Long range primary weaponry?

[Wraith_Magus]

As a Dwarf Fortress player, I first want to applaud your use of !!SCIENCE!!, Shrewd135.

As part of what I was saying before, if you are going to increase the "lifespan" of a weapon, you have to compensate by decreasing the rate of fire proportionately (and compensate for that change's side-effects with high damage-per-shot). Otherwise, you're tracking an order of magnitude more objects whose positions have to be updated once per frame.

The other alternative is to just plain make the bullets faster, although that of course makes them more effective against fighters, especially at close ranges.

Try looking at the Point Singularity Projector, and it's 6 shots per minute (one shot every 10 seconds) as opposed to the PPC, with its 43 shots per second - you'll find much less burden on the system if you up the range of the PSP.

Besides, it might also just plain look cool just to have the "big guns" fire only once every 5-20 seconds in giant world-shattering salvos like a real-world battleship. If it were graphically changed to make each shot have a larger "fireball" both as a traveling shot and when it impacts, you could make capital ship weapons something awe-inspiring with each shot taking huge, obvious chunks out of shields or hulls, rather than being more like a machine-gun exchange.

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As for fighters and even cap ships, I hope that AI will become smarter about "strafe" maneuvering more generally, and even erratic throttle control (just plain slamming on the breaks is equivalent to a hard turn for throwing off aim). At a great enough range, simply giving ships an awareness that they are in range (I.E. "when the music changes") queuing up erratic maneuvers at all times should be enough. Again, even a frigate can dodge if you're talking about ranges of 20 km. (Although I do hope that vector thrusters will be generally more useful in something larger than an M4 in Rebirth.)

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To go back to the notion of what makes fighters worthwhile, and how M4s are supposedly completely obsolete in this game, as well as the talk about how increasing weapon range and speed will "screw up laser/torpedo balance", I have to say... maybe they should be rebalanced.

Playing a little more AP, a M7M is basically capable of wiping out whole sectors single-handedly. The only drawback is the need for resupply, but it's still much easier to buy a couple supply TS ships to ferry you flails and hammerheads, and maybe even make some dedicated resupply complexes than it is to build and supply an M1 with escort frigates and corvettes and a constant supply of fighters with all their component weapons and shields and upgrades.

While this somewhat goes into the conversations had in the "capital ships as fast as fighters" thread's discussion, I'd like to see "bombers" be more like dive-bombers (or "lancers") that fire dumbfire missiles in such a way that it uses the momentum of the launching ship (which must be fast like an M4 or M5) to give the missile its extra thrust, and they simply spam dumbfire missile swarms on their dive-bombing runs while firing off erratic vector thrusts. At the same time, they are less maneuverable, especially while bombing, and need fighter escort, and will go down fast against flak towers. (They would, of course, have horrific attrition rates, but compensate by being cheap and potentially much more easily mass-purchased.)

This also gives M4 and M5 "interceptors" more reason to exist, as an M5-sized drone can be a more of a torpedo interceptor where speed is more important than firepower, while M4s can be predators for the dive-bomber M4s, while M3-sized drones are too slow to play anything more than a "zone defense" as a space superiority fighter.

That is, if you've ever played any of the Star Wars games like X-wing or TIE fighter, Y-wings are the bombers, while A-wings are the interceptors, and the game is basically rigged to make Y-wings beat capital ships if they are in sufficient numbers, and if the A-wings can stop the TIEs from swatting all your Y-wings out of commission.

Likewise, if you've ever played Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, the bombers in that game are very much swarm divebombers, and sending 6 or so squadrons of bombers in on a single target is quite visually impressive for the tiny specs that the bombers are in kilometers-wide battlefields - suddenly, hundreds of glowing dots of dumbfire rockets start staccato fire upon a soon-to-be-disabled capital ship. Again, with individually targetable turrets, M4 bombers on suicide runs can be used to target specific capital gun turrets, whether they are flak turrets (making them incapable of holding off further bomber attack if they lost the space superiority battle to your M3s) or runs on anti-capital guns (making them vulnerable to your own ship closing in to the range that those guns would have been effective in, and letting you pound away with your own heavy guns at ranges where they can no longer effectively dodge).

