Earth Ship

from StarControl Forums

This ship's missile was a subject of discussion before and I had mentioned some general ways of dealing with missiles like point defense, electronic warfare, and the speed and maneuverability of the missile itself.  I still haven't had a chance to play Super Melee much, but after having briefly seen how this is working there are a couple more specific things I can say about this now.

An indirect way of making the Earth ship less effective at the retrograde it uses to make this missile seem so powerful would be to just lower the ship's turn rate by a lot.  This one change alone will make the Earth ship seem much weaker.  The Earth ship feels so powerful because the player is doing a classic Kaufman Retrograde, controlling the range flying backwards.  It's even more pronounced here because the Earth ship's missile is about the longest range weapon in the game.  So you can "hover" flying backwards firing missile after missile until the enemy dies and they can never even shoot back at you.

If it took the Earth ship a long time to turn around to fly backwards in front of the target the ship would feel a lot weaker.  If you combine this with shortening the range of the missile so that most ships can shoot back in this situation, the problem will be mostly solved without needing electronic warfare or point defense. 

And, of course, the missile itself could still be given a reduced turn rate, which would make it miss more often.

174 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from StarControl Forums Top

That is really insightful. I’ll play around with that.

Reply #2 from StarControl Forums Top

I just played a few more games;-)

Another way to weaken this ship, that has nothing to do with the missile, is the secondary point defense weapon.  You have this acting as both "point defense" and "interceptors".  "Point defense" shoots at missiles, mines, plasma torpedoes... "seeking weapons".  Babylon 5 also had what it called "interceptors", a point defense-like system that engages incoming energy/ballistic (i.e. "guns").  The SCO Earth ship's "point defense" is actually both of these things combined, it is shooting down both seeking weapons and projectiles.

You might also weaken its defense by making the point defense only target "seeking weapons" and not "shots".  

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Reply #3 from StarControl Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 1

That is really insightful. I’ll play around with that.

There was a post a while back where Alverez and I discussed this as well, and had a play in the XML's to slow down the turn rate of the missile - makes it easier for an opponent to dodge at the last second and have the missile miss that way. Still requires some skill, you will still get hit if you run away or you are too slow to accelerate laterally quickly.

Reply #4 from StarControl Forums Top

If you slow down the Earth ship the Scryve start to win if they aim their laser right.  I think that laser has even longer range than the nuke and right now if you fire the laser to be just in front of where the Earth ship is moving, the Earth ship cannot turn around in time.  Slowing the Earth ship down just makes that worse.

 

But maybe you could slow the nuke itself and not cause that problem.

 

Except if the Earth Cruiser faces the Measured it is doomed to die because the Measured AOE out-DPSes the Earth Cruiser AOE and the Measured can dodge any nuke.