Huperdrive, Sublight and Meneuverability

[E3]

Hey...

I'm not a newbie to Rebellion.

I've been playing it for yours.

Well I WAS playing it for years. Lost the cd.

Just got a copy of the game again.

 

I used to use RebEd (back when it was still using s cjb.net address)

So I've picked up RebEd again.. got some nifty cards.

But I'm editing some stuff..... and I come to a snag.

 

Hyperdrive ratings.... which is faster the high or lower number?

Sublight movement, which is faster the high or lower number?

Meneuverability? Do I want to set this high or low?

 

While answers can be made here, I would prefer a reply via IM.

ICQ - 78636278

AIM - E3G4R3

MSN - e3g4r3@hotmail.com

 

thanks

[Lord_La_forge]

The higher number is always better, so it is faster. You can check it by yourself, by looking at the different ships stats... (for ex. the death stars sublight s. is only 1)..

[E3]

I assumed higher was better in every case.

 

I remember, back when RebEd was being distributed from its cjb.net site, a specific card. One of the many copies of the Eclipse Star Destroyer. It could get anywhere in the galaxy from anywhere in a day, maybe 2 days maximum. I forget the exact hyperdrive rating it had.

 

Now, the highest I can set the hyperdrive is 150, and it takes ships several days just to move accross a single sector.

[Evaders99]

For hyperspeed, lower is better.

[Jahled]

Honestly dudes

 

The lower the hyperdrive rating the better, as Evaders Says.

 

Good edited hyperdrive settings are about 60 for ships, 50 for the best, and 45 for exceptional ships such as the Assualt Transport... any lower than this the game breaches the silly; in my opinion, though; 45 seems to be the limit of of the game's capability.

 

Go any lower and you'll mash the AI's stupid sense of intelligence...

 

..err..progra....

[Trejiuvanat]

I use Hyperdrive at 40 for the Shuttles, 50 for the CorGunship and the Lancer, and 60 for almost everything else. SSD has 65, ESSD 70. Oh and Golans 0!!!

[E3]

And what about weapon reload rating?

 

I've tested and tested

 

I've set them low...... and my ISD's have taken minuits between shots.

I've set them high.... and seen no visable difference?!?!?!? WTF?

[Jahled]

Yes, I'm curious about this as well.

 

The only (perhaps mis-informed observation) I have of weapon recharge is with powerful capital ships capability to similantious blast with turbo lasers and ion canons...

 

And informed response, someone?

[Jahled]

Yes, I'm curious about this as well.

 

The only (perhaps mis-informed observation) I have of weapon recharge is with powerful capital ships capability to similantious blast with turbo lasers and ion canons...

 

And informed response, someone?

[LordVader]

Yes, I'm curious about this as well.

 

The only (perhaps mis-informed observation) I have of weapon recharge is with powerful capital ships capability to similantious blast with turbo lasers and ion canons...

 

And informed response, someone?

 

Sorry this isn't an informed response, just another vague non-sensical rambling....but what if the weapon recharge rate referred to how quickly the weapon regains it's numerical value?

 

I've noticed that the weapon recharge rating of the ship seems to diminish at the same time as the value of the weapons.

 

Another thing, has anyone ever seen a ship with turbolaser, ion cannon and laser capabilities shoot all three in a battle? I added laser cannons to the bigger capital ships but have yet to see it being used in combat (you can tell whether a ship uses laser cannons or turbo lasers by the different sound it makes).

[Trejiuvanat]

I didn't know that. I usually do not give lasers to the bigger capships, to keep the game balanced.

About the weapon reacharge I think its what Evaders pointed out, how much time a weapon needs to fire again...

[E3]

So logicaly, then, smaller values fire quicker.

 

 

YET, when I set the recharge low, it would still take a long time to fire between shots. It woudl fire a few times at that rate, and then not for for a few minutes.

 

Luckily, its my BIG ship, so its shields held out untill it was able to fire its second volley.

 

I've set the rechage values to the other end of the spectrum, and seen no visable difference.

[LordVader]

About the weapon reacharge I think its what Evaders pointed out, how much time a weapon needs to fire again...

 

Where did Evaders say this? Thought he was talking about hyperdrive ratings...

[Evaders99]

Fine, now I'll say it.

 

I think weapon recharge is "lower is better" - but obviously they made a cap there so you couldn't have ships dying left and right. Oh well.

 

That's my thought on it, but I've not tested it.

[Bromley]

That doesn't sound correct for two reasons:

 

1. Upgraded ships have higher recharges (i.e. 40 vs. 20 for Imp SD II vs. I)

 

2. Damaged ships have lower recharges (i.e. 20:40 for a damaged Imp II SD).

 

I've seen someone post on Usenet that they thought it was a % of weapons that can be brought to bear, but I don't think that that's strictly accurate. According to a strict interpretation of this, An Imp II SD could bring to bear 40% of 400 weapons, whilst an Imp I SD only 20% of 200 weapons. That just doesn't sound right to me.