For that matter, it might be nice to have "suicide drones" that are basically just torpedoes that have the ability to fire vector thrusters and evade some incoming fire, or even have a turret to shoot back at an M5 hunting it down, but where it intends to just ram a cap ship with a nuke for a payload. (And when I say "nice", I don't exactly mean "nice for the target".)

This, in turn, means scaling back on the M7Ms and possibly even rethinking the M8 (which is basically an M6M, anyway). A M8 that instead concentrates on anti-torpedo flak for space superiority, as well as just vomiting absurd numbers of torpedoes would basically mean that an M8 could neutralize another M8 by just loading up on Mosquito-like missile-intercepting-missiles, and swarms of dive-bombing M4s could be a counter to missile corvettes and frigates. (Which would be countered by M5 interceptor or M3 zone defense screens.)

This, in turn, gives carriers more reason to exist, rather than just destroyers (or maybe out-and-out battleships and dreadnaughts, considering the greater focus on cap ships that don't have to be hypothetically vulnerable to a single M3 pilot) since it would rebalance the game more in favor of small fighter drones actually standing a meaningful threat in the game of fleet rock-paper-scissors.

[Scraphound]

You know, in Freespace and a lot of the other space sims I've played, one of the reasons bombers would hold on to their ordinance until they were close was because fighters would lock on to torpedoes and shoot them down before they reached their targets.

Talk about making M4s and M5s useful in battle. Give them a missile defense order. They protect the cap ship from anything targeting it, placing an emphasis on bombs and torpedoes over fighters.

I'd also suggest looking into missile racks or something along those lines. So while perhaps your M8 can carry 35 Tomahawks in its cargo hold, that's with the missiles being packed together and unusable. Your racks might only be able to accomodate 10 torpedoes for use in combat. Bombers could launch, make their runs, return to their carriers for refitting, and head out on another run.

Load times would also help. You shouldn't just mash the fire button and unleash barrage after barrage of death.

I'm eager to see what Rebirth does. I'm hoping that the game is heavily rebalanced, as the title seems to imply that it will be.

As it stands combat is really too easy and there are just too many ways to exploit the AI. I should not be able to destroy an entire sector with a single M7M supplied by a Flail/Hammer complex.

[Shrewd135]

Actually this could be remedied very easily if we just had more "banks" of guns to control. Say for instance on Broad side guns there were 3 banks... 2 of which you could program for attacking capital ships and the 3rd for attacking missles.

As it stands now, you have to give all 8 guns the same command.. which is pretty unrealistic.

It really depends alot, on how many targets the computer is tracking at one time. 1? or 10?

As it stands now, it only tracks as many as it has turret batteries. So increase the number of batteries and you get more fine grain control.

[Wraith_Magus]

Nexus was like that, although in a slightly more restricted manner. Your point defense turrets were strictly point defense turrets that only reacted to things they were designed to shoot down, like fighters, and never even tried shooting at other capital ships, while your capital ship guns would not fire at fighters.

Of course, there were only about 4 different main types of gun that you pretty much just kept upgrading over and over.

Since X:R is going to have a focus on turrets, rather than weapons banks, maybe there will be a way to break down targeting script by weapon type rather than by location. (That is, all PPCs only target cap ships, while FAAs go after fighters and torpedoes.)

[Danielwhateley]

There wasn't much problem with capital weapons in x3tc, it was more or less that capital ships had more weapon slots for turret points for attacking certain ships and could use the most damage dealing weapons the Photon Pulse Cannons, their range was almost 7km, and incendiary bomb launchers reached further, it wasn't as bad as a mass driver with only a 900m range

A bonus for capital ships range on all guns would of made that 900m look a little more acheiveable against larger targets

X:R wont need capital weapons reaching unexpected distances, i personally rather see the cannon/laser fire from the enemy rather than getting wacked with something i cant even see coming

I'm sure the devs thought it out thoroughly in the process of design, they will most likely have small, medium and large guns that are build able on capital ships, small ones designed for flak and short range, which track excellently and of coarse large ones, that reach out to a considerable distance instead of point blank and not too far that it is not noticeable/not exciting, or so far that if you have to start destroying subsystems with drones, or your special ship, that by the time you make it there, you could of made a coffee and boiled some water in the process.

