It's based on the hit percent chance it has, not the range, but basically the same idea. Problem is, this is the same logic that causes ships to stop "at range" for firing at other ships, so even if we cheated this would have very negative side effects like potentially causing frigates to walk into the range of special forces guard posts when they shouldn't, and things like that. Of course, you can do a bunch of other gyrations to try to get to the specific cases where this would work right and wouldn't interfere with "at range" firing or anything else, but I'm not real motivated to work on that problem, honestly. Simply adjusting the speed, which I've already done, is a faster solution in terms of programming time and CPU cost, has other ancillary benefits, and doesn't have any possibility of interfering with the "at range" logic. At this point it sounds like you're trying to solve the problem just to solve the problem; or am I missing something?
This isn't a solution to the original problem. The above scenario is only considering ships of the same type chasing each other. If, with the adjusted speeds, an AI ship has speed 20 (arbitrary number), and a human ship has speed 20, we have exactly the same issue. Even when ships of the same type are chasing each other, doesn't that just result in a jerky, stop-start type of motion on the part of the pursuer?
Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, that would be the case. Well, feel free to add this to the list for future consideration, then, but to be frank it's not a high priority for me at the moment. I feel like that's going to increasingly be an edge case (since ships are generally in speed "bands," most of the time the pursuer is either going to be able to keep up with the adjusted logic, or they will rapidly fall behind and switch targets). At the moment I have vastly more work than I can actually accomplish in the short term, and this issue falls below the other list of bugs and balance issues, and the remaining expansion content. Mainly because it's a devilish sort of thing that is likely to cause secondary problems when a fix is put in, and is for what is now hopefully going to be an edge case in the first place. But we'll see what you guys think of ZF.
