Gladius gets the bad rap...

I haven't seen much hatred directed at the Gladius, either. It's only in Standoff that I ever noticed anyone disliking the Gladius. It's kind of a minor character in Privateer, and Armada as a whole was kind of a minor player in the whole series as far as plot goes.

If I may be excused for running onto a Standoff tangent, the "guns placement" issue isn't the only problem we're looking at here. The game engines have quirks that result in more "hating" for a fighter in one instance than another. I read that there were some complaints about the Raptor and lack of gun convergence in Standoff, which took a favorite fighter from WC1 and caused it to be all but worthless in Standoff. You can't argue with the "official" ship dimensions - but to the game designer, they're just numbers, right? But lots of weird things can happen with numbers when you start getting into the details of the game engine.

Here's a fighter that really gets a lot of hatred: the Epee.

In WC2, ships were still bitmapped, and the Epee was very heavily derided by fans for its poor durability. I don't remember any official/canon sources criticizing the Epee for its poor armor (granted, I haven't read the novels), but in fanon you can find all sorts of criticism directed at the Epee for being under-armored. (tissue paper, toilet paper, etc.) In WC2, it was about as easy to get hit in an Epee as a Sabre - I don't know for a fact, but I suspect that the collision detection radius for an Epee wasn't much smaller than any of the other fighters in WC2, so you still caught a lot of fire. In Standoff, the Epee is fiendishly effective because it's actually so small, it's very difficult to hit. Where you have to make a major maneuver in a Sabre or Gladius to avoid being hit, in an Epee you can practically just twiddle the joystick and dodge fire by inches. The light armor isn't as much of an issue because even when you do get hit, it's probably not with all barrels of a full guns salvo.

If Standoff were to follow the original game experience despite the models, the Epee would be really awful to fly, and the Raptor would be very potent. I still really, really like Standoff, though - even if the move to the Prophecy engine causes all kinds of cognitive dissonance with memories of WC1 and WC2 gameplay.

As for hating the Gladius - the incarnations of the Gladius are so far apart from one another between Privateer and Armada, I didn't know what to expect from its incarnation in Standoff. Although it's a real trial to fly it, I like that the Standoff Gladius has personality, in the way that the Scimitar has personality. And to make another cross-engine comparison - the Gladius feels a little like the Y-wing to the Rapier's X-wing.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I love Standoff, but I've never understood their insistance on "realistic" gun positions... especially on ships like the Rapier - how is the 'blueprints suggest it should work like this' gun layout more 'right' than how they actually do work in the game?
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Even though it is frustrating, I kind of liked it. It makes you appreciate the more tightly-packed guns on better designs.

For historical precedent, look at the P-38 Lightning. One of its big advantages was that all of its guns were packed close together in the nose, rather than spread out all over the wings.

For Wing Commander precedent, take the Bearcat.
 
I kinda like the Gladius. If it had a fuel pack/twice as many fuel it would actually be one of my favourites. It might be big, but it packs a lot of a punch if you can hit without ITTS.
 
cff said:
I kinda like the Gladius. If it had a fuel pack/twice as many fuel it would actually be one of my favourites. It might be big, but it packs a lot of a punch if you can hit without ITTS.
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I liked that... the slow moving shots without ITTS in standoff.

It takes a good pilot to get the kills in this ship
 
For the record, the Standoff Gladius totally rapes the WC canon. I don't think you guys should even try to rate it at all. :p It's a crazy amalgamation of the Privateer light-fighter Gladius and the Armada torpedo-bomber Gladius, inspired by the WC2 stories of torpedo-carrying Epees and brought to life due to our story's need for a cheap and expendable bomber that could be available in the backwater Gemini sector.

I wouldn't have had the audacity to pull that kind of crazy stunt if it wasn't for Privateer and Armada giving the same ship (as opposed to ships which look the same, like the Talon/Gratha, or ships with the same names, like the two Rapiers) wildly different stats, even though the games are set more or less at the same time.

Delance said:
Similary, the Gladius could've been modelled in a way that, despite the official dimentions, would have actually useful guns, if the makers of the mod so desired.
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Our Gladius is already *half* as long as the Armada Gladius.

(It's the one case where we have a ship out of the "official" scale, because the Armada length would make it over 70 meters wide, so we would have trouble not only hitting targets, but getting the ship to land, keeping the AI from colliding with each other, etc. So I went and arbitrarily used the Armada length as wingspan instead, which gave it a length of about 17 to 18 meters).

Bandit LOAF said:
I love Standoff, but I've never understood their insistance on "realistic" gun positions... especially on ships like the Rapier - how is the 'blueprints suggest it should work like this' gun layout more 'right' than how they actually do work in the game?
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What happens is that the hardpoints where the bullets are fired from are actual locations in 3D space in the Vision engine, something which wasn't a concern in the sprite-based games. So, there are three things we could have done to make the guns "work as they did" in the previous games:

1) We could have the bullets be fired from somewhere other than the location of the actual gun barrels, somewhere closer to the center of the ship. For example, we could make bullets come out of the middle of the Gladius's wings.

2) We could reposition the actual guns on the models. This would change the looks of the ships, in the example above, the Gladius would have its lasers mounted on the middle of its wings, instead of on the wingtips.

3) We could re-scale the ships so that their guns would end up being not more than 10 meters or so apart from each other, thus making it possible to hit most targets even with straight-flying bullets. The example Gladius would now be 5 meters long, or so, in order to be not more than 10 meters wide... then it would only miss the smaller targets (8-meter long Sarthas, and such).

