Blackspace!

[villain of the story]

Could you get a little more confusing? +10% of what? Final mobility before applying that? Is "extra power" the remaining power? Is it +10% per 200pu of the extra/remaining power? Or is it +10% per something else?

 

[SoupNazi]

At some (unknown to me) point of having extra (positive) power, you start getting a bonus to mobility up to a total of 10% bonus (it doesn't go beyond that).

Better explain through an example:

You have a size 40 ship and a total mobility of 4000. Now if you have the exact power needed to power everything up, your mobility will be 60. But if you have 200 extra power, your mobility should be 66.

Though I'm not sure when exactly you start getting extra power, if it's at 100pu extra, or 200pu extra etc. What I do know is that it doesn't go beyond a 10% bonus.

It works the same way with thrust, and my guess is, weapons and defenses too.

 

[villain of the story]

Looks like it's just impossible to go over size 100 and have even a single point of mobility.

 

[SoupNazi]

It's definitely not impossible, if you only use the freight hulls, the Judsons and Micro fusion reactors.

 

[villain of the story]

I'm experimenting with it and, ok you can easily get 50 mobility but you can't have anything else. No shields, no armor, no stronger hulls, no weapons, NOTHING. Ok, maybe a FEW guns and that's it, otherwise the the formula sinks the mobility down into sub zeros. It's stupid. All that the discussion on combat and mobility's suggested worth against huge ships and it's not even in possible to do.

DU should give me a few hundred billions for I have easily wasted that much on just experimenting and getting the numbers right to see if shit works and they don't even work.

 

[SoupNazi]

I managed to get like a size 50 ship with a mobility of 85 and 500/120 rating so I don't see how it's impossible to do the same with higher. Yeah you won't be able to get a great defensive rating but your mobility is supposed to be your defense at that point.

 

[villain of the story]

Impossible. Assuming it's size 50:

(50*110) = 5500 sc
169 x Judson-12s = -3718sc, -2535 pu
1 x Gen-C Nuclear Power Plant, -675 sc, +2700 pu

Gives 85 mobility with 1107 sc and 165 pu left. No way you can have a rating anywhere near 500/120 with that little space left.

 

[SoupNazi]

Re-inforced Hull Framework 6
Freighter Class Hull 38
M-275 Micro Fusion Reactor 10
Judson-12 Ion Drive 122
T22 Deflector Screen 1
Johnson Kox T-989 Dual Heavy Turbo Blasters 9
p66 Rapid Turbo Blasters ("Shredders") 40
88mm Gauss Cannon 3
MIV Laser Penetrator 3
----------------------------
Actual Thrust: 38
Actual Mobility: 74
Size: 44
Rating: 452/124
Energy left: 302

Pulled out of my old Excel file.

Edit: so at size 50 it would be 41 thrust, 79 mobility and the same rating (except a bigger defense due to few extra hulls)

Edit2: in fact, if I got rid of the re-inforced hulls, with 159 Judsons I get a mobility of 85 with the same attack rating.

 

[villain of the story]

Uh... well... didn't you get one-shotted with that piece of crap

edit2: Yeah, coincidentally, total sc of your components are exactly 1107.

 

[SoupNazi]

Uh... well... didn't you get one-shotted with that piece of crap

edit2: Yeah, coincidentally, total sc of your components are exactly 1107.

Even Faceless got destroyed by The Entity so there's no shame to it :D

and not it's not?

Edit: oh nvm, you meant of the attack components

 

[SoupNazi]

Also, does anyone have the formula that calculates price of each module depending on your size (or whatever it is)? I'd like my .xls to also calculate the total price of the vessel you "build" in it.

Though it's probably not really possible to do in a simple way since in Blackspace you can never buy all components at once... hmmm

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Re. size, in the context of Battleship vs. Fighter,

If I understand correctly, it's not that the Battleship's weapons have a reduced chance to hit, but rather that only part of the weapons fire in the first place - right? (excluding missiles)

Well, erm... Technically, as far as the combat system is concerned, it just loops through and fires everything. I just wanted a nicer theory explanation as to why half of your weapons would miss.

So, again, what is the final formula to mobility?

