Combat & Movement

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Following from my questions regarding scale (Thanks for those answers) I have a few most questions regarding the said title. Basically I want to create a pure 3d fighting system that allows ships to roll and use the full 3d axis. This applies mainly to smaller craft as Frigates are going to play a very important rule as Gunboat, Corvettes and what not. The question I have is how do I make frigates and Crusiers move constantly during combat, lobbying for the best postion to fire there weapons. I understand I can make frigates act as fighters but I'd like cruisers & caps to move more during combat circling each other, if you ever seen Battlestar Galactica thats what I'm aiming for. Basically the entire combat system is to be fast moving with small ships with roles zipping about while Cap ships duke it out while crusiers in the dozens in support. The aim is to create small fleet action & when the time is right, full scale armandas with hundreds of ships.

With that idea in mind I also want to make battles gritty and tense afairs with explosions left right and center but also I want to add the idea of a dying ship (for the larger cap ships) That is when a ship is destroyed can I have it float subtly through space as its carcass explodes? Can I make ship wrecks & debris last on the battlfield for a length of time defined by me and float about?

Am I able to modify weapons to only damage shields for example? Create flak/Missile barrages on command (via ship abilities) Can I make weapons that punch right through shields? Can I create weapons that disable ships or functions (engines or a special ability)?

How can I length the time it takes to 'jump' from planet to the next and add a cool down for jumping. What I often find is ships jump in then jump back out at the slightest provaction, well I want to stop that by adding a cool down of say 30-90 seconds meaning thats the time needed to wait before jumping through the phase lane.

Finally how can I modify the way the graviety well works to allow longer running combat but at a minium distance from the planet, ie that combat takes place a good 50km away from the planet. I want to lengthen the size of the grav wells to allow for planetery bodies to be a large fighting arena where crossing systems can be quite dangerous as ships can hide behind planets or asteroid belts.

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Am I able to modify weapons to only damage shields for example? Create flak/Missile barrages on command (via ship abilities) Can I make weapons that punch right through shields? Can I create weapons that disable ships or functions (engines or a special ability)?

Yes to all. In the last case, a basic weapon can only do damage, so any disabling effect will have to be an ability. Though really, you can assign weapon effects to abilities (just look at Kol's gauss blast for example), so you can make an ability function as close to an actual weapon as you'd like.

How can I length the time it takes to 'jump' from planet to the next and add a cool down for jumping.

Each playerrace.entity file (playertech.entity, playerphase/psi) has a hyperspaceData section where you can modify phase space speeds, antimatter costs, charge-up time. You can't create a cooldown such that they won't be able to jump at all for that duration, but you can increase the charge-up time so you have longer to kill them.

Finally how can I modify the way the graviety well

I can't give you a good answer on this because I haven't messed with it, so I honestly don't know how far it can be taken.

As per maneuvering, currently what you're asking is not possible. Most unit behaviors we don't have access to right now. They're tied (as best as I can tell) to the entityType definition. So anything defined as a Squad gets to do strafing flybuys, roll around, etc. Anything defined as a ship is pretty static-y. For now, there's nothing we can do about it.

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a possible jump cooldown could be to play with the antimatter cost of jumping and the recharge rate. Unfortunately all abilities would have to be balanced. If you are planning on completely modifying the game, you could have the abilities use a 'cooldown only' systems and use the antimatter purely for hyperspace.

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The antimatter cost to jump doesn't actually prevent ships from jumping if they don't have enough, it just takes that much out of their AM pool, setting to 0 if they have less than needed.

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I like the idea of more movement with the capital ships. Empire at War had that problem as well, the fighters would engage, but the cap ships would just park and bark at each other. We just need the codes to modify the ship behavior files for combat...

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But what will be the point in making the ships move? since damge is global and is not affected by the angle of fire (as far as I know, please correct me if i'm wrong) there is absolutely no incentive to make the ships move unless you want the battle just to look more pretty....
and I don't know what it will do to the game speed on not so new machines.

Don't get me wrong, I do think that there should be some kind of movment but more on the lines of missile ships trying to stay at theier max range and frigates zipping in and out to replanish their shields between attack runs.
As we stand right now, this is not worthwhile because most ships that get the most out of menuvering in combat have an extreamly narrow firing arcs mainly LRMs and Missile Caps (who designe a missile armed shis with low health, armor and suboptimum firing arcs?)

Cheers
Warder

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It is possible to have passive abilities that apply status effects to targets. Check out the TEC Marza Dreadnought's ability 'Incendiary Shells,' a passive that applies a DoT effect to his weapon damage. By tweaking that ability, you can apply whatever status effect you might like.
You could also check out the TEC LRM Frigate and Vasari Assailant frigate abilities that apply splash damage. These abilities work by applying a status buff to the firing ship that applies a status debuff to the their shots that propagates damage effects to nearby enemies when struck. It's kind of cumbersome, but you can use it to give your unit an auto-cast ability that applies a status effect to his damage. You can even modify other properties this way, such as "I want his shots to deal less damage, but slow the target" or "I want his shots to fire more slowly, but do more damage and by-pass shields." The great thing about is that it's toggle-able, so you can have a unit switch between doing his status effect thing, or just normal damage. I am trying to look into a way to apply 'if ability a is active, disable ability c' style conditions, so that units could have even more types of fire options available... I'll let you know if I find anything.
Also, for changing the jump system, you might want to play around with the debuffs that limit jump capacity, specifically the Vasari Evacuator's gravity warhead. You could change it to a passive ability that made the unit unable to jump, and then perhaps have a secondary push-button ability that over-wrote that buff for a duration. I'm not sure if that would work, or if the passive effect debuff would just instant re-assert itself, but it's something to play around with. Another way to do it might be modifying the jump time in the race file, and setting it to something obscenely high, and then just make a unit that had a PBoE jump speeding ability, so that without the unit and it's ability, jumping is more or less useless. (Note that you can't tell a unit to stop jumping once he starts, so this could potentially stick a huge portion of your fleet in "I'm trying to jump" mode if something goes wrong) Anyway, there are a couple ideas for you, have fun playing around and let me know if anything works!

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