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Phezzan
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Please check out the Original thread at Atari forums
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forum...threadid=301835
Scroll down for Mockup image
NearDamg
FarDamg
MaxAccuracy
Shield Penetration
Armor Penetration
MultFire
All of this information is important to calculating damage - The player shouldn't have to Alt-Tab to a spreadsheet to design a ship.
Players are frustrated when they try to find this information and most are more likely to quit than to read spreadsheets or forums.
To show all of this extra data would require using the top half of the screen, which isn't very useful right now IMHO.
I envision the weapons panel covering the entire height of the screen.
The Weapon info readout would get the bottom half and display at least:
code:
Space: Unispace Shots: MultFire | |
Cost: SysCost Shield Pierce: ShldPen | |
Range: AccDisSt - AccDisEn Armor Pierce: ArmorPen |_|
Damage: NearDamg - FarDamg Recharge: FireDlay | |
Accuracy: MaxAcc - MinAcc Randomness: DmgDelta | |
----------------------------------------------------------------- | |
Total Damage: #### Average Damage: #### Space Remaining: ####
Total Space: #### Average Unival: ####
Damage is calculated for the Accuracy ranges to give you an idea of the actual combat performance. (For current weapons DmgDis = AccDis, but this may not always be the case, calculating the damage would solve this.)
Average Damage is the (damage at 50% max range * MultFire - 1/2 * DmgDelta) * the number of weapons, or 0 if it's below zero.
Average Unival is the Average Damage divided by (Space * FireDlay).
The list of weapons would be given more space and the weapon with the highest tech would be on the screen. Either show the bottom of the current list (and scroll up to see old weapons) or reverse the order of the list (newest weapons on top).
This would also allow Missles and Fighters to display Shields and Armor and Deflection.
Other suggestions:
The AI should maximize damage at the range it is likely to do battle against the strongest enemy it has seen in battle.
Ideally this would require harvesting a few statistics from actual battle for each type, but they could be approximated from your "worst enemy's" tech level or your own.
Range, Max damage threshold of enemy (combination of armor deflection and shield Stopping Power). From these each TF can calculate it's total damage per second per space accurately and will always have an excellent design.
Also the AI needs to balance it's choices - If SR ships did pick a mount - they would always pick the Ult Spinal, a poor choice for short range.
For other suggestions _Please_ read the 'improving AutoBuild' thread.
Phez
Sorry for posting this twice - but I didn't want it buried in an argument
I hope the devs read this one...
Edit: Forgot Rate of Fire and Damage Delta
Edit: Added damage sums and total space bar
 Attachment: shipdesign.png
This has been downloaded 53 time(s).
Last edited by Phezzan on 18-06-2003 at 08:46
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18-06-2003 07:46
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