Gavin Darklighter
THE FINAL STAND
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Posted - 2008.07.13 17:12:00 -
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Edited by: Gavin Darklighter on 13/07/2008 17:15:25
I really like the idea of being able to group all the guns into one big gun, but the biggest issue I see is how to apply damage from overheating. The server could easily calculate the damgae applied to each gun, but if the "grouped weapons" appear as a single icon in the modules area, the player will not be able to see what the damage level is for each gun.
What I would do is make it so that the first weapon in the "weapon group" shows as an "active module" with all of the ammo from each gun combined (I.E. an 8x 800mm II autocannon group would show 480 ammo loaded on the active gun). Then the weapons that got grouped into the first weapon would show up as passive modules that can be overheated and would show their damage state and if they are online or not. Each gun that gets overheated would increase the weapon group's damage modifier by the appropriate ammount. Missiles might need to be changed to an overheat bonus of damage instead of ROF to accomodate such a system.
As for damage and to hit calculations, I think they will need to be handled differently from the way normal damage calculations are applied. When you fire 8 guns and half miss, you still do half damage. But when you fire one gun and it misses or hits, you are dealing full or no damage. Also when you get a wrecking hit with one gun out of eight the extra damage is nice but not that great. If you get a wreck with an eight-gun group, it would be absolutely devestating. So instead of calculating if a weapon group misses or hits once, it will either have to:
A. Calculate whatever the tracking, optimal, signiture modifiers are once and then use those figures to "roll the dice" each individual gun, or..
B. Make the damage not random but based on a curve so that the weapon group does x% of full damage based on the modifiers mentioned above.
The last thing that I see as an issue to grouping weapons is what happens when your target is almost dead and you fire a shot that does twice as much damage as you need to finish it off. With ungrouped guns you would be able to immediatly fire the un-used weapons on another target. If we went with option "A" from above where each gun has its damage computed individualy, then it would be easy to figure out how many of the guns in the group were needed to kill the target. Once you know that the server could reduce the damage modifier to compenstate for the guns that are still cycling and let you fire the remaining weapons.
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