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SargonKingOfSlith
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Turok, from the explainations given to date, it appears that each round's offensive power is divided into "globs" depending on your firecontrol rating.  Each "glob" is then assigned a target based on formations.  So overkill firepower is lost if a huge "glob" vaporizes a 1,000 ton escort.  It's not clear if multiple globs can target the same ship, although they should be able to considering the enemy fleet might have only a single ship.  So I would wager that each "glob" is assigned randomly, and if multiples assignments end up being the same ship, so be it.

Entirely correct. A dead ship (killed by an earlier "glob") does not qualify as a valid target for another "glob", but a ship that isn't killed could be targeted again in the same battle pulse.

 

Also note that the Naval Combat.pdf document, published ages ago, clearly indicates that leaders add to fire control, and discussed fire control and splittiing of fire quite some time back.

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Target Selection -- A player should be able to set some type of controls on how their ships will target others. In my big Warp battle, the Vindicator and all of the Dahak Cruisers would concentrate all of their fire power on one tiny 1000 ton corvette each round, just because they happened to be stacked in Deploy location 1.

Think of it from the perspective of the screening ships. They are there to take the shots that would otherwise be hitting the battleship. You might be aiming at the battleship, but the screening ship can occupy your line of sight and make you hit him instead. If there are a lot of them, then it is more likely one of them will get in the way then of you getting a clear shot at the battleship. This is simulated (saves the complex simulation maths) by picking a random target weighted by deploc.

 

Whilst I too might favour some priority system favouring attacks on one sort of large ship over another, I would not like to lose the ability to screen my large warships with smaller ships.

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Target Selection -- A player should be able to set some type of controls on how their ships will target others.  In my big Warp battle, the Vindicator and all of the Dahak Cruisers would concentrate all of their fire power on one tiny 1000 ton corvette each round, just because they happened to be stacked in Deploy location 1.

Think of it from the perspective of the screening ships. They are there to take the shots that would otherwise be hitting the battleship. You might be aiming at the battleship, but the screening ship can occupy your line of sight and make you hit him instead. If there are a lot of them, then it is more likely one of them will get in the way then of you getting a clear shot at the battleship. This is simulated (saves the complex simulation maths) by picking a random target weighted by deploc.

 

Whilst I too might favour some priority system favouring attacks on one sort of large ship over another, I would not like to lose the ability to screen my large warships with smaller ships.

Ummmm ... I hate to mention this, but, space is big. Really, really big. Beyond comprehension big. There are huge volumes of space to protect if you want to build a screen. Something that really can't be done anyway due to the nature of the weapons. For example:

 

How do you get into the way of a Fighter or Drone that's heading off to attack Cruiser? They simply fly around you. And when it's a 200 ton drone versus a 1000 ton screen ship, even if you got in the way, all you get is one drone gone, and one debris pile from the screen ship being destroyed at impact. That shouldn't hold off the entire drone fleet from continuing on. There's no freeway to travel, and no gappers block to slow them down :ranting:

 

Or how do you get in the way of Laser fire? All the computers need is any opening and *ZAP*, there goes the laser barrage at light speed.

 

Maybe you have a barrage of 30cm Autocannon fire. That fire is going to cover a large arc of the sky as it heads towards a distant target. One ship can't block that. Even hundreds of 1000 ton ships would have difficulty blocking a barrage from a 3 million ton warship. At least not without all being immediately destroyed.

 

The same for missles or torpedos. You lock on a target and launch. They bob and weave, and eventually hit (you hope) the target. Like a fighter or drone, a screen ship could perhaps block one missle or torpedo. Instead, with the procedures in this game, every single torpedo and missle locks on to one exploding screen ship and barrels into the explosion. Funny, I don't remember Wild Weasel Shuttles being on the R&D List. :ranting:

 

Sorry, screen ships cannot block the firepower. They won't even hamper the fire power even if they get in the way and get destroyed. They are Gnats. But, since the programming focuses on them if they are in deploy location 1, then huge amounts of fire power is wasted (when it should simply blast through the ships and on to the true targets).

 

 

AS FOR PICKING A TARGET: They way Pete explained it to me in a mail is, when you fire you choose a target, then you choose another target. If the second target is more interesting than the first (and what decides this he did not say, I would guess size), then it fires on the second target. This is followed for each pulse (or glob) of fire in a round. Pick, Pick, compare, select, fire, next glob, pick, pick, compare, select, fire, etcetera....

 

As for the deploy locations, the chances something is selected to be fired on is highest for items in Deploy Location 1, with decreasing chances after that. So, lets say you have 100 ships, 90 screen ships and 10 large ships, all in Deploy location 1. Assuming each has the same random chance to be fired on along with a double select as Pete place in the mail, the odds of firing on a large ship is 19% (you would have to pick a screen ship twice to not fire on a large). Now lets move the large ships back to Deploy Location 7. If the chance of each heavy ship being selected is reduced by say (only a guess here, no evidence to support) 60%, then the overall odds of firing on a large ship drops to around 8%. As the screening ships die off, the odds of firing on the big ships increase.

