Defensive Systems

Dragon1

Rear Admiral
Hello everyone at the Wing Commander Saga mod,

I hope things are progressing well for you. Just a quick question. In the novel "Fleet Action", we learn that both Confed and Kilrathi capital ships are armed with sophisticated point defense systems for dealing with torpedo attacks. Systems like minature mass-drivers and point defense missile batteries. I would immagine that torpedo attacks on Kilrathi capital ships make up a large number of missions in the up-coming mod release. Do you guys have any intention on modeling any of these defensive systems into the capital ships?

Also, the damage threshold of ships in the games differs from that of the novels considerably. In WC3 and 4, the Victory and Lexington could survive 4 sometimes 5 torpedo hits before blowing to pieces. In the novels, I recall the heaviest Confed ships succumbing to 2-3 torpedoes. What balance will you guys use?

Thanks for all your hard work,
From an appreciative community
 
We are still making final adjustment to the game-balancing, but we will target some game-balance similiar to WC3. To give you a rough scetch, while a destroyer/fregate barely survives a torpedo-hit, cruisers are much tougher to take down. Carriers can sustained quite a few torpedo-hits, but I'm not 100% sure how many (depends on the carrier-class). Fact is, that we are trying to calculate the available WC-Stats into the new engine as good as possible, as long as it doesn't contradict the balance again :)

To answer your question about the point-defense weapons, except for one model, all ships are armed only with the Laser- and AMG-Turrets like the stats say (and a few missile-turrets). Personally I use fleet-tactics as weapons reference when arming a model, I think it is very accurate about the armament. But when we would add the point-defense weapons too, there would be simply too much defense-fire and I guess it would break the balance again.

The coded turret-AI is very accurate in shooting down torpedos, and also very accurate in anti-fighter-defense. You will be suprised how hard it will be, getting a positive torpedo-lock, not to mention that the torpedo still has to make it through the AA-Fire. (So the choice is either to face the AA-Fire first and take out some turrets, or shoot from larger distance and the correct vector to get a lucky shoot)

The defending fighters aren't making things easier, imagine a banthkara carries around 120 fighters, and they will not watch you shooting down their home-carrier. Though our missions will most probably not throw all of them against you (some of the available fighters could be destroyed in previous missions to give the final assault a better chance of success), but a few more than in WC3 (and not only 3 at a time) you should expect nevertheless. But in order to make it not too hard, you have not only 1 wingmen most the time, escpecially not at carrier-raids. I hope that does answer your question :)

I really hope, that we will receive the final-codechanges soon(mostly fiction-viewer, which we cannot do this stuff on our own unfortunately), so that we can finally release the prologue. It is really about time, that you people will get the result of our work, instead of reading about it :) The beta-test is running, and most of the mission-bugs seems to be fixed now. Besides the missing code, a few model-upgrades, some interface-polishing and the installing-routine are now to be fixed, that should do the trick. However, I'm currently outburned from my work, and Tolwyn and some others do have exam-stress, so it will still take some time.

(Now I see it from a really new perspective when game-designer are forced to delay a release-date, it's really not that easy catching up on a promised release date :D )

Starman©
 
Back
Top