Upgraded Weapons

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AlastairS
Space Krill
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 26, 2018 11:10 am

Upgraded Weapons

#1 Post by AlastairS »

I am a fresh pair of eyes on the game. Played it for the first time yesterday.

I was concerned and confused regarding weapon upgrades. Once you do upgrade them the image of the weapon is the same in the ship building menu. The description doesn't change either to represent the new number of damage.

So it leaves one with the impression they are doing something wrong or that the game is buggy.

I only realised later on that the ships attack numbers went up.

I would like to suggest this process is made more obvious. Put a v2 on the image and update the specs, or have a separate weapon v2 item that replaces the old version completely.

Just my 2 cents. I am not sure if this would apply anywhere else in the game. Haven't played enough to pick it up elsewhere.

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Dilvish
AI Lead and Programmer Emeritus
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2012 6:25 pm

Re: Upgraded Weapons

#2 Post by Dilvish »

AlastairS wrote: Wed Dec 26, 2018 11:17 amThe description doesn't change either to represent the new number of damage.
I would like to suggest this process is made more obvious. Put a v2 on the image and update the specs, or have a separate weapon v2 item that replaces the old version completely.
Having a separate v2 item (and v3 and v4) is how things used to be. This current system is preferred because of the streamlined upgrade process it allows for existing ships.

Taking a close look at the current weapon part descriptions, though, I would agree that their wording does unnecessarily create the opportunity for this kind of confusion. Although they do note the possibility of weapon damage upgrades via tech upgrades, the existing wording implies that such should update the 'shot damage' reported on that page, but it currently does not. Below is the relevant portion of text for the Mass Driver part, after upgrading to MD2, although there is no indication of such on this page.
Pedia wrote:Upgrading the weapon technology will increase the shot damage.

The weapon's Damage is a combination of the shot damage and any active modifiers. Each mass driver on a ship built by a species with the piloting trait will do an additional 1 damage per piloting level (-1 for Bad Pilots).

Shot Damage: 3
It seems to me that the simplest fix to clear up inconsistencies would be to change that first sentence to something like "Upgrading the weapon technology will increase the shot weapon's damage." Perhaps along with, "Base Shot Damage: 3"

But that might still be a little subject to confusion by newcomers. Ideally, the shot damage number reported there could be increased to reflect the upgrade. We prefer to avoid hardcoding the text for stats of content, so that when content stats are changed the relevant Pedia pages are self-updating, which complicates things like this. Although it would not be possible for the reported Shot Damage to take into account all possible modifiers, I do think it would probably be reasonably possible for it to take into account the weapon upgrade techs (certainly possible, the uncertainty is about reliability and possible drag on the UI). I invite you to open an Issue on our Github repo, requesting that the weapon part pedia pages be clarified with respect to upgraded weapon damage. If you do so, please include a link back to this thread.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

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Oberlus
Cosmic Dragon
Posts: 5715
Joined: Mon Apr 10, 2017 4:25 pm

Re: Upgraded Weapons

#3 Post by Oberlus »

Dilvish wrote: Thu Dec 27, 2018 3:58 pmTaking a close look at the current weapon part descriptions [...]
It seems to me that the simplest fix to clear up inconsistencies would be to change that first sentence to something like "Upgrading the weapon technology will increase the shot weapon's damage." Perhaps along with, "Base Shot Damage: 3"
[...]
I'd like the weapon description to include information on the tech upgrades the same it does with the pilot trait, something along this lines:
Pedia wrote:The weapon's Damage is a combination of its base damage and any active modifiers: tech upgrades and the piloting trait of the species that built the ship.

Base shot damage: 3
Bonus per tech upgrade: +1
Bonus per piloting trait level: +1 (-1 for Bad Pilots).

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