 

Go back to the battle I had with the NSI. You will see a number on the listing after the Destroyed of each ship. That is the order in which ships were destroyed. (So NSI lost the first 11 ships, one of my Cruisers became the 12th, etcetera...). The listed deploy locations in the battle are wrong (it's a bug, Pete promised he's working to fix it) as the heavy ships of the NSI were in a spot other than deploy location 1 (while my Vindicator wis in Deploy location 1 and all other ships in Loc 2). I destroyed one CO Dog Meat, then a 2nd, then a 3rd. Finally the fourth ship destroyed was one Pup E Light Cruiser. With a Fire Control Rating of 1 (which may have been higher due to my Admirals presence, but again this is not displayed so we do not know), I then went back to popping off corvettes till another Pup E was the 11th ship to be destroyed. Actually, this matches pretty well to my 60% guess above. If the 11 NSI heavy ships had a 60% reduced chance to be fired on, with 45 screens in the front, the odds to pick a heavy ship to fire on would be abou 19% .. with slowly increasing odds. This works out on average to firing on two Heavy Ships in the first 11 rounds, exactly what we see in the battle.

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Again Ken, our thanks for your attempts to illuminate this foggy subject for us and your general willingness to share data that cannot be gotten anywhere else.

 

:ranting:

 

/Locklyn

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Actually (if we count in Sensor) this ship has only 2% devoted to Fire Control. If we leave out Sensors it is just 1%.

Do Sensors add to fire control?

 

I was under the assumption they were used only for "spotting" enemy vessels...

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Ok thanks for your help. Do we know how drone/fighter attacks work?

 

If I launch a drone/fighter attack from Deploc 1 are they going to cause more damage (individually) than an attack launched from Deploc 8? If so, why?

 

I would presume that a defending fleet gets more shots at fighters/drones if they are launched from deeper positions. Do we know if this is true and to what extent?

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Sensors had (have) a rating on their own, so I was not sure of that.

Pete spoke of bridge ratings are for fire control, but sensors have a sensor rating.

 

I have stated this explicitly, because the Mass Detection Sesnors where 1000 ton units, and

contributed a high volume of mass to the calculation.

 

Cestvel

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Actually (if we count in Sensor) this ship has only 2% devoted to Fire Control.  If we leave out Sensors it is just 1%.

Do Sensors add to fire control?

 

I was under the assumption they were used only for "spotting" enemy vessels...

Sensors are defensive systems, and unless you find a sensor that happens to have a bridge rating in addition to its regular defensive value, it wouldn't add to your bridge rating.

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Ok thanks for your help. Do we know how drone/fighter attacks work?

 

If I launch a drone/fighter attack from Deploc 1 are they going to cause more damage (individually) than an attack launched from Deploc 8? If so, why?

 

I would presume that a defending fleet gets more shots at fighters/drones if they are launched from deeper positions. Do we know if this is true and to what extent?

Fighters and Drones add to firepower as if they were in DepLoc 1, even if their carriers are not. The defender doesn't get more shots if the fighters/drones are launched from deeper back, but that would have been a good idea - I just didn't think of it when the battles were put together :ranting:

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Ok thanks for your help. Do we know how drone/fighter attacks work?

 

If I launch a drone/fighter attack from Deploc 1 are they going to cause more damage (individually) than an attack launched from Deploc 8? If so, why?

 

I would presume that a defending fleet gets more shots at fighters/drones if they are launched from deeper positions. Do we know if this is true and to what extent?

Fighters and Drones add to firepower as if they were in DepLoc 1, even if their carriers are not. The defender doesn't get more shots if the fighters/drones are launched from deeper back, but that would have been a good idea - I just didn't think of it when the battles were put together :ranting:

By "the defender getting more shots at the Fighters/Drones..." we assume you are thinking of more 'opportunities' to degrade the attackers?

 

If we read into the defensive system numerics, which Pete has promised to explain, the impression gained is that they apply only to individual ships. :ranting:

 

Thus CIDS defenses and defensive fighters on CAP only defend against the incoming fire from Missiles (including Fighters and Drones), plus additionally destroying some of the Fighters and Drones themselves, on the actual ship being targetted that 'round'.

 

If that is indeed the case, then additional opportunities to take out the F&D's would not really exist. As has been mentioned previously - space is big, really big. Weapon ranges are therefore very low...... If ships are travelling at an appreciable percentage of light speed, then even light speed weapons will have limited ranges....

 

F&Ds launched from extreme range just benefit the launching carriers by keeping them out of harms way. They'll still only be fighting at very close ranges.

 

Chief Warmaster to Ur-Lord Tedric

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I would presume that a defending fleet gets more shots at fighters/drones if they are launched from deeper positions.

