I just did an experiment with an idea that’s been floating around the forums, plugging a large number of power generators on a cruiser and sending it to attack enemy cruisers at range 100, to damage them with shockwave when it explodes. I got the power output into the mid-700s, and noticed two things:
It damaged the ship it was touching, but not one that was just a short distance away.
The damage to the ship it was touching was only around 300-ish, not what I was hoping for with a 4500+ credit expenditure.
I’m not saying I think this should be balanced into a viable tactic, that would be silly even for this game.
But it does seem to me that the distance the shockwave travels should be larger for bigger explosions like this; is it currently a fixed distance regardless of explosion power?
300 damage is enough to outright destroy or at least severely cripple frigates. It’s pretty hard to justify increasing that, considering that there isn’t an avoidance algorithm.
Is there a way to make shockwave damage variable to it’s initial beggining? Point zero could be like 2X damage (penalizing anything on top) but further it travels the less effect it has. Also I see no reason why fighters are completely immune to shockwave - there should be at least a small enough amount to make them run back to a carrier for repairs. It would make fighter/laser spam much less useable.
Yep, the explosion radius is fixed depending on the ship size not the power produced. I experimented time ago with kamikaze frigates (a mod I was doing) with 1000 power outputs and bigger and the only differences where in damage done by the blast. I dropped the mod because I ended with waaay overpowered and cheap ‘bombs’ and didn’t want to bother to balance it.
That’s actually the way it already works; more damage closer to point zero and less farther out. I don’t know what the actual ratios are, however.
That would be really difficult to balance; too little and it would have no effect, too much and it would wipe out whole clouds of fighters really quickly. Maybe a kind of “stun” effect, with the fighters spinning around for a few seconds after being hit by a blast…
Aha, I suspected but wasn’t sure. Thanks for the confirmation!
That one I like. And it’s not too hard to balance:
Number are out of thin air, just to show the principle:
Less than 300 damage shockwave: No effect on Fighters.
For every 30 points above 300, fighter takes 1 damage.
If you choose the “30” halfway decent, it’s easy to balance, as total damage increases by huge amounts for a small difference for fighters. But I like the stun idea more.