It's shit is what it is. I'm still working on various replacement formulas (it's at this point I regret not doing more math as a child). For now though:

• $ship_mobility = ($ship_size > 0 ? $ship_mobility / $ship_size : 0); // 1. Divide mobility by size of ship.
  $ship_mobility -= $ship_size; // 2. Subtract the size of the ship for good measure.
  $ship_mobility = round(($ship_mobility * $ship_power) - ($ship_cargo * 0.1), 2); // 3. Give us a bonus based on available excess power; 4. Each cubit of cargo reduces mobility by 0.1
  $ship_mobility = $ship_mobility < 0 ? 0 : $ship_mobility; // 5. Always make sure it never drops below 0.
  return $ship_mobility;

The only thing that gives mobility as of right now are Judsons (that will change soon enough). Re: Your power question, hover over your green power bars for more.

 

[SoupNazi]

$ship_mobility = round(($ship_mobility * $ship_power) - ($ship_cargo * 0.1), 2); // 3. Give us a bonus based on available excess power; 4. Each cubit of cargo reduces mobility by 0.1

Oh THAT's why my calculations always came up one higher than mobility actually was! Thanks.

 

[villain of the story]

I suggest either total or final mobility also doubling as damage reduction, eg. "defensive maneuvers" for decreasing impact zone of guaranteed hits (so the attacker still has to roll a hit). There could be a maximum limit for damage reduction percentage based on ship size and thrust once an attack has been already been registered as a hit. I'll try out some formulae.

 

[SoupNazi]

I think that better / more components (both engines and power sources) would be enough to sustain mobility even with the current formula, for now.

In the future, it should be changed so that density of modules makes the biggest difference - so it would make more sense for mobile ships to have just 1 powerful engine, 2 powerful guns, and 2 big hulls. Not 1000 small engines, 500 weak guns and 100 hulls. It should force specialization so that this one mobile ship won't be able to take out both shields, armour AND hull, but just one or maybe two.

 

[villain of the story]

Why invent such an artificial restriction? That's almost as bad as forcing DnD classes on ships. Tweaking the current formulae seems to me a lot better and diverse.

 

[villain of the story]

A brief overlook of new weapons:

(1) T-989 Dual Heavy Turbo Blasters
-18sc
Dmg.: 12/22/22
Mob.: 0%
Crit.: 10%
-20pu

(2) p66 Rapid Turbo "Shredders"
-42sc
Dmg.: 32/58/78
Mob.: 0%
Crit.: 5%
-66pu

(3) GNR8 "Persuader" Plasma Accelerators
-138sc
Dmg.: 105/188/235
Mob.: 0%
Crit.: 15%
-210pu

(4) (SeM.2) Energised Plasma Blasters
-260sc
Dmg.: 250/395/462
Mob.: 0%
Crit.: 10%
-385pu

(5) Omek "Fourty-Three Special" Equalizers
-380sc
Dmg.: 380/620/705
Mob.: 0%
Crit.: 25%
-550pu

(6) Armageddon-6 Heavy Blaster Cannon
-525sc
Dmg.: 555/900/1,000
Mob.: 0%
Crit.: 15%
-926pu


(1) :
-> 0.66 / 1.2 / 1.2 dmg/sc
-> 0.6 / 1.1 / 1.1 dmg/pu
(2) :
-> 0.76 / 1.38 / 1.857 dmg/sc
-> 0.48 / 0.87 / 1.18 dmg/sc
(3) :
-> 0.76 / 1.36 / 1.7 dmg/sc
-> 0.5 / 0.895 / 1.119 dmg/pu
(4) :
-> 0.96 / 1.5 / 1,78 dmg/sc
-> 0.649 / 1.0256 / 1.2 dmg/pu
(5) :
-> 1 / 1.63 / 1.85 dmg/sc
-> 0.69 / 1.127 / 1.28 dmg/pu
(6) :
-> 1.057 / 1.7 / 1.9 dmg/sc
-> 0.69 / 0.97 / 1.079 dmg/pu

Seems to me like there's no choice here. (5) is a no brainer. Best overall damage on all types per structucal capacity and power, and the highest crit. It's followed by (4) and (3) in that order. (6) is a bad fucking joke; nearly double the space and power requirements but fails to compete on damage output with a negligible edge and doesn't even have a crit rating. What gives, DU?

