well i guess people dont like the flashpack. though effectively BL's firepower drops by 1/3rd without it. the only truely effective capship, the vesuvius, will not be able to hold the line in large combat. 5 or more tallahassees and a 4/5 destroyers will start to take it apart no sweat. then what do you do. you need quick efficient cap ship counter methods. i see the flashpack as this. if you are worried about a race to flashpack mentality that can be easily stuck down. just imagine, research and build times for all required technology to use flashpack will be available no quicked than 20 mins and at 20000 RU. this can be strictly set by me and there would be no way around it. it would mean that if you were playing against BL (human or AI) you would have 20 mins to desing a strike force and attack. the enemy will have no scope of doing anything if he spends 20000RU on research only. if needs be you could set out with early harrasment techniques. you see each race has a weakness and a strength. BL is weak at the beginning of the game, this can be taken advantage of. confed has a balanced strength right from the start so you might want to use this to advantage. i dont think we need to remove it. plus the flashpack is counterable. its targetable by capships so if one flashpack is launched not to far away a carrier's turrets might just be able to shoot it down before it gets too close.
ok now mjr whoopass. im afraid whatever realism tradeoffs are being made they are being made mainly due to the game engine or gameplay.
1) first of all even though till now fighter maximum speed values match wc4 values i have doubts about using them. this is because in HW2 those values make ships fly so fast that they can fly from one side of a map to the other and back in less than a minute. similary cap ships seem to move so fast that they give you the feeling you're spinning a pen on the table. on average, the higher you go with speed values causes some undesireable effects in HW2 such, as badly behaving collision boxes. collision boxes (avoidance boxes of ships) is not a fixed mesh. it is (at all times) a calcualtion of the ships speed at that moment, heading and some internal equations developed by relic. this means fast moving ships and especially large ones like concordias and the tallahassee end up going mad when they need to fly in formation or take up a position near another capship. hence all capship speed and movement values pitch and yaw are reduced by me to suit HW2.
2) due to the absence of shielding in the HW2 engine (even though i have faked this on fighters) capships get massacred in combat. i made their hull strength by accurately following the ships database here. so my concordia had 6000 core strength plus 1200 shields, so i made its HP 7200. similarly made the tallahassee and destroyers matching the specs of WC4. loaded up the game, jumped to enemy proximity (enemy was confed also with only capships in their fleet *identical to me*) the capships opended fire with their dual bore lasers (doing 25 damage each bore) so thats 50 damage and dual bore AMG doing 600 damage each turret and within a few salvos the entire fight was over. this was with almost 20 ships each. it was boring and pityful. so ship health is set by me in accordance with HW2 standards. now people with HW2 mod knowledge will tell me to set weapon damage power. for example i can set capship weapons so that the same laser turret can have full damage potential against fighter craft but reduced damage potential against capships. but people will say equally that AMG turrets are made for capship slugfests. so it means that a tallahassee with ~4000 hp takes ~2400 damage from one salvo of AMG turrets on an enemy tallahassee alone. 2 salvos and and a ship you waited 5 minutes to build and spent 10000 RU on is gone. its really depressing when you play this (yes even more so than a vagyr BC firing its front cannon at your hiigarian carrier) trust me.
3) torps cant be one shot killers. HW2 does not allow you to specify how many times a ship can fire a weapon. if you give torps to a longbow it uses it like a laser cannon. if you make torpedos a buildable munition then you have one build entry in your build menu for each wing of bombers, so if you have 10 wings of bombers and 4 bombers a wing, thats 40 entries in the build menu. there is only one option and i have taken the route already, which is to have long refire times. however torps are not wasted since whenever they are fired they only choose capships as targets so there is faith that even while a longbow wing is dogfighting it will still pump every available torp into some enemy capship near by. or even easier just tell them to go after the capship itself. torpedos are strong but it would take maybe 3 wings of longbows or effectivley 2 wings of avengers to take down a carrier class. torps are targetable so they can be shot in flight if you choose to do so. also bombers will have normal gunfire that is attuned to damaging capships more than damaging fighters, similar to how i have made laser mounts on capships as i mention above.
4) the tallahassee is 800m effectivley. i know people will think i did this because i wanted it to be the BC equivalent, but in the end i had to make it bigger than 530m for a very simple reason. as you have read above the tallahassee will have full use of its rear hangar. this means ships have to dock and launch from that same hangar door. with the ship scaled to 530m the hangar is so small that there is no space for a wing to land and launch at the same time. since ships can not have sharing paths for docking and launching in HW2 this meant that fighters docking just intersected horribly with those launching and if not with other fighters then with the tallahassee itself. its not possible to set priority for ships to dock over ships to launch (not available in HW2) since they use different paths it will allways happen simultaneously.
these have been the biggest areas of change. all have valid reasons. though i think i will have to seriously question the use of flashpack. do people think i should remove it entirely?
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