Ship Radius Question

[Hearteater]

1) Is Ship Radius used for anything other than Boosts (e.g., Attack Boost, Armor Boost)?

2) Is my export wrong, or is the Missile Frigate ShipRadius from Marks I-V really 40/40/30/30/60...that seems off.  I'm guessing it should be 30/30/40/40/60 (similar to the Parasite)?  Unless my export is wrong.

[keith.lamothe]

1) It also causes an automatic immunity to translocation when >= 120.  The immunity is stored in a separate flag, though, so if we felt like removing that rule it would be fairly easy.

2) The radius is based off the actual visual area of the ship, and some of the older graphics (missile frigate being among the oldest) varied in size from mark to mark. (edit: and not always in the same direction)

[x4000]

Ship radius also affects how tightly the ships can pack in a certain area.  Which seems only so important, but it affects how they are able to concentrate fire if their ranges are middling, and how they take AOE damage in return.  Among other related more minor things that I'm sure you can extrapolate.

But in terms of larger actual mechanics, Keith's ones are the ones of course.

[Hearteater]

I just checked and visually the radius on the Missile Frigate are correct.  I think it actually causes a slight balance issue since Mark III and IVs get more Boosting and can clump tighter than IIs and Is (they are AOE immune, so clumping doesn't hurt them at all), but I don't know that it is really that big a deal.  Just an oddity I noticed parsing the data.  Note that it is the only Fleet Bonus/Triangle Ship that gets smaller with higher Marks.  Most have a smaller size at Mark I or are the same across the board.

[keith.lamothe]

Perhaps we could have boosting total go off the Strength metric now that we're starting to standardize on that.  The ship radius isn't actually all that bad a metric for this case (it's worked for years) but as you say it does have some edge cases.  And using Strength would probably be better than having a separate "BoostCost" stat, etc.

But as you say, it's not actually all that big a deal.

[Hearteater]

You could probably just use a value of INT(544*Mark/Cap) per ship.  That should make a Mark V ship cost five times a much to boost, which makes sense because it has five times the base damage.  And higher cap would let you boost more of them proportionally.  The 544 was picked because that should be the biggest cap-size in the game I believe (just so you don't need to deal with real numbers).

Such a system is also pretty intuitive to the player.  Does ship type A have twice the cap of ship type B?  Then you can boost twice as many.  You could even express boost counts in "number of Fighters".  Additionally, I don't know if the amount of boosting is standardized at present, but you could also just make it a standard "Boosts are always 1/2 a cap of equal Mark Fighters" so a Flagship II would boost half-a-cap of Mark II Fighters.

[keith.lamothe]

Does ship type A have twice the cap of ship type B?  Then you can boost twice as many.

What about turrets (3x as strong as comprable fleet ships)?  mercs (3x the cap of normal mkIV ships)?  Starships (lower dps, higher durability, balanced as half-caps)?  Superweapons? Etc.

You could even express boost counts in "number of Fighters".

Actually, the Strength metric is defined as 1 = 1 mkI fighter on high caps.  So I think that's what you're getting at

[Hearteater]

Honestly, I don't think I'd make it all that complicated.  Leave it with k*Mark/Cap formula and have at it.  Starships will "waste" some boost (since their base DPS is half normal) and Turrets will be a big gain (since they have relatively x3 DPS), but in the grand scheme of things, I wouldn't be overly concerned.  We've already got Military CS boosting Turrets, so it isn't like attack boosts are impossible to get on every Turret in a system.  If you want to micro attack boost for turrets that have damage multipliers against the current wave, good for you.  I don't think its any more powerful than the abuses possible with attack boosting right now.  It's just more clear and consistant.

The only issues I have with using the strength metric are:
1) It isn't an obvious one to the player.  We don't know how much strength every unit is worth (and I don't think we need our interface clutter with that information)
2) If strength takes into account health (so more health means more strength) then that would suggest it wouldn't be any more accurate than my suggestion
3) If strength takes into account actual DPS then it really becomes impossible for the player to evaluate how much can be boosted because of the wide differences in per-ship dps

[keith.lamothe]

It doesn't look at any stats like health or dps.  It's actually just my guess at "how many mkI fighters is this worth?", so it's actually really close to Mark/Cap (and is exactly that for triangle types, bonus types and starships) but stuff like 3x for turrets, 3x for mercs, etc.  Anyway, not really a big deal either way

[Hearteater]

Agreed.  I was just checking into Ship Radius for my DPS spreadsheet to make sure it didn't do anything special.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, just boost-limits and translocation immunity.  And collision, of course.  Other than that it's just a stat with a somewhat quirky distribution on older units.

[Bognor]

While we're on radiuses, I've a strong hunch the number of ships a booster can boost is actually being calculated based on the ships' radiuses, rather than the squares of their radiuses.  When I get time I'll try to create a save that demonstrates this. 

[Hearteater]

Why should it use square of the radius?  If it isn't just going to use radius, it should use cube of radius since ships are three dimensional objects?

[TechSY730]

If you want to get pedantic, it would be pi*r^2 for how much "area" to "consume".

EDIT: Heck, if you want to avoid decimal multiplication, you could even do just 3*r^2 and that would be close enough for most in-game purposes.

[Hearteater]

But pi is a constant multiplier across all the ship volumes you sum and as a result can be factored out since you can just multiply the boosting limit by pi.  So for ships with radii a, b and c, and a boosting limit of x, using volume (although it works for area too):
x = 4/3*pi*a^3 + 4/3*pi*b^3 + 4/3*pi*c^3
x = 4/3*pi*(a^3 + b^3 + c^3)
x / (4/3*pi) = a^3 + b^3 + c^3

So if you apply an implicit 4/3*pi multiplier to the booster's limit, you eliminate a multiplication and any need to deal with decimals.

(x * 4/3*pi) / (4/3*pi) = a^3 + b^3 + c^3
x =  a^3 + b^3 + c^3