Well...#1 would have looked very silly. I didn't go with #2 and #3 because they both would mean changing things well established in original games (gun locations and ship sizes) because of a technical issue that came up in Standoff, but which was absent from the original games (the issue of your ship no longer being a sprite trying to hit other sprites).

So, what we did was precisely come up with a way to fit all the facts together: the Gladius's lasers are on its wingtips, the bullets come out of the lasers and not out of the wings, the Gladius is 36 meters long, and the lasers are still able to hit targets less than 70 meters wide. Gun convergence was the only method we could come up with to make all that work without arbitrarily changing factors which were well established in previous games.

Then we made our guns converge at approximately half of their maximum range, in all ships, meaning you are still able to effectively hit targets provided they are not right on top of you or at the very maximum range. In fact, at exactly half the maximum weapon range, a Gladius could theoretically kill a Ladybug. :p

The issue remained a lot more problematic for the Raptor because it would also need vertical convergence, which our dll patch doesn't do, and which we decided to not bother with because it only affects one Sim-only ship. If we could have convergence on more than one axis, and "customizable" or "auto" convergence (think X-Wing Alliance), then this wouldn't be an issue at all, but what our gun convergence patch boils down to is a text file telling the game how many degrees to rotate a projectile around the Y axis for each ship.
 
Eder said:
1) We could have the bullets be fired from somewhere other than the location of the actual gun barrels, somewhere closer to the center of the ship. For example, we could make bullets come out of the middle of the Gladius's wings.

Well...#1 would have looked very silly. I didn't go with #2 and #3 because they both would mean changing things well established in original games (gun locations and ship sizes) because of a technical issue that came up in Standoff, but which was absent from the original games (the issue of your ship no longer being a sprite trying to hit other sprites).
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That's the one I always go back to. I don't think it'd look all that weird in the heat of things. If it was noticeable, I would think it'd be kind of a decent tradeoff.
 
I could live with it if it gave the Raptor and other ships back some of their old teeth. I doubt many others would care because it would give the Raptor especially some of its WC1 feel.
 
That there has even been this much grief over the Raptor's ineffectiveness in Standoff really must say something about how much we love that old bird. Only 34% chance against a Jalthi? I think not.
 
There are some useless ships in WC games , yes
Poor Phantom... it ain't it's fault that mass drivers are not cannons but nonsense in WC Armada
Poor Wraith, I'd say, for Particle Cannons are no cannons too...

So those two are useless in Armada, for cannons with projectiles which are slower than ships are no cannons. Armada's Gladius has no such problem. Good enough ship, I'd say. Not perfect (Jrathek would beat it easily enough), but good enough.

Epee in WC2. The same problem. Those damn slow particle projectiles. You have to fire at "two meter and no millimeter more" distance to actually hit the target, or the enemy will evade you fire without problem. It kills the purpose of light fighter whose only chance to survive is to keep distance.

WC3? No such problem, all cannons are beam cannons, they are no more of projectile type, so the problem disappears.

WC4? The same thing. No more projectile guns (Except the stormfire, which fires so fast it can't be called projectile cannon in terms of WC2)

Guess I don't have to state that EVERY cannon in standoff is of impossibly slow projectile type so that is makes simple targeting a torture ;) So I didn't say it :)

P.S.
Standoff Gladius has really awful cannons ;)
 
MjavTheGray said:
There are some useless ships in WC games , yes
Poor Phantom... it ain't it's fault that mass drivers are not cannons but nonsense in WC Armada
Poor Wraith, I'd say, for Particle Cannons are no cannons too

So those two are useless in Armada,
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The Wraith's Particles are average, but its Reapers are very good. Its leech missiles are also invaluable, and it's a cheap fighter to produce. The Wraith is one of the most useful fighters in the whole game.
 
With the Raptor in Standoff, I just turned off the two outer guns. I could hardly hit anything with them. The problem with that was the two inner guns (mass drivers? It's been a while since I played it...) weren't very powerful. It made quick kills very difficult for me; I would usually only try for them on Wave 2 and 5. I saved up my missiles for the latter, weakening the Kats 'til they were almost gone separately, then using my missiles to finish each of them off in quick succession. I saved the DFs for last as point-blank shots. By the time I reached Wave 6 and got rearmed and refueled, I either went kamikaze, or tried to hide behind an asteroid to even the odds (heh heh...stupid Kats; too bad the collisions didn't count). Either way, I never got to Wave 7.

I loved the Raptor in WC1, even more than the Rapier. It's interesting how much of an effect gun placement has when you've got a different flight engine. The Epee, on the other hand, has the exact opposite result, due to its smaller cross-section.

I'd be interested in hearing Stern's opinion, as well. After all, he's the master of the gauntlet.
 
Well, at least it's better than flying a flying a desk...

I don't much like the Gladii, mainly because its shields seem rather weak for a fighter-bomber. The maneuverability isn't really that great, and without much in the way for shields to compensate for it, it seemed like you were getting shot up quite easily. For something that is supposed to survive a dogfight and get to a capship relatively intact while absorbing flak hits well enough to deliver torpedoes...well, it just seems weak in that mission.

I dunno...that's just my experience, but I don't much care for it myself.
 
I even enjoyed flying a Gladius in Standoff - it was not That bad (ok the afterburnaer WAS that bad).However my wingmenen were blown up in Gladii much faster then in Rapiers OR Stilettos, wich was really irritating, espetially in EP3 losing path missions...
 
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