 

One thing that I've noticed is that all the capital ships (Dread and above, including the DS) have a 10:1 ratio of recharge to best weapon facing (i.e. SSD 500 TL + 200 IC = 700, weapon recharge 70). The other ships appear to have heavies/10 + 2/3*laser/10, although the Carrack and Star Galleon are insistant on buggering that up . I suspect that the TL on the Carrack were a late addition and the recharge wasn't adjusted to reflect them and that the Star Galleon was just a typo of 1 instead of 2.

 

You'll note that, assuming that points damage to recharge does not involve some hidden variable, 1 point of damage to weapons recharge will affect laser carrying ships more than TL/IC ones as lasers only get 2/3 of the recharge points that TL/IC ones do. Not really sure if that's important, but Coolhand obviously thought it was important enough to impliment the 2/3 rule rather than just treating lasers like TL/IC.

 

This formulaic approach seems to fit with what I've seen of the character stats. Coolhand put little effort into determining the "correct" stats of people and they've done the same here. Not that that's a bad thing really, just an observation.

 

Which brings us back to that Usenet post. When you are damaged and your recharge rate drops to 0:20, your weapons don't fire in tactical. So he may be right in that, if you are at 10:20 then 50% of your weapons on any facing will fire. Given the name (Weapons Recharge ) it seems more likely though that it just takes your weapons twice as long to recharge, effectively meaning that only 50% fire in the time it would take 100% to if you were undamaged.

 

This is a separate issue to the total number of weapons available to fire, which may be reduced by damage. It's further confused because there appears to be either a variable time to recharge or a variable time to acquiring a target after a weapon is recharged. Still, my best guess would be that it is better to have 100:100 than 10:10 as you can absorb more damage with a lower reduction in % firepower available (i.e. each point is only a 1% loss rather than a 10% loss).

 

Regarding a relationship between recharge and actual weapons being damaged, it's not a direct relationship. I have an Imp I SD with 5:20 recharge but 17&17 on the front arc. If they were directly related then you'd expect to see 3:20 or 4:20 recharge.

 

[/long uninformed response ]

[Bromley]

Another thing, has anyone ever seen a ship with turbolaser, ion cannon and laser capabilities shoot all three in a battle? I added laser cannons to the bigger capital ships but have yet to see it being used in combat (you can tell whether a ship uses laser cannons or turbo lasers by the different sound it makes).

 

Just did some testing. My ISD with 1 TL, 1 IC and 1000 lasers took out a Y-Wing in 2 shots, so I think they work regardless of the actual sound file used .

 

EDIT: hehe, I could have just used my brain instead. The Carrack and others work fine, so TL & lasers are obviously okay together. The lasers obviously work because the Carrack can kill fighters and The TL obviously work because the Carrack can kill Covettes.

[E3]

Well I think he meant, since TL and IC cannot target fighters, and LC do target fighters, that he has never seen a ship shoot all 3 weapons at once; the LC at fighters, and the TL/IC at capital ships.

 

I've never seen it either. Ships seem to target just ONE ship and fire on it, either the TL/IC (they do fire together it seems), or the LC. So one target only.

[Bromley]

Well, it's difficult to test. Put it this way, with one TL, 300 IC and 1400 lasers I was hitting the enemy ships with a blue effect and a green effect. Both did about the same damage.

 

So my contention is that any sound effects are just that - the ship still fires at least it's two best weapons. Given that fighters fire up to three weapons, I suspect that the game fires all three for cap ships but clups the lasers and TL together. Still, that's the hard part to test .

 

btw, TL do target fighters, just not very well. I haven't seen a blue effect hitting a fighter, so I think that we can assume that IC don't target them.

[LordVader]

EDIT: hehe, I could have just used my brain instead. The Carrack and others work fine, so TL & lasers are obviously okay together. The lasers obviously work because the Carrack can kill fighters and The TL obviously work because the Carrack can kill Covettes.

 

I wonder about the TL being used primarily to kill Corvettes, consider the strength of the Carrack's TL. A possible theory is that the LC would do more damage to the shields because it fires more quickly, giving the Corvette less time to recharge the shields. I've noticed that ships with LC's take a long time to destroy the hull's of disabled ships, whereas TL are more effective.

[Bromley]

Just tried a test. I took out the lasers and added a gravity well to the Carrack.

 

Here's the thing. Despite being attacked by a corvette and a Y-Wing, I managed to cut the corvette's shield recharge down to 2 rings before they'd even noticably damaged mine.

