Allright, thanks to all for feedback, this will greatly help me to improve the next version of the mod which will be out as soon as I get a the following updates done! And thanks for all the praise, and criticism too.

To adress a few matters:

-SHIP SPEED: definitely too slow. Their top speed will be adjusted in a "speed revamp" for b0.82 version of the mod. Basically, I simply reduced ship speeds based on a simple divide operation - most ships got a half speed reduction, while caps got their rop speed divided by four.

The new ship speed table will differentiate by class and purpose. Capital ship speeds are still going to be the slowest, but far faster than they are now. These differences between ship classes will not be as large,  but they are still going to matter.

The top speed of all ships will be the scout, and that will remain unchanged. The bottom speed will be the siege capital, which will have its top speed raised by some 50%. All other ship speeds should fall between these two values. They are further to be divided into three classes:

-capital ships: slowest, with the fastest capital ship equal to the slowest cruiser type

-cruisers: medium range, again with the fastest cruiser equal to the slowest frigate type

-and finally frigates

Each of these class groups will further be divided into roles:

-assault: ships designed to fight hard and fly fast, they are going to have the most powerful engines to help them both survive and reach combat quicker; the fastest role type

-support&carrier: medium-speed ships; as the name suggests, they are going to encompass support types and carriers

-fire support: heavy duty firepower, these ships sacrifice mobility for sheer damage potential; including siege types, long range frigates and colony frigates (not colony capitals, which will fall into the support role)

SHIP TUNING: as was suggested, some ships like Illuminators escape the LRM box-in by having multiple firing angles. Their weapon characteristics will be further refined, perhaps by adjusting the firing rate or damage, or both.

The "jousting" effect is actually called a head-on pass. Its a classic maneuver, and one that is pretty much impossible to avoid with current fighter physics. Naturally, most head on passes end up with someone getting a voley of laser or plasma or whatever up their tailpipe. I feel this is pretty much as it should be.

Siege ships are indeed, observed a bit too weak. They are going to get a buff in defence, but only a minor one - their weapons were left unaffected by the mod and are going to remain so. They, however, are meant to be extremely vulnerable to other types of ships, especially assault types. Sending a bunch of siege frigates at a planet and hoping for that mass-carpet bomb carnage will likely result in a lot of broken-up siege frigs, especially if the defender has any sort of a fleet in orbit. Best use with a large fleet to occupy enemy forces, or as a separate "mop-up" fleet jumping in after the action has played out and the player has control of the gravity well. In fact, the buff will be done for the sake of AI which still tends to send siege frigs as a part of a main attack force - this will give them a sligtly better chance of doing some damage.

Long range frigates were initially observed to be actually superior to moving ships - they could simply turn in place and continue shooting while the mobile ships had to complete their pass and turn about to get another chance to fire. That's why the LR frigs got a big nerf to their shield and armor values as well as a large penalty to turning speed. I feel that LR frigates are meant to support the all-important assault types in battle, not dominate the battlefield. They have a very specialized role which can be further augmented by creating fire-groups with them and manually assigning targets to them during battle. They are still very dangerous, especially in numbers.

ABILITIES: these are also going to receive a look-through. However, to save time, I would appreciate all willing beta players to suggest possible issues like Soor has done. This helps me a lot in getting to problem areas much quicker.

Anyway, the next version of the mod should be ready in a few days. In the meantime, keep those suggestions coming, if you got them!

Is it possible to cange the number of targets a ship can have at once?

Not a modder myself, but in that case that's something to take a look at for the illums - its the combination of 270 degree firing angle + multiple targets that makes plopping an illum/guardian/subjugator blob in the middle of the enemy fleet so deadly.

hey.

maybe its just me, but i prefer some ships stationary.  These would be teh long-range ships and the carrier cruisers.  A vanilla-compatible version would also be appreciated.  Thanks a ton man!

-Flankers

Just a random thought I had sobear with me as my terminology may very well make the arguement a tad over complicated.

So, is it possible to scale damage received based (both shield and hull) on the angle of the fire in relation to the defending ships OWN firing arcs? As an example if a ship received fire head on (be it a broadside, fighter fire etc) i.e the damage was to its front firing arc, could that then be scaled to say 3/4 or 4/5 damage? In comparison a proper broadside so a side-on (left/right firing arcs) ship would hit for normal damage.

The two main reasons I ask this is firstly it adds further tactical depth with the positioning of fleets and the calculation of a firing run. Secondly (and this is all personal opinion) I believe ships would tend to be structurally sounder at the front -like say, a car- and I imagine that the shield projection is somewhat of an egg in shape around the ship, which is also strongest at the front/back, if you follow what I am saying.

