Differences Between Ship Equipment

[avilonrayne]

I'm trying to figure out if there are any hidden differences between various ship equipment items. Is there any way to find the full stats of a given piece of equipment?

Specifically, I'm looking for the following

• How long do different engines take to engage travel mode? I've narrowed it down a bit; see below.
• Do paranid engines have a drawback to go with their increased boost duration compared to argon/teladi? I know their normal and boost speeds are increased at the cost of travel speed.
• Do shields have any hidden aspects? I found the recharge rates in the encyclopedia, but besides that and capacity does anything else change?
• From what I can tell, paranid weapons and turrets aim and rotate more quickly and teladi guns have more hp. Everything else seems to be the same, and the argon guns get the worst of both worlds. Do argon guns get some hidden bonus to make up for it? They aren't even cheaper to build (same cost as teladi).
• How quickly do weapons run out of energy or overheat? I'm not sure which mechanic the game uses.
• How quickly do weapons recharge or cool off?

I really wish all of this was in the encyclopedia, and I wish shield recharge rates were right in the ship purchase/upgrade menu instead of hidden in the encyclopedia.

I have done some testing on engine travel modes. From what I could tell, combat engines enter travel mode and accelerate almost instantly, while travel engines take a few seconds before they'll fully start up and go above normal max speed. All-round engines were right in the middle. Because of this, you can boost before travel mode with combat engines to get a head start on the acceleration. They just pick right up where the boost leaves off if you enter travel mode right away. Travel engines on the other hand can't do this. If you boost first, then engage travel mode, the ship can no longer boost and the travel acceleration won't kick in right away. The ship slows back down pretty quickly to normal max speed, then it accelerates again, slowly, to the max travel speed once the travel mode fully starts up. This really seems backwards. Shouldn't travel engines be better at travel mode?

[pref]

Yeah, some equipment really misses a couple lines of info.

For me the most important differences between engines such as boost duration and travel drive warmup time were never mentioned on the UI.

[Axeface]

For me the most important differences between engines such as boost duration.

Thats the reason I exclusively use combat engines, they get 12 seconds of boost which translates directly to shield power saved, on M ships this is especially important. Means your ai ships dont completely drain their own shield all the time too.

[snorrewb]

Wait, all combat engines cut boost after 12 seconds? I had no idea!

[Angsaar]

If you extract vanilla's .cat's you can peek under the hood here:

assets\props\Engines\macros

and other equipment's folders in:

assets\props\*type*\macros

[Imperial Good]

Do shields have any hidden aspects? I found the recharge rates in the encyclopedia, but besides that and capacity does anything else change?

Recharge delay. PAR shields will start to recharge sooner than ARG and TEl.

From what I can tell, paranid weapons and turrets aim and rotate more quickly and teladi guns have more hp. Everything else seems to be the same, and the argon guns get the worst of both worlds. Do argon guns get some hidden bonus to make up for it? They aren't even cheaper to build (same cost as teladi).

Guns are the same for all factions. Even the main batteries are the same statistically despite being the only guns with race variants.

Turrets are just a mess. I suspect that at some stage it was intended that each faction had very different turrets but currently there is no reason to go anything other than PAR turrets as all PAR turrets rotate 10% faster and deal the same damage while only sometimes having less health than TEL variants. ARG turrets are just the worst of both.

How quickly do weapons run out of energy or overheat? I'm not sure which mechanic the game uses.
How quickly do weapons recharge or cool off?

Only guns have these mechanics and they are common between all races. Exception are main batteries which are statistically clones despite being unique for reach race.

[Angsaar]

Quick comparison of M engines:

Note: in audio at least 'attack' is how fast you go from 0 to something and 'release' is the opposite, so I'll assume a similar meaning here.

Edit: Overall game balance clearly took second place to bug hunting at this time, so I'd expect ship/component differentiation got put in the back-burner, in particular until DLC races are out so that Ego has time to think about how to approach each one.

engine_arg_m_allround_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="7" thrust="8" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="1" thrust="9" attack="30" release="20" />
<thrust forward="1094" reverse="1039" />

engine_arg_m_combat_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="10" thrust="8" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="0" thrust="8" attack="15" release="10" />
<thrust forward="1148" reverse="1206" />

engine_arg_m_travel_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="4" thrust="6" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="3" thrust="12" attack="45" release="30" />
<thrust forward="1094" reverse="984" />

engine_par_m_allround_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="8" thrust="8" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="1" thrust="8" attack="30" release="20" />
<thrust forward="1127" reverse="1070" />

engine_par_m_combat_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="12" thrust="8" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="0" thrust="7" attack="15" release="10" />
<thrust forward="1183" reverse="1242" />

engine_par_m_travel_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="5" thrust="6" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="3" thrust="11" attack="45" release="30" />
<thrust forward="1127" reverse="1014" />

engine_tel_m_travel_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="4" thrust="6" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="3" thrust="12" attack="36" release="24" />
<thrust forward="1061" reverse="955" />

engine_tel_m_allround_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="7" thrust="8" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="1" thrust="9" attack="24" release="16" />
<thrust forward="1061" reverse="1008" />

engine_tel_m_combat_01_mk1_macro
<boost duration="10" thrust="8" attack="0.25" release="1" />
<travel charge="0" thrust="8" attack="12" release="8" />
<thrust forward="1114" reverse="1170" />

[Axeface]

Wait, all combat engines cut boost after 12 seconds? I had no idea!

The boost lasts for 12 seconds which means your shield drain a LOT less.