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Quite simple really. If you hit with (6) you do more damage. It's 555 Shield Damage, 900 Armour or 1,000 Hull damage compared to 380, 650 and 705 for (5). Crit is only useful if you can actually hit your enemy - if your chance is low anyway, you may prefer to just do more damage in general those times you do hit (particularly if you have plenty of spare power available). You're also assuming that you can fit dmg per sc interchangeably. IE: If you've got 530sc left, what are you going to install? 'cause you ain't gonna be able to fit 1.4 Forty-Three's. Like-wise if you've only got 50sc left over, throwing on some Shredders to fill the gap isn't a bad idea. Oh and when the Armageddon does crit hit, it crit hits one hell of a lot harder than the Forty-Three's. Eventually, I plan for other things to increase crit chance as well (Targetting Computers or some such), so those Armageddon's might be punching you in the face more often than you think.

Ideally though, people will argue about what is better than what and reach their own conclusions based on their choice of fit-outs. If something really, really blows though I'll look at it.

Why invent such an artificial restriction? That's almost as bad as forcing DnD classes on ships. Tweaking the current formulae seems to me a lot better and diverse.

Just for the record, I have thought about arbitrary limits on things. For starters, as Faceless has discovered, over a few thousand guns installed makes the combat system chug quite slowly (it used to crash but I was thankfully able to fix that). I'm generally against it though. Mainly because I do like the fact that people can continue to increase their e-peen to unprecedent levels¹ but also because I can design out of those issues (hence guns doing more damage per sc as you go up). I do prefer formulas with diminishing returns though - so that an extra Engine does give more thrust but not as much as the last one did. I just need to work on my math skills and come up with some decent formulas that produce nice numbers.

¹Fun Fact™: I was originally thinking size 64 would be about as big as ships ever got.

 

[Kayerts]

[Redacted in the name of sector-wide peace.]

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Shhh.. I didn't want to tell him.

Also, some people will now have negative SC and power because changes were made to the original weapons (they take up more room and suck more power). The short answer is, either buy enough Hulls to make up the space - or sell some of your stuff (I've set it so that you can sell anything other than Hulls when you have -sc).

 

[villain of the story]

How many new stations are there? What are the coordinates?

Quite simple really. If you hit with (6) you do more damage. It's 555 Shield Damage, 900 Armour or 1,000 Hull damage compared to 380, 650 and 705 for (5). Crit is only useful if you can actually hit your enemy - if your chance is low anyway, you may prefer to just do more damage in general those times you do hit (particularly if you have plenty of spare power available). You're also assuming that you can fit dmg per sc interchangeably. IE: If you've got 530sc left, what are you going to install? 'cause you ain't gonna be able to fit 1.4 Forty-Three's. Like-wise if you've only got 50sc left over, throwing on some Shredders to fill the gap isn't a bad idea. Oh and when the Armageddon does crit hit, it crit hits one hell of a lot harder than the Forty-Three's. Eventually, I plan for other things to increase crit chance as well (Targetting Computers or some such), so those Armageddon's might be punching you in the face more often than you think.

Right. I was only thinking about weapons in bulks. Also, somehow, I've managed to read Crit.: 15% as 0.

 

[SoupNazi]

Why invent such an artificial restriction? That's almost as bad as forcing DnD classes on ships. Tweaking the current formulae seems to me a lot better and diverse.

I don't mean to restrict it artificially. The restriction would come naturally, because you wouldn't be able to make a very mobile ship with weapons capable of destroying all the defenses of a ship because having so many weapon types would increase the density of modules on your ship and decrease the mobility. You'd need to use the weapons specializing in one type of defenses in order to get a decent damage output.

I'm hungover so that may have not made any sense at all.

 

[SoupNazi]

where the fuck are the micro fusion cores?

 

[villain of the story]

What micro fusion cores? There has never been any micro fusion cores.

 

[SoupNazi]

reactor, w/e