advice: do not take my experiments all too serious - they stem from testing series which i did my best to do as reproduceable as possible. there is no evidence based on hard facts for these theories - it might all be "bad luck" only
newdean wrote:1. As you acquire more M1s and M2s, OOS combat gets harder, and combinations that would have been easily defeated at an earlier time when you had fewer capital ships become steadlily more deadly to your OOS gatekeepers. This does not appear to happen to the same extent when you load up on M6s, M7s and TLs. Implication: (A) Don't add M1s and M2s unless you want to have the OOS landscape continue to become steadlily deadlier; (B) there is a point it might be wiser to stop at, before adding further capital ships; and (C) this enormously complicates cross-game comparisons of ideal OOS gate keeping forces: My Elephant plus Dragon plus LXs and Pirate Falcon Vanguards may be very successful holding forces in my game, but because you have more capital ships, might be a suicide squad in yours, gate keeping the exact same sector.
2. Hangared fighters appear to have no value OOS. Implications: (A) Don't waste your money on stuffing the hangar of your OOS Raptor or elephant (unless you deploy the fighters once it's at the sector its patrolling/protecting); (B) M2s are much more cost effective OOS killers than M1s, if you can deal with their sluggish speed.
3. Carried (cargo) but not installed weapons are not taken into account in OOS fighting, and have no value OOS unless then installed. Implication: Your raptor you have optimized to take out swarms of fighters IS with flaks probably ought to have those weapons swapped out with GPPCs before you send it to guard a sector OOS.
4. Missiles actually may have some utiltiy OOS, but only the most damage-causing ones.
5. OOS TL set on "attack all enemies" can do well against a popped cluster, but set on "attack [cluster]" flubs spectacularly, as it does not select a second target once the cluster pops. (This effect caused me to misunderstand the mechanics of what happens when you watch OOS combat--I thought it was watching that had nerfed my TL, but it was the attack command I'd given it.)
6. Watching or not watching has some effect on the timing of combat rounds, which has some impact on the durability of the losers (takes longer to die, if you're jumping in to save it.) Might have some impact on matchups of beams vs. shield regeneration but uncertain, and for the most part OOS is OOS, very similar whether you watch or not.
- OOS means "Out of Sector". "Out of Sector" means all the other sectors than the one sector where the player ship is. No OOS sector is ever rendered in 3D.
- Game engine has a variable: 'galaxy flight timestep'. It is 30 seconds for OOS sectors, unless the sector map of that OOS sector is open. In that case the timestep is 5 seconds. Ship positions and attacks are resolved only at every timestep. Shields, however, recharge every 3 seconds on all OOS sectors.
- Shields have their internal maximum recharge rate. Most ships have shield generator stronger than needed to recharge all shields simultaneously. We have not actually tested whether shield regeneration follows exactly the same rule as in sector, but it seems to do so.
- OOS combat resolution is as simple as possible. Any added complexity would decrease the performance notably.
- OOS attacks cause random amount of damage. There appear to be modifiers to possible damage values, but they are difficult to determine due to the randomness.
- Was it mere randomness, or does the same weaponry do the same average amount of damage on one "5 second" attack as it does on one "30 second" attack?
- Only installed weapons cause damage.
- Turrets do not have to run any command for the installed guns to do damage.
- Ship with command 'None' positioned exactly on enemy will not do damage, even if it has installed weapons and its turrets are set to 'Attack all enemies'.
- Larger weapons seem to do more damage than light weapons.
- Larger ships (maybe weapon generator or ship class) seem to do more damage per hit of same gun than smaller ships.
- In fleet engagement targeting plays important role. If ship fails to target (and kill) the greatest threat first, it will sustain more damage.
- Missiles are consumed and do damage OOS.
- Missile damage is probably not affect by the ship type.
- Missiles cannot be targeted OOS, and thus there either is no missile defence, or it is a hardcoded modifier to the missile attack.
- Swarm missile seems to do damage for one warhead only.
- PSG, FAA, IonD do not do area attacks OOS. Thus, no "friendly fire incidents".
- "Enemy" races seem to have slight advantage on combat resolution. "Friendly" races seem to have 50%-50% chance on one against one combat (of identical ships).
- The number of player owned M1 and M2 seems to improve the advantage of the "enemy" race ships.
- I had a Dragon with front guns installed but no active hardpoints in the selected weapon group. It seemed to kill a Pirate OOS. I do assume that weapon groups are ignored OOS. Needs verification.
- Scene seen on OOS sector map: Caiman enters from Gate. Pirates are near and attack. Caiman releases Drones and continues its Task (dock at station). Caiman outruns the Pirates and survives. The Caiman might have been faster than the attackers, or something distracted the attackers.
- Carriers do not launch their fighters OOS.
- Docked fighters do not affect the combat of a Carrier OOS.