Rock, Paper & Scissors Weapons

[Demoncrawler]

I wanna change the weapons/shields/hulls to be more interesting. Is it possible to change the categories and specify different effects on different types of hull/shipsize/shields? For some more interesting fights so you have some more rock, paper & scissors in your games. Atm it seems to be pointless to research lasers 4 and those other small weapons.

[Geoff the Medio]

Is it possible to change the categories and specify different effects on different types of hull/shipsize/shields?

No; once in a battle weapons on a ship have a damage rating per hit, not dependent on anything other than the target's shield strength. (Before the battle, effects can modify the weapon strengths, but this will apply the same to all targets fired at.)

The partially implemented but not yet used fighter mechanics have some different damage rules and practical outcomes for fighters shooting and being shot at, though.

[Demoncrawler]

Thought so because I can't find the weapon categories in any of the source codes. Category: shortrange seems to be unused.

[MatGB]

I wanna change the weapons/shields/hulls to be more interesting. Is it possible to change the categories and specify different effects on different types of hull/shipsize/shields? For some more interesting fights so you have some more rock, paper & scissors in your games. Atm it seems to be pointless to research lasers 4 and those other small weapons.

In the current Test releases it is definitely worth it, any ship you build between laser1 and plasma 1 will get the laser4 bonus once researched, combined with, for example, the solarweb laser4 can be impressively powerful.

Regarding the rock/paper/scissors idea, Fighters are deliberately designed to add to that paradigm and move us in that direction, the fighters are typically relatively low damage but ignore shields and having a swamr of them lessens the effect of the very powerful weapons. However, getting the costings correct and the AI ready to use them properly is going to take time so we decided to put back completing the implementation of Fighters until after the next formal Release so we can finish off other work more effectively and not delay Release for an unnecessary long gap.

After fighters are ready, we hope to have other types as well to move forward in various ways—Fighters also includes a Rate Of Fire mechanic, currently only used in game by the monsters equipped with Flak Cannon, and that will add a different dynamic, we may even have different options in the research tree, do you want a more powerful Mass Driver/Laser, or have the ones you've got fire more shots?

Currently, all the weapons are Short Range (except, really, the Spinal Antimatter Cannon), and we haven't implemented more mechanics as yet.

You can, for what it's worth, have differing hulls have different things done to stuff they're equipped with within existing scripts, have a look at the Sentinel and Warden scripts for examples of that (again in Trunk/Master), but you can't currently have them do different things to different types of target.

You could even script parts that negate shields for longer battles (fighting starts based on game state at end of previous turn, then effects are processed so shields would go after the first turns fighting), if you wanted to. No idea how to teach the AI how to use that sort of thing though.