DU Doo-Doo (or: When Numbers Get Not-Particularly-Serious)

Sharpshooter recently noticed an interesting little background thread in Wing Commander IV and decided to pull at it. The game's ship selection screens, which shows specifications for each flyable ship in the game when they are available for a mission, includes an interesting figure not included in other locations: "Dmg/Salvo". This measurement, listed in du or damage units, shows how much potential damage one single salvo from a ship's main guns can cause (not accounting for outside modifiers like windows or interiors on capital ships). Four of them match the game's internal gun damage values exactly: the Hellcat (2 Ion Cannons & 2 Particle Guns = (43x2)+(30x2) = 146 du), the Banshee (4 Lasers = (18x4) = 72 du), the Bearcat (4 Light Tachyon Gun = (4x50) = 200 du) and the Lance (2 Plasma Gun & 2 Tachyon Gun = (67x2)+(70x2) = 274 du).

The remaining three ships, however, do NOT match the in-game data. And it's from noticing this that we can learn a little bit more about Wing Commander IV's development! Upon investigation, we learned that the specifications shown in these screens are stored in LOADOUT.IFF separately from the gun values used in gameplay. What that means is they can be wrong without it impacting anything else; they're static values that aren't calculated from the 'real' numbers. So what we're seeing isn't an indication of something misunderstood about the game's inner workings… it's a sort of sensory echo of how the game was balanced!

Things like weapon damage values and ship specifications were always one of the last things locked when making a Wing Commander game. That's because they're an element that can be easily edited based on the Quality Assurance's playtesting. If testers find that a gun makes the game too easy or a ship's speed makes it too hard, those values could be easily altered right up until the game went gold (and today, well after!). However, there was one knock-on: printed material like manuals and hint books needed to be locked weeks earlier in order to be printed. So any changes to the game's simple balances made after these went to print would not be reflected. In the 90s, many hardcore Usenet jerks complained that Origin's manuals were 'notoriously inaccurate' as if the writers were lazy; the actual truth was that they were very accurate… for the latest build of the game they could possibly have referenced.

Today this means that we can look at differences between the values printed in those sources and the ones in the game and get an idea of how things were initially balanced… a bit like how a space telescope looks back in time by capturing light generated eons past! Let's compare the gun damage values from Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander IV with the ones in the game itself:

By including the numbers from Wing Commander III we can see that the base set stayed the same between both games… which means that the balance work on Wing Commander IV would've focused on the game's new 'heavy' gun variants. And indeed we can see that two values were changed after the guide went to print: the Heavy Ion Gun damage increased by ten and Heavy Photon Gun decreased by ten! This immediate explains the discrepancy in the Longbow screen. Using the guide numbers: 2 Plasma Guns & 2 Heavy Ion Guns = (2x67)+(2x50) = 234 du (versus the real in flight value, 254 du)!

The Vindicator tells us a slightly different story! The screen gives a value of 184 du while the final in-game guns, two Tachyons and two Lasers, only add up to 176. What most likely changed where was not a rebalancing of the gun values (which as we noted above remain the same as they did in Wing Commander III). Instead, we're seeing a full gun REPLACEMENT: the earlier iteration of the Vindicator must have had Heavy Photon Guns instead of Tachyons! This actually makes a little sense as the lore makes a point that tachyons guns are brand new while photon guns are more common on the workhorse fighters.

The Avenger, however, still isn't completely understood. The game lists a mysterious 267 du, an unlikely number in any of the scenarios we've thought through since the gun values should always be even numbers. A ship could theoretically get an uneven number if it had an odd number of guns but all evidence indicates that the Avenger was designed for four from the concept forward:

Our best guess here is that… it's an error. The Avenger carries two Heavy Photon Guns and two Heavy Mass Driver Cannons. Using the final in-game values that should be 248 du, a reduction of 19 from the screen which suggests a weapons change. But the earlier number in the guide gets us much closer: 268, a difference of just one (and matching the earlier guide's stats for Heavy Photon Guns and Heavy Mass Drivers).

Thanks for traveling to the past to help us learn how Wing Commander IV balanced its guns!