Liking the new plasma starship

[Volatar]

I am familiar with the SoaSE mechanic for dealing with focus-fire, and it is interesting, but if dps were heavily dependent on the recent "history" of what had hit a ship that would mess a lot with the autotargeting logic that tries to throw as many shots at a target as will be needed to kill it and then move on even if it's not going to die until the shots actually hit.  Armor Damage actually violates this a bit but it's in the direction of more shots being thrown at the target than necessary, rather than less, and "overkill" is way less noticeable than "underkill".

Sins can handle more complex targetting logic because they are, at maximum, dealing with 200ish ships. AI War has to be able to scale to thousands.

[Hearteater]

The Dispersion Field suggestion shouldn't be too terribly hard on targeting, since the ship in question goes from taking damage as normal to fully immune to damage.  Further, since the damage taken pool is decreased by a fixed amount every 0.2 seconds, the total period of invulnerability is known the moment it becomes immune to damage which might make it easier to determine whether a given ships shot would be wasted or not.  Now whether that defensive mechanic would feel good in play is another question entirely.

The Damping Field would be much trickier, but depending on how armor is handled for targeting, it could be possible to convert the Damping Field into armor for direct comparison.  But planning enough shots to kill before switching targets would be much harder.  Then again when I made those suggestions I was thinking of only the biggest of the big using them (Golems, H/Ks, Mothership), so the inefficiency in targeting would be less important.

My understanding though is the targeting stuff is already so tight that even tiny changes to it have a massive impact on performance.

[orzelek]

Actually after thinking about that a bit I realized that this would put players in much worse position against exo waves - and thats where majority of power creep is currently. So that may not be so good idea...

[jordot42]

I hope you don't change the RoF on the bomber starship to 4 sec. from 2 sec.  The alpha strike would be bigger and maybe the ship would be more efficient, but seeing the weapon discharge every 2 seconds is just more satisfying and fun to me.

[Hearteater]

My problem with the discharge is the range is so short and the projectile so fast, you often can't even tell they are firing .