Idle_Scholar

I like how the Assault Frigates appear to be spinning on the spot.

Yeah my (Styver) Thranta's got taken out trying to shoot down TD's, before I could give them proper targets. The Eidolon of mine was supposed to disgorge a bunch of non hyper capeable fighters but only one of them actually docked before it jumped. Oh well at least it undocked and moved to engage some TD's as per the docked/attack thingy.

Has anyone been able to sucessfully salvage weapons and then re-arm the missiles on fighters?

Ok I think I've found it. Select a ship in the unit viewer. Select a left forward weapon with part of the forward firearc in the -ve direction (with 0 at +ve X and -ve angles in a clockwise direction from the X axis, as defined by my crude ASCII axis) Y^ | | | | ___________> X Now rotate the ship anti-clockwise and watch the -ve part of the weapon arc first subtract from the positive bit, then gradually return as the ship continues on its anti-clockwise roatation. For some reason this doesn't apply to weapons mounted on the right of the ship.

Is there any way to ditch cargo? Or preferentially salvage a single type (say just weapons)? Or transfer cargo between capital ships (maybe a reason to buy shuttles)?

If you view the fire arcs for ships in GalSim's stats viewer, the forwards fire arcs are currently incorrectly displayed. If this reflects on the actual simulation then there's a tiny bug there.

You could also put a maximum (time) limit so people can't mistakenly make ridiculously long jumps. Also I really think there's something 'off' with the speed of combat. It's generally over in two turns, sometimes three, and that doesn't really give you much chance to influence what's going on. It might be better with the really large capital ships but once the main game starts is everyone going to be wandering around with fleets of SD's as their standard unit?

It's done. If anyone notices any errors or has any improvements to make then feel free to modify the file and re-post it.

I've made an excel spreadsheet comparing all the stats of the ships currently in the price bracket. If anyones got a way to host it that'd be great. Otherwise it's a case of PM'ing me with your e-mail if you want a copy.

Maybe 1 cycle should equal 2 seconds. It just seems that ships are really slow in relation to the speed and range of firing.

Did your RGUN fire at 'Blazers stuff with its HTLB?

Heh, opps. Well thanks for pointing that one out.

A few of UI widgets that might be nice. 1) A scale measure, like you have on maps. OK so you've got the RMB thingy but a little bar that tellls you how big it is at all times would be cool 2) Range circles. Say if you hold down shift and hover the mouse over a unit it draws little circles/wedges showing range and fire arc 3) A button to take you from selecting a ship to its information page in the database

I jumped a pair of THRNTA in (the Hobgoblin and Sly Fox) and engaged at HTLB range. I basically did damage while they were attempting to jump out.

I almost got one of their RGUN's and the other's on half shield so that should give you more of a some chance.

2nded to that suggestion. Otherwise you go to sleep, log on teh next day and wonder what happened to all your stuff.

Which kinda sucks if it counts too much. I mean I'll probably be in full time employment in a few months and I'd hate to be playing a game rulled by 12 year old kids and unemployed insomniacs.

Themicrojump does appear to be the tactic of the moment. In that combat the NFRG and CORHMR exchanged places about three times before I thought screw it and decided to engage. If I'd had anything to actually lose I'd have jumped the CORHMR streight out of there and waited for the shields to regenerate. With regards to the ACTIS I had 74 at the start of combat, and I think they killed about 20 or so TIED's.

Some of the gunship weakness could be down to not having missiles equipped.

You could do classes by mass. Again it wouldn't be perfect but masses for all the craft are already included in the ship description file.

I'm probably being obvious (and naive as to how easy things are to implement) here but would an 'engagement radius' say of 50km help with the target selection? Obviously you'd still need to work out the distance between a ship and all others in the sector but you wouldn't then need to run any further calculations on those excluded. On a more fundamental note you could subdivide each sector into 10km squares, with ships assigned to the square subsector they occupy. Then you wouldn't need to calc ranges that you don't need, just list the ships in the subsectors around the primary ship.

I was thinking about fighter tactics and started to formulate something. Basically I'd have it split into three. 1) The ship advances into range and just sits there, adjusting for movement of its target but otherwise remaining stationary. Like the defult Cap-Ship behaviour. 2) The ship conducts strafing runs, where it flies at the target, then past it, then turns around and repeats. This is a bit like what fighters do now, but currently this simply leads to a trail of dead fighters, when they'd get more shots off by sitting there and firing. If it can be set up that they are much harder to hit given a high relative speed between target and ship this would be worthwhile. 3) Turning dogfight mode (or really cool fights). Basically two groups of fighters fly at each other, select targets then try to get on each others tail. I've got some good ideas as to how you could code this but before I work out more details how is movement done? Do ships turn at the start of each time unit then fly forwards at whatever speed they select, or does it take one 'pip' to turn, then another to move, or can it turn as it moves (producing a circular trajectory), and do they have acceleration or is it instant? I'm also assuming the game engine already calculates the vector between an attacker and a target. Oh and finally how does it work out priority between ships or is it all simultaneous? Sorry for all the questions but I've done a bit of C++, a tiny bit of Java and plenty of maths and I think I can come up with something really sweet.

Ahh I get the weapons display now. I missed the writing in the top right. I also didn't realise about the selectable enemy display. I guess eventually it'll appear when you click on an enemy ship on the map, as opposed to having to select it form a list. Edit: Holding down ALT+LMB selects enemy units for perusal

See I think your probably right on both counts there. At a guess it's not multiplying the damage, either by the shot/cycle number or by the number in the LC4 (or whatever it is). And the same with the fighters breaking. But I'm still confused why the Corona didn't use its 2 LC4 batterys. Also there's the fact that the log (on both occasions) didn't record any damage taken by the Bayonet, though that may be because my report isn't privy to that information. The Bayont is the Spearhead if the owner wants to add their info on the matter.

OK, I think I've found an indestructable Bayonet class. Now unfortunately my first log got overwritten before I had the wit to save it but the battle went as follows. 1) I jump in a Corona, 25 Star Vipers and 8 R41 Starchasers (see fig 1) 2) For a turn my Corona fires and hits every time with its 3 TLC4 and 1 IC4 3) At the same time my fighters all take one cycle of shots at the Bayonett and then fly away for some reason (See the line of corpses in fig 2 for their flight path) 4) By calculation I've now done enough damage to take down the Bayonet's shields. This is assuming that the damage and shots/cycle info is accurate and that when it says 'x HIT y with a TLC4' in the log it means all the shots in the fusilade (a TLC4 has 4 4x75 strength shots per cycle) hit. 5) While this has been going on the Bayonet and Correlian ship have been destroying fighters and do some damage to the Coronas shields 6) New turn 7) from the report below the Bayonet has now taken enough damage to be destroyed So my questions are three fold: Why did the fighters fly off and come back? Why isn't the Bayonet dead? Why did the Corona only use its LC4 battery once and miss? http://i136.photobucket.com/albums/q200/Deathblane/OddFighterBehaviour1.jpg fig 1: Everything jumped into the location of the Corona http://i136.photobucket.com/albums/q200/Deathblane/OddFighterBehaviour2.jpg fig 2: The fighters then flew off to the left of the Bayonet, as can be seen by the lines of corpses And finally the report: