Something I didn't mention is that you only really need three difficulty levels here. Easy, Normal, and Hard. This will make it easier to create difficulty levels through only the maneuvering and aim of the AI. It will be a lot harder to create 5 different levels of difficulty using only "smarter AI".
The AI uses the Scryve weapon well enough, but human players are going to have a hard time doing that. If the speed balance was right, the Scryve will need the ability to reliably "reach out and touch" the enemy to force the enemy to come too it, since it can't get too them. The Scryve should maneuver like the Ur Quan in SC, very slow and very slow turning. Yes, the Pinthi weapons need some work in the end. At this early stage I was really just evaluating the general
Another way at looking at the speed issue is that the ships have too much momentum. They can't maneuver. This is Star Trek: Bridge Commander combat, an endless jousting match. The ships are moving so fast that you cant turn left or right, you have to turn around and thrust for a long time before slowing down enough to maneuver. This creates an endless jousting match, or said in the technical terminology of the SFU... there are only two possible forms of attack, Hig
Very strange... Highlight it and it will become visible. I have no idea why...
Again, I don't mean to be insulting, I think the phrase helps to understand the point. The way that the health and energy bars work is another example of “programmer game design”. I can still remember that the Spathi's aft missile did 2 damage. Quite possibly the #1 “Golden Rule” among table-top game designers was “use the lowest numbers that work”. In the “serious” Avalon Hill/Amarillo Design Bureau/SPI, etc branch o
I don't mean to offend anyone, but the difficulty level issue is one example of what I call “programmer game design”. Programmers are part mathematician and they like to do everything scalable. They think that everything is scalable, and that is usually not the case in games. In the case of weapon damage, you are just throwing everything off when you do this. Gamers like it best when they know that, for example, 3 hits from this gun kills that ship and 5 hits from this other gun k
The way this map is presented bouncing off of the planet, or asteroids, should cause damage. You generally want to avoid having collision damage in a game like this, but when it is as blatant as everything using the center planet as a pinball machine bumper it becomes almost necessary that it cause damage. The problem right now is how strong the gravity of the planet is, how large the planet is, and the speed of the ships. You are a little bit out-of-control at the
Earthling – The Dan'Nath might be better, but other than that this is still the most powerful ship. The missile is too good and too powerful. They were able to make this work in SC2 because SC2 was practically on a hex map due to it having been designed with only 16 possible directions of movement. In your modern “free movement” where the missile is not “on tracks” that will cause it to miss unless you aimed it just right this becomes
I played SCO a lot for the first time this weekend, probably about 6 hours. My posts today are the notes I took while I did that. Ships are not to scale, they all appear to be about the same size. Only health hints at size difference. Actual scale might make some ships too small, and others too big, but there should be a visual difference in size of the ships in relation too each other. Most gamers judge a ship's capabilities mos
That link works for me too, it's even back too being it's normal purple. This is very strange, beginning friday afternoon it started telling me that the forums were down for maintenance. I had been using this link to get here all along and it just stopped working for some reason... https://forums.starcontrol.com/ Ok, I guess I will post my notes from playing this weekend and give everyone a lot of reading to do:-)
This is the exact gamepad that I am trying to use... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA10V41H0401&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=K
Another way of explaining the "rate-of-closure" issue is that if the battle pass is happening too quickly, then "turning in for a knife fight" is not an option. The action is too fast for a knife fight to take place, separation happens too quickly for that to happen. A "knife fight" is another word for a close-in dogfight. So if the ships are moving too fast there is are only two general ways of fighting, the two primary forms of "high-speed maneuvering". The first is
Yes, it was entirely my computer. SCO works fine now that I have up-to-date drivers. I have a cheap generic gamepad because they stopped making my beloved MicroSoft Sidewinders (the best gamepad ever made!) a long time ago. I still have half-a-dozen Sidewinders I had stockpiled for Subspace because I would wear them out in 9-12 months playing Subspace, but they are no longer supported and you can't even make them work anymore even if you have one:-( So I am using s
That is kind of strange. Why would you nuke a boarding pod? That should be purely an anti-ship/planet weapon. This MW warhead missile is just an "anti-figher weapon that can cause light damage to ships" by lore, and is actually designed to attack ships. There are no "squadrons" of fighters in SCO to shoot a MW missile at. I had the submunitions "spiraling" toward the target to randomize how many missiles hit in a "real" way, based on how many actually wind up hit
I have SCO working now and plan to spend a lot of time playing it this weekend. A few things I immediately notice are... The ships are still moving too fast. To paraphrase SVC because I don't remember the exact words, “space combat is not like a dogfight between WWII fighters, it is like dogfight between B17 bombers”. In a real-time arcade game like Subspace or Star Control the speed is deceptive. You might think it i
Great... There was a driver update for my video card in September, but it says "update failed" when I try to install it. Back in the days of DOS I would know how to get it updated one way or another, in 2017 I have no idea what to do about "update failed":-( EDIT: It took all night to figure out, but I finally got the video driver to install and the game seems to be working now. I have barely played it at all so far, but the arena can be a lot bigger than this. You w
SCO isn't recognizing my gamepad. I checked and it is still working fine in Mortal Kombat. I would also want thrust to be forward D-Pad and break/reverse to be back D-Pad, not buttons. A worse problem is the crashing, it doesn't seem to like my computer very much. It always crashes before the end of the second fight, and the enemy ship is usually invisible for all or most of the first fight. It stops/pauses a lot, sometimes for a very long time, until finally c
There are things like fighters. There are not squadrons of fighters launching waves of missiles, which a dedicated escort ship is actually designed to deal with. The MW missile would always be shooting at another ship, not incoming fighters or missiles because SCO doesn't work that way. These aging and desperately needing to be replaced real world AEGIS cruisers are where this concept ultimately comes from.
There aren't really fighters in SCO, this MW missile design is actually meant to attack ships. It's really just just a lore thing that it is an "anti-fighter" weapon. It is this escort ship using the only weapon it has when it finds itself in a fight. The earth ship is supposed to be a lower point ship, and this can be used to give it a capable but not powerful primary weapon. I mentioned that you might think of it as a conversion to an escort from the original "old"
The whole point is that it is a dedicated carrier escort, like a real-world AEGIS cruiser. The PD lasers shoot down missiles and sweep mines, the MW missile is an anti-fighter weapon. Both cause light damage to ships, the fact that they are both PD weapons is really just lore that works well with the situation. The MW missile has a myopic zone that could be matched to the range of the PD lasers, so that it uses one weapon or the other depending on the range it is at. <p
Earthling – The weapon thread made me think of a good way of representing this ship in SCO. The “point defense missile” submunition is an anti-fighter weapon that can do light damage to ships. The Earth ship already has point defense, and is supposed to be a lower point ship among the stock lineup of ships. This combination of weapons makes it very obviously a “carrier escort variant”... as if it was specifically designed to defend the
This is a little long, but I thought was the perfect thing to help here. This is something from one of my design docs that was included to help others think up new weapons for the game. These categories should help you all to think up your own cool new weapons that you would like to see in SCO. (R5.2) General AI Weapon Categories The follow
The Earth ship has a “long range missile”. You also want a “short range missile”. So here is a “medium range missile”... Multi-Warhead Missile – This is a “bus vehicle” (large missile) with half-a-dozen “point defense missiles” inside of it. The tiny missiles inside do minimal damage, but there is a chance more than one will hit. The bus missile is guided, but the
The announcement about the beta schedule mentions that ships range from 5-20 points. This doesn't seem like nearly a big enough range for what you are wanting to do. With the idea that you will someday have at least dozens of ships (not even counting ones players make in the editor), you will probably need a larger range than this to work with. I was thinking the 6-60 example I had been using might even be too low in the end. Using the lowest numbers that work is a per
There are very few things that can't be explained with pseudo-scientific techno-babble! ;-) You could say that either ship within the bubble can use their hyper drive to collapse the bubble, even if you decide to just have static bubbles and not have them collapse to shrink the arena. Once the bubble has become weak/small enough, either ship can escape it/leave the fight at will.