[Wraith_Magus]

There wasn't much problem with capital weapons in x3tc, it was more or less that capital ships had more weapon slots for turret points for attacking certain ships and could use the most damage dealing weapons the Photon Pulse Cannons, their range was almost 7km, and incendiary bomb launchers reached further, it wasn't as bad as a mass driver with only a 900m range

A bonus for capital ships range on all guns would of made that 900m look a little more acheiveable against larger targets

X:R wont need capital weapons reaching unexpected distances, i personally rather see the cannon/laser fire from the enemy rather than getting wacked with something i cant even see coming

I'm sure the devs thought it out thoroughly in the process of design, they will most likely have small, medium and large guns that are build able on capital ships, small ones designed for flak and short range, which track excellently and of coarse large ones, that reach out to a considerable distance instead of point blank and not too far that it is not noticeable/not exciting, or so far that if you have to start destroying subsystems with drones, or your special ship, that by the time you make it there, you could of made a coffee and boiled some water in the process.

I don't follow your arguments... you start off saying the short-range weapons we have now are fine, then say that you're sure that we'll have longer-range ones, anyway?

The argument we were having was about what relative ranges "felt right", and whether or not weapons fire should extend out to ranges that a corvette- or frigate-sized ship should be capable of evading weapons fire at the maximum ranges of common anti-capital weapons.

As was said before, the faster and longer-range the weapons, the more it relatively just makes your giant, unmissable targets smaller (and at least feasibly missable) at the ranges that you can start engaging them. An M2 is still a much slower and larger target relative to your vision at 20 km or even 100 km than a M3-M5 is at 2 km. I don't even start shooting at a M5 that isn't running directly at or away from me at greater than 500 m unless I'm using PBEs.

That, in turn, gives better justification to the different gradients of weapons, since you can have extreme-damage weaponry that is too inaccurate to use against anything but capital ships at close ranges as a "knife fight" weapon, but still have longer-range weaponry that can hit capital ships, and which are accurate enough to be turret-disablers at shorter ranges, or which can target frigates at medium ranges that would be at least maneuverable enough to evade at ranges that an M1 would be incapable of evading.

[SirDeathwalker]

Another unintended consequence of much longer ranges, is Protect ship X, missions are now much more difficult.

I kinda figured some things may get "off" in the process

I would be interested to see the results of a 25% increase in bullet speed and if possible give a bonus to lifetime for capitol ship weapons (no more than 25%) granting capitol ships longer ranges. ( I tend to believe Cap ships should have about a 10 km standoff range vs another Cap ships, any closer then it becomes a wrestling/grappling match instead of a fencing match)

[Danielwhateley]

Well i never had a problem with my Photon Pulse Cannons hitting a corvette for instance, or even a M3, though its a bit overkill when just 3 of the projectiles hit and its 20% hull, they were only designed as anti capital anyway.

the slowness of capital ships in the game for instance a titan, it made up for it with its range with PPC's, even a corvette coming straight at it would have trouble evading unless it can strafe like the player which it cant.

The X:Rebirth game wont need 20km guns or even 100km guns like most are arguably noting, there was never a problem with capital sized weapons, they were balanced so they could deal with certain targets.

In a Turret View Mode, you could never even track a m3 yourself, you had to wait for it to be in the crosshair.

I understand how people would much rather 20km range on their guns instead of the fairly close 6km, and i dont know what the Dev's have planned for ranges on guns or even projectile speed, maybe the guns will only be able to lock onto capitals idk.

I personally just dont think it would be a good idea increasing the ranges on guns, as the Out Of System script was made, if you engaged in combat with 10 titans against another 10 titans, you would lose half or even all.

There are changes being made however, and from what i have read already, it looks like there will be multitudes of different ranged guns on capital ships, but the player ship will stay as one gun set.

One of the nicest things i liked about X3TC is the multitude of weapons you can choose from, they seem to be removing that from the player and implementing it on drones aswell as capitals and stations.

X3TC will always remain the better version of the X series, especially with the albion expansion, changes to the game play are easily weighed up and problems and benefits can be found in the changes.

The changes though, remind me too much of the regular dogfighting games you find, where your bound to 1 ship throughout the whole game, X:R will be much more outstanding however, but the original x3tc always had that "difference" which i enjoyed playing for that reason.

