When attacking an enemy ship and adjusting your ship to position itself relative to the enemy ship, you can measure relative distance to the enemy ship using the weapon firing arcs. This does work well and lets you easily see what weapons you can fire. However, I have an idea which I believe will greatly improve the ability to, and precision of, reading ship distance from a targeted enemy: displaying the distance between your ship and a targeted enemy ship as a number when adjusting distance!
There are several major benefits that displaying the distance as a number brings:
1: Precision for range calculations is significantly higher - for both their range and their enemy’s range. When players can read the distance as a number, this contributes to precise range planning because the number gives much more information than “is the enemy in the arc or not?”, and this information is extremely valuable for defensive repositioning and guessing the attack range of enemies, as I discuss below.
2: It’s easier to create strategies utilizing ship distance useful in combat. With the only method of measuring distance by measuring attack range shown by firing arcs, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to create strategies that precisely place your ship’s distance from the enemy at less than the maximum range of your weapons. This is extremely problematic for ships with only long-range weapons like missile barges or railfans. But displaying range as weapon arcs and distance as a number significantly helps when planning what distance to keep your ship in submaximal range.
Example: Your ship has 2 HE missile launchers with a max range of 400m, and you want to keep your enemy at about 300m distance, far enough to shoot them without being shot by their lasers. But since the arc is 400m in size, how can you tell when they move into their attack range of 200m? Displaying both range as an arc and distance as a number easily communicate to the player how far their weapons will shoot, but the distance number can also be used to guess where the enemy’s range will be - without explicitly telling the player.
3: Having access to a numerical distance allows for the creation of more precise strategies - players can now devise which distances from enemy ships are best for their strategies in ways never possible before! The strategies they come up with can be as varied as their ship designs!
So having access to range from an enemy as weapon arcs and distance from that enemy as a number, IMHO, would improve tactical versatility and precision while being unobtrusive and not strictly required to play, as well as remaining familiar to Cosmoteer veterans. This way, everyone wins!