 

You know how the first few seconds of combat seem to have higher rates of fire than later? Well, even after that, I was getting ~2 shots off for every 1 the corvette made. When I reset and tested a normal Carrack with a gravity well, after the initial flurry of multiple shots, it settled down to ~1 for every corvette shot.

 

This would seem to indicate that if you reduce the 10:1 TL:recharge ratio then you increase the rate at which it recharges. In this case it was 15:6 or 2.5:1, due to the removal of the lasers, although it would have been even higher if the Carrack's weapon recharge had followed the usual pattern. Presumably the initial high rate of fire occurs because you go into battle with all weapons charged.

 

That might sound obvious, but I assumed that E3's testing indicated that recharge points were only important for damage purposes in determining a % of damage to recharge. I'll have a go at testing with a couple of similar ships but hugely different recharges.

Edited November 12, 2003 by Bromley

[Bromley]

Yep, recharge definitely affects the speed of fire.

 

Two tests.

 

(1) Two SDs configured with 50 TL each. Recharge of 1 on A and 100 on B (normal recharge for this many TL would be 5).

 

RESULT: A fired 6 shots, B fired 26.

 

(2) Two SDs, C configured with 50 @ recharge of 10 and D configured with 100 @ 5. C would normally have 5 and D normally 10, so C is operating at twice normal recharge, whilst D is at only 1/2.

 

RESULT: C fired 25 shots, D fired 14.

 

 

Not sure why E3 didn't experience this sort of thing, but maybe he increased the TL/IC numbers, making any small change to recharge less effective, or just didn't test the extremes?

 

Note that, based on test (2), it doesn't look like recharge is linear down to zero. So it's likely that setting recharge to 5x usual will not greatly increase the number of shots fired over setting it to 2x. Either that or recharge is linear but doesn't intersect the origin and we just don't notice normally because the ships weapons are destroyed in a similar ratio to the recharge, meaning that when we reach zero recharge we have zero weapons. To test this:

 

(3) Two SDs and a Carrack. All with 50 TL, E with 0 recharge, F with 5 and G with 20 (G was the Carrack, but that shouldn't matter). Expect recharge is 5, so G is 4x recharge and F is expected.

 

RESULT: E fired 3 (at the beginning), F fired 29 and G fired 41.

 

That confirms that weapons are already loaded when battle commences as after the first minute E didn't fire again. It also suggests that you get a decreasing return to scale. So if you assign a recharge of 100 to a ship that only has 100 TL, you'll increase the rate of fire over that of a ship with the standard 10 recharge rate, but by say x2 rather than by x10.

[vakundok]

Theoretical answer:

When the weapon recharge drops to zero, the ship can still fire. Once with every (unused) fire arcs.

The higher the weapon recharge rate is the better, however, I think there is a limit, possibly the sum firepower and values above that have no use. It also seems that it is not linear, so four times the weapon recharge seems to cause only two times faster firing ...

 

EDIT:

Oops! I am sorry, Somehow I have failed to see the last reply.

[LordVader]

I wonder if Admirals make a difference to the ship(that they are on)/fleet's capabilities such as weapon recharge, shield rating, DCR- if the Admiral encourages ships to repair more quickly and speed ?

[vakundok]

I am interested whether the weapon recharge is cumulative or not. I mean:

1. Do different weapon systems affect the fire rates of each other (x TL + x ion + y recharge against x TL + y recharge)?

2. Do different fire arcs affect the fire rates of each other (x TL on all arcs + y recharge against x TL on front only + y recharge)?

[LordVader]

I am interested whether the weapon recharge is cumulative or not. I mean:

1. Do different weapon systems affect the fire rates of each other (x TL + x ion + y recharge against x TL + y recharge)?

2. Do different fire arcs affect the fire rates of each other (x TL on all arcs + y recharge against x TL on front only + y recharge)?

 

That's far too technical for my simple brain. The only thing that interests me with the ships combat capability is: can it move and can it shoot. If not, it's quite useless until repaired

[Bromley]

I am interested whether the weapon recharge is cumulative or not. I mean:

1. Do different weapon systems affect the fire rates of each other (x TL + x ion + y recharge against x TL + y recharge)?

2. Do different fire arcs affect the fire rates of each other (x TL on all arcs + y recharge against x TL on front only + y recharge)?

 

1. Yep. Per my post of Wed Nov 12, 2003 6:56 pm, there appears to be just one recharge. Removing the lasers but leaving the recharge meant that the TL fired much faster. I'm not certain, but it is possible that lasers recharge faster than TL & ions and that's why recharge on laser ships is 2/3*lasers/10, rather than the customary weapons/10.

 

2. Good question. Instinctively I'd say yes, recharging weapons on a now non-facing arc would slow down recharging of weapons on the facing arc, but I've no proof for that.