Walt Dalas120 I also suggest having nukes shoot out from the launcher at a high speed, then slow down to "cruising speed" over a couple of seconds.
I'm not opposed to this, but why?
Just to give players more options. "Can't break through their flak? Fly in close, but be careful of return fire." Maybe the further a nuke flies the slower it gets.
This might be a good thing for side-fired missiles as well. That way there's a little more benefit to having forward-facing launchers, which I think is good for balance (more interesting tradeoff between forward- and side-facing) and also encourages switching from a side-launching to a forward-launching missile (or vice versa).
Walt Wasn't the point of the mines to start fires deep in enemy ships?
I'm not sure if a weapon designed to make heavy use of fires is a good idea, not without changes to fires/fire extinguishers. Right now fire extinguishers are very specialized and just a little like PD - though not really an issue right now because they're cheaper, don't take up surface area, and fire is always a byproduct of something much more deadly instead of a weapon in and of itself. But if firestarting becomes a significant part of any weapon, I think fire extinguishers would need some moderate changes.
Originally, I think the idea was for mines to deal bonus damage vs internals (like a cannon) but not be particularly strong vs armor/shields/weapons. Mines could also have been an "add-on" weapon that you could throw on any ship that already has missile launchers, with fast/inexpensive factories but very slow loading/firing (so if you already have a bunch of launchers, just throw on a few mine factories for cheap). I think that specialized anti-internal damage was a good fit for an add-on weapon.
But since mines need to load and launch rapidly from storage to help build minefields at the start of a multiplayer match, I no longer think they really work as an add-on weapon. But...
What would you think about making HE missiles the "add on" weapon, specialized vs either internals or armor? Mines could deal more even damage between shields, armor, weapons, and internals, like the current high explosives.
Walt One of the reasons I didn't do that in this prototype or make mines repulsed by their own ships was so that you could potentially build ships to physically manipulate the mines, like building bucks to release a bunch of mines on the enemy, crazy (maybe OP?) strategies like that.
What about having mines die (but not explode) when they collide with a friendly ship, and still not be repelled by friendly ships? I think that makes sense to do anyway, and it would prevent someone from building an unrealistic mine container ship.
Walt Making mines attracted to the closest point on a ship is probably easy. Making mines realistically attracted to a ship depending on its size and shape is not feasible, that's too complex a calculation to run performantly. Making mines more attracted to larger/heavier ships is easy, but then you have strange edge cases like what if only a long skinny part of an otherwise large/heavy ship is close to a mine, realistically the mine wouldn't be strongly attracted to the ship, but without taking the actual mass distribution of the ship into consideration, the mine would be attracted strongly towards the ship.
Would it work to have each mine attracted to the point midway between the nearest non-structure enemy part and the ship’s center of mass? That might be a reasonable approximation.
Walt Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I feel like a simple animation of a series of little lights turning on as the timer counts down would be just fine.
You know... that's a really good idea. There doesn't need to be an explicit reason why fire rate is limited - the railgun works just fine after all. I'm embarrassed I didn't think of this
Would it work to have the countdown start even when the missile isn’t yet loaded? And could the countdown transfer between missile types? (so if my 12 second load time nuke launcher is at 5/12 seconds, and I swap it to an EMP missile with 6 second load time, the EMP missile is now at 5/6 seconds)