I have no idea how and if it could be coded but I figure it can't hurt to ask. I have tremendous respect for the time and effort you have devoted thus far Manshooter and I look forward to playing The Last Stand!

Mansh00ter,

Hey, i must say this is soo cool what uve come up with. Althoutgh do u think u can make a version for the 1.15 version of sins since, i might not upgrade to entrenchement for a long time.

Akkan117

Developers listen to feedback and enable fighter physics, mod community (Manshooter in this case) use it to good effect, great work all round.

I am curious to see what it looks like with a large battle fleet, Blair said in a recent interview that it looked chaotic (reffering to their own internal tests I assume not modding work).

Would it be possible to see a large frigate battle in action? (or did I miss a post/link further back)

On the subject of fire arcs, I am by no means an expert from what I concluded from tests many moons ago the arcs are hard coded to a 'hemisphere of 180 degrees' based on the direction/facing of the dummy points stored in the models mesh. Either that or it fires in a straight line and the ship has to turn to face the dummy point at the target to fire. That might have changed though in recent releases...

manshooter - re: the cap ship speed issue, have you considered reducing the acceleration alot, but leaving the actual top speed of the cap ship alone?  large ships, even in the ocean today, are actually really fast.  I'm pretty sure an aircraft carrier can hit 30 knots.  i know the game or the mod isn't trying to emulate real world physics, but the bigger the ship, the bigger the engine, and theres insignificant aerodynamic drag in space, so naturally the ship with the most biggest engines is the fastest.

if it is possible to tweak their forward acceleration and angular acceleration to be appropriately slow and lumbering while leaving their top speed high would still give you the wanted effect of massive unmaneuverable cap ships, but they would still be bearable in transit from point to point. 

That sounds like a great idea because it would make it a snap to cross a gravity well or go around a star. The issue I think the game might have is to recognize when the ship must start to brake before it can slow down. Otherwise when you send your Marza over to bomb a planet it might wedge itself firmly into the equator.

Is there a parameter that controls when a ship should start to decelerate so it won't overshoot its targets?

Actually I just thought of doing that when I was pacing up and down a backyard today. Waiting for girlfriends has its benefits.

I'll definitely try this out... low acceleration and reasonably high top speed should satisfy both the need to have a maneuverability penalty for large ships and remove the tediousness when it comes to travelling long distance.

As for braking, that's another thing. The braking distance cannot be set, so if you set  decelleration too low, ships tend to clump up together, or even bounce off stuff. Usually, keeping the decelleration value high enough so that a ship can come from top speed to full stop in two seconds or so is enough. But since capital ships are supposed to get there and stay there, having such a discrepancy between acc and decc values won't matter (it would mess up fighter behaviour.)

When it comes to fighter behaviour, unfortunately it cannot be adjusted, you have to do it the other way around - adjust the ships to the behaviour. Homeworld 2 has a much more elaborate flight dynamics, which simply cannot be achieved in Sins without some major reprogramming. Flight stats such as mass, acc, decc and angular acceleration/decceleration ned to be balanced in such a way that you get the ships to actually do stuff like dogfighting, keep their combat efficiency so that battles don't last forever, don't jam together too often (I still have to test the current system on a Very Large Battle) and don't ram stationary object either. So there's quite a lot to take into account, and at the end of the day you have to settle for best possible - perfect likely isn't going to happen.

Well, I tested the mod on a medium sized fleet clash, around 100 ships per side, all light frigates, to see what happens.

An absolute furball happens! Forget about keeping track who is doing what, ships are all over the place, there are laser bolts flying everywhere and every half a second or so something goes boom.

Which is pretty much what I wanted to see. The idea is to prep your fleets before you engage the enemy, as the only way you will be able to effectively command after the fighting begins is through fleet sections and groups.

The reason I included volumetric effects in the mod is because I wanted to see what the potentially furious destruction of ships would do to the framerate, and at least on my computer it slowed everything down noticeably. The main culprit is the flotsam (shrapnel), so I'll tweak that out as well for the next update, to reduce the load.

I encourage people who have seen or tested out large battles to report here what the experience was like regarding gameplay and framerates!

With. I noticed that Bailknight's mod has some particulalry heavy-duty effects, such as the TEC LRM missile trail, but in my test only light frigs were used so the problem lies with all the debris flying about since there were a lot of ships popping all the time. Reducing the lifetime might also work, but I have to be careful not to reduce it too much because then you lose all the "clutter" environment which I find very, eh, athmospheric.

ONCE AGAIN! AWESOME!

'nuff said!