[Shrewd135]

One more thing to note.. some parts of the game seem to be hardcoded, and when you mess with ranges you really make things hard.

An example of this is when I added to the range of capital ship weapons that included xenon weapons... So when you jump into a xenon sector through a gate you usually had like 1 or 2km before you were in ranged of the J thats blocking the gate's guns... So if you did an immediate turn, and dropped behind the gate you can at at least add some distance between you two.

But now.. you jump in, and better start evasive maneuvers fast cause there is already a massive barrage of PPC, and other fire on its way, since you are now totally in range.

So the position of where a ship guards a gate, is already set, and you just messed it up .

Its not a huge consequence, but it can be tough on some missions.

I use the hypherjump mod, so I can jump into a sector away from the gate... so its not as big of a deal... but it is interesting.


I did want to reiterate though, the game IS BETTER with longer ranged weapons. Just that you have to take into account a few more things.

[Wraith_Magus]

Actually, I was just thinking about some things...

Basically, instead of making "bombers" be missile-launchers, why not just have lasers that are just really slow? HEPTs are already basically there for M3s to shoot other M3s or M6 or even M7s if en masse, and are useless against an M5 except at utterly point-blank range. Why not just make an even slower laser?

Say, 200 m/s laser, on a M3/M4, on a ship with a larger-than-normal capacitor, but somewhat smaller-than-normal laser recharge, so that it does "bombing runs" on capital ships. If it had a 3 k range (or 4 k or so if you are already using those extended ranges) and a rather low fire rate (60 shots per minute or so) paired with the slow speed, it's useless against fighters, but you could make it do something like 20k shield and 3k hull damage per shot.

If that ship has a rear or pair of turrets with anti-fighter weapons, and generally just plain being slow, with a battery of the "bomber lasers" as the main weapon. You practically already have an example of this in the Teladi Falcon Hauler (which can work as a missile bomber, as well) and also the Notus.

That way, you have laser bombers that take down M2s when en masse.

[SirDeathwalker]

you can get the same effect with certain missile types

[Wraith_Magus]

Yes, but they don't NEED to be missiles - you don't have OOS ships firing missiles quite like that, so you can't have rigged up bombers for OOS patrols, for example. Likewise, you wouldn't need to manage ammo for laser-bombers.

Besides which, you already can just rig up any old M3 to fire a bunch of tornados at a target, this would involve creating specialist dive-bomber type ships that have specialist AI, and help differentiate combat between different specialist ship types.

As you can see with the constant expansions of ships like M2+, M7M, TM, M7C, the new variants of TS that have slightly more guns, etc, the game is expanding through specialization and differentiation.

Why not reflect that in more specialist weapons, as well?

[Flaming Blastclaw]

Particle weapons should have medium range over 10km and 10% the speed of light.

Lasers should have enormous range over 100km and speed of light.

Projectile weapons such as bullets and missiles should have infinite range and speed of 1000m/s to 5000m/s.

[Wraith_Magus]

Particle weapons should have medium range over 10km and 10% the speed of light.

Lasers should have enormous range over 100km and speed of light.

Projectile weapons such as bullets and missiles should have infinite range and speed of 1000m/s to 5000m/s.

That's true hard science. We're not going to have that in this game, if only because infinite range on a bullet means that each bullet would stay in memory forever (or at least, until a trip through a superhighway) which would mean that any firefight would hog huge chunks of memory that rarely would ever get reclaimed.

Keep in mind that many bullets currently have a lifespan of a few seconds, and rates of fire that mean that any single gun can only have a half dozen or so bullets live at any given point in time.

Shrewd's simply upping the ranges on the guns (without lowering rate of fire or upping bullet speed) resulted in more bullets being in memory at once, and as such, the game's framerate suffered.

X:R seems to be changing how guns work, and is apparently just having one huge gun to each turret, instead of banks of 8 identical guns in every turret. Part of the problem is that each turret fires 8 individually tracked bullets at a time, so consolidating that down to just 1 individually tracked bullet may let ships fire 8 times as many live bullets at a time, which means you can potentially octuple the range of the bullets from that alone.

[Flaming Blastclaw]

That's true hard science. We're not going to have that in this game, if only because infinite range on a bullet means that each bullet would stay in memory forever.

But I want realistic physics: realistic or at least believable power sources, explosions, damage, collisions, motion...

