Author Topic: On Abilities and Immunities  (Read 1542 times)

Offline BobTheJanitor

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On Abilities and Immunities
« on: January 11, 2011, 11:46:41 am »
Is there a reference somewhere for the many different things listed under the Abilities and Immunities section for ships? Some of them are obvious at a glance, but some of them I've had to puzzle out and I'm still vaguely unclear on. Instead of asking every time, it would be nice if there was a reference in game somewhere for it, like the ship reference, so I could (to pick an obvious example) select "Repair" and see a description along the lines of "A ship with Repair Immunity cannot be repaired by Engineers, Mobile Repair Stations, Fortresses" etc. etc. For a less obvious example, Tachyon Emitters reveal cloakers right? I figured that out, but I don't think it's actually stated anywhere that I've seen. Giving it a cool name like Tachyon Emission is aesthetically better than 'Decloaker Beam' but then it's not obvious what it does without some kind of reference. Sure someone can put it together and figure out that Tachyon Guard Posts are what's decloaking their scouts, but maybe they think that's a function of something about that specific unit, so they won't understand when they see something that's not a Tachyon Guard Post that still causes decloaking, because they don't know to look for the right Ability in the unit's list. Anyway, something like this in the stats or in the wiki would be neat.

Also with reference to the reference (heh) it would be nice to be able to just put in an armor type and get a list of what has bonuses against it. That would help when determining what to use against what, without having to deal with an increasingly huge list of ships. Which, by the way, is pretty unweildy. Seriously, just try to look something up in the ship reference list. It's rather jerky and hard to scroll and hard to get it to stay on the spot where you want it when you do find the ship you need. Maybe a text search? Or type the first few letters at least to get it to jump to that section of the list? (Although to be fair I haven't tried this in the latest beta yet, maybe it's been smoothed out?)

Secondly, the list of ships over to the right when looking at the planetary view. I can't puzzle out the little icons next to them. Multiple upward pointing arrows. Little diamonds. What is it trying to tell me? Did Timmy fall down the well? I have no idea! Sorry if I'm rambling on, it may be from being stuck at work and unable to play right now.

Offline x4000

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Re: On Abilities and Immunities
« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2011, 12:08:41 pm »
In terms of the immunities, those aren't listed anywhere, but they're meant to be fairly clear.  Some of the newer ones (Gravity, for instance) probably fail at that.  This are things that need to go in the wiki, but I haven't had a chance to update that yet.

As far as the planetary summary background icons, those separate out into mobile military, immobile military, mobile nonmilitary, and immobile nonmilitary, just as a very broad way of helping you find your groups of ships.  The upward arrows, diamonds, etc, are just there to help have a shape for colorblind players to key off of, if they can't differentiate the background colors themselves.
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