What is the relationship between weapon tracking speed and the enemy ship’s speed? Is it just, if tracking speed > ship speed, hit, else miss? This doesn’t seem to be the case. I’ve actually noticed that, even when tracking speed is considerably higher than ship speed, the vast majority of shots miss.
To test this, I created two units: a pack of fast rocket fighters and a single cruiser piled with cruiser defense lasers and tracking modules.
The rocket fighter build is:
[config]
name = rocket fighter
guiname = rocket fighter
hull = Federation Falcon Fighter
cost = 109
[modules]
0 = fighter power,
1 = fighter_rocket,
2 = fighter_engine III,
3 = fighter_engine III,
This results in 3.24 speed. Given that it uses rockets, a current bug (fixed, AFAIK, for 1.12) results in them orbiting the cruiser unable to fire.
The anti-fighter cruiser build is:
[config]
name = anti-fighter test cruiser
guiname = Anti-fighter test cruiser
hull = Federation Eagle Cruiser hull
cost = 3444
[modules]
0 = cruiser_defence laser,
1 = cruiser_defence laser,
2 = cruiser_defence laser,
3 = cruiser power III,
4 = cruiser_defence laser,
5 = cruiser_targetboosterII,
6 = cruiser_targetboosterII,
7 = cruiser_defence laser,
8 = cruiser_defence laser,
9 = cruiser_defence laser,
10 = cruiser droidbay,
11 = cruiser_armour V,
12 = cruiser_armour V,
13 = cruiser_armour V,
14 = cruiser_armour V,
15 = cruiser_armour V,
16 = cruiser_armour V,
17 = cruiser_armour V,
This has 7 cruiser defense lasers, which are 3.7 speed. The two level 2 tracking boosters should add ((0.16+0.16)*0.6 eff.)=0.192 for a total speed of 3.892, if I understand how tracking boosters work. At this speed, they are significantly faster than the ships and should be fully capable of hitting them.
When I ran the battle, it took over a minute at 4x before it was over. In the end, only 10% of the cruiser shots landed.
This is the fastest weapon I’m aware of and it was unable to take out even a moderately fast fighter. Even worse, this cruiser – purposely built for taking out fighters – wouldn’t stand a chance against them if I hadn’t intentionally crippled their weapons.
There are probably a few problems in here, but the one this post is about is the tracking speed. How does it work? Do these results point to a bug somewhere? The logic behind this should be made clearer to the player, including how tracking boost applies to the weapon tracking speed (is it strictly additive?). Also, the tracking speed logic likely needs to be changed so that even moderately fast ships can be hit with some consistency.