How about making projectiles disappear after 1 minute?

A decent 3570k Ivybridge system with 16Gb DDR3 and a HD7950 should handle all the realistic physics Egosoft could ever dream of.

By the time X-R is ready Intel Haswell should be available which means systems will be 5-20% faster.

[Wraith_Magus]

Egosoft isn't going to turn a profit if they exclude anyone who doesn't have computer models made within the last month from playing their game. You have to design your game for systems that are a few years old.

And keep in mind that some high rate of fire projectiles, like the Pulsed Beam Emitter only last for a second. (They have a maximum reach of 1 km, and reach that distance in a little under a second.) What you are talking about isn't something a 20% increase in computer power fixes, you're talking about adding tens or hundreds of times as many projectiles for the computer to spend time calculating their new positions.

There is strategic value in those sorts of weapons, as well. I put PBEs on my M6s in spite of the low range because of their shield-popping capacity, and the heavy hull damage of an ISR makes a good pairing for it. However, many people eschew the limited-range weapons, and that provides for some good game choice for the player to mull over.

Besides which, even realistically, lasers diffuse or lose focus long before they have traveled whole light minutes. Lasers that have traveled past the point where they are focused are no more hazardous than a flashlight. Ionized plasma bursts radiate out energy and lose potency and cohesion as well, and weapons like Plasma Burst Generators that are sprays more than beams have good reason not to travel terribly far before losing effectiveness.

[Flaming Blastclaw]

What you are talking about isn't something a 20% increase in computer power fixes, you're talking about adding tens or hundreds of times as many projectiles for the computer to spend time calculating their new positions.

I said 20% faster than Ivybridge.

The X3 engine was designed for single thread CPU's from 2003?

Ivybridge has cutting-edge technology such as a new random number generator that's faster, latest SSE and AVX instructions.

Depending on the model we can have 4-16 threads running, use DirectX 10/11/12 which has much lower overhead than DX9 used in X3.

So it's more like a 2000% increase.

Modern GPU's can add another 4Gflops if needed too.

So in the end it's the software, the skill of Egosoft in developing an space simulator engine thats holding things back, not the hardware.

[Nanook]

Please keep the discussion to the upcoming game, Rebirth. Discussions of hardware and such belong in the Off-Topic forum. Thanks.

[SirDeathwalker]

How about a modifier on "main" weapons only on m7 or larger (or only m2) extending the "lifetime" of the weapon 25% to 50%, and only on larger weapons. Basically a modifier on weapons placed in the "main" weapon bays. Basically considered "spinal mount" weapons, larger versions where the ship is built around the weapon system (as a story justification for the modification).

Or maybe only 10% for M7's and 20 - 25% for M2's, giving the larger vessels back the advantage of size, too bad not ALL M2's mount "main" guns, of course, neither do all M7's.

[Wraith_Magus]

There are three ways to have longer-range weapons without having more bullets tracked by the game than we already have.

One is to increase bullet speed without increasing lifespan - a bullet that lives for 10 seconds and moves at 400 m/s travels 4 km, while a bullet that lives for 10 seconds and travels at 800 m/s will travel 8 km without having any additional bullets in memory at the same time.

The second is to decrease rate of fire proportionally to the rate at which you increase bullet lifespan. A PPC bullet lives for about 30 seconds and has a rate of fire of around 40 shots per minute. You can reduce that to 20 shots per minute, and let the PPC bullet live for 60 seconds, and double the range that it travels without changing the speed. This makes more sense for capital ship guns that you don't want being fast enough to shoot down fighter craft.

The third is to have less guns, but make those guns more powerful and longer-ranged. Consolidating a turret with 8 guns down to a turret with 1 gun that can have eight times as many bullets flying at the same time has no net effect on memory. This also makes more sense for the big guns on a capital ship, which usually have banks of 8 guns per turret, anyway.

You can mix-and-match these, as well.

In fact, we have seen "XL turrets" in the screenshots, but it may be possible for cap ships to have the capacity to jam 2 L-sized turrets in a XL turret location, and have the guns slaved to fire at the same time like current guns do, giving some flexibility of weapon choice, but making the XL turrets have the bullets that travel really, really far without paying a massive price in rate of fire, taking advantage of that third trick.