 

The defender doesn't get more shots if the fighters/drones are launched from deeper back, but that would have been a good idea - I just didn't think of it when the battles were put together :ranting:

 

By "the defender getting more shots at the Fighters/Drones..." we assume you are thinking of more 'opportunities' to degrade the attackers?

Right, just answering that one specific question - shots against fighters and drones are not increased in effectiveness or quantity just because the fighters/drones happened to have been launched from carriers stationed more to the rear in the enemy formation. That would have been a good idea - doh! Didn't think of it :ranting:

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Speaking of globs.....

 

It was my understanding that each 'glob' would hunt down its target according to a defenders deployment location along the probabilities of a 'very bad bell curve' (as we were told at SNROTE convention and on the boards shortly thereafter)

 

Thus...

 

If the defender has all of his screen vessels in deploy location 1 and the command control/fuel vessels in the last deployment location, the offender would have a very low chance of targetting the command cruiser/fuel ship in the rear if there were ships to destroy in deploy location 1,2,3,etc

 

It makes for a conceivably silly situation on the bridge (with crazy amounts of screen vessels and a fire control rating of 1) :

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

SUBORDINATE: Commander, all of our Plasma Torps and Siege Beam Lasers are primed for use. The enemy fuel tankers and command vessels are less than 0.1 AU away and closing behind these enemy screen fleets.

 

COMMANDER: Excellent! Rather than maneuver past these screen vessels that will do little to no damage to our fleet and focus on the one ship that will do us harm, fire all weapons against that 1,000 ton enemy screen vessel!

 

SUBORDINATE: Ummm......aye aye sir!

 

[1,000 ton screen ship explodes]

 

SUBORDINATE: We got it! Ow....that enemy command cruiser just dealt us a pretty serious blow to our hull. What is our next target?

 

COMMANDER: Why, another one of those puny screen vessels, of course! Obliterate that screen vessel!

 

[several rounds go by......]

 

SUBORDINATE: We are down to 2% power. Our weapons systems are down. The enemy command cruiser was accidentally hit two rounds ago when we blasted through a screening vessel. There are two enemy screening vessels left.....Commander, what should we do?

 

COMMANDER: Are you insane? All hands on board. Set ship trajectory for direct contact into one of the remaining enemy screening vessels.....RAMMING SPEED! Brace yourselves! To victory!!!!

 

[The enemy command cruiser marvels at the stupidity of the Commander's decision and finishes off our hero with a final volley of 100 10cm Autocannons]

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I made a point about a month or two ago.....

 

You can't expect your AI fleet commanders to make smart offensive decisions. Space combat seems to be heavily tilted toward how the defender chooses to deploy his/her fleets.

 

We now know that you can increase the rate of chewing through screening fleets with high fire control: If we couldn't, I would have quit playing this game. (I might as well be honest about that :ranting:)

 

Space is big...and really really 3-D. Using a naval combat model for space combat is, for lack of a better word, antiquated. Ships with high maneuverability should have the ability to zip through 'screens' and target the fat mother ships. The command vessel's point defenses and fighter bays should be its primary method of discouraging proximity -- not puny, useless, order intensive, shipyard slip absorbing, screen ships.

 

The problem I have is the concept of 'deploy location' Space is too big and 3d for such a concept. Oh well :ranting: I'm guessing code considerations were made. And I dont necessarily EXPECT a 3-d model of combat for such a game as this.

 

Fortunately, I'm pretty lucky at rock/scissors/paper :taz: (ie my weapon-type guess will beat your defense-type guess) I think everyone will see that space combat comes down to match-ups....do you have ample CID technology and availability to defeat your opponent's Drone/Fighters? Are you shrugging off Black Sphere Generators in hopes your neighbors wont invest in Plasma Torps? Who else is overlooking the possibility of the uber Cold Weapons empire that nobody ahs built defenses for? But luckily - the opponent has the same concerns....do their defenses match your weapons?

 

We now live in a SN universe where people are sending forward ships stocked with EXPL finds to 'throw off' the other guy into thinking you have weapon path A....when in reality you are secretly building weapon path B. Your neighbor rushes off to defend agaisnt weapon path A...only to confront an entirely unexpected weapon path B fleet that steamrolls to his/her HW front door.

 

See why trade/espionage is so imporant now? :ranting:

 

BTW - did everyone enjoy slotting Fire Control items these past few cycles like I did? :lol:

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BTW - did everyone enjoy slotting Fire Control items these past few cycles like I did? :lol:

Depends on what you mean by Fire Control. My understanding from Pete is that if Battle Imaging Systems have a bridge rating of 2000 and Mk II Computer Systems have a bridge rating of 2000 either would works just as well and there isn't necessarily an advantage between having one system over the other unless the component/resource cost is different. The benefit of getting the Battle Imaging System is the possibility of it opening something else up. Otherwise, it looks more like SN2 to me where better computers are the way to go, just my opinion.

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