How is range measured?

Does anyone know how range is measured? Is it from the centre of the ship, the location of the module, distance from the closest point on the ship’s collision shape, or something even more abstract?

I believe it is measured from the module itself.

From: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2504

Also a great way to see this is when in a battle if you select a ship and then select a specific weapon, it will show which hard point that weapon is on, what it’s targeting, and it’s min and max firing range.

Using this you can see the effects of putting weapons in different slots on ships.

Uh… If ranges are measured from the turret, then some of these weapons are awfully short ranged aren’t they? For some cruiser weapons that means that a significant chunk of the weapon’s range is eaten up by the sheer size of the ship’s hull.

Cliffski, if you’re reading this, is this a deliberate design choice? Where is the “engage ship type X at range Y” order measured from, and does that mean that a ship with a weapon of range 500 told to engage at range 500 could be out of range because its weapons are 80m further back on the hull? Might it make for more predictable ship performance to measure all ranges from the ship’s centre of rotation?

and that’d be why i mount shorter-range weapons on the fronts of ships…

i suspect that “engage at range” is range-to-centre-of-mass of the ship. the range of individual modules is quite definately measured from the module itself. you can see this in-game. and it’s also quite possible to get ships which engage in range of only half the weapons (though that’s rather easily solved tbh)

i don’t quite understand what you mean by measure all ranges from the centre … are you suggesting that you could mount weapons on the back-side and they’d get a range boost (just as the weapons mounted on the nose got nerfed)?

I agree this may need to be rethought. We have the information that the distance is measured from the weapon, but we do NOT have the information of how far away the weapons are from the different emplacements in meters, and the nose of the ship, or wherever the range is calculated from. Even if we had that info, the player has to go, ‘ok range is 650, but they are 60m behind the nose, so that’s range 590, but optimum rage is 400, so that would be…’ Then he has to jiggle that inexact slider to set the range. The question is, is that good gameplay. I personally don’t think it is, and I think the computer should be smart enough to get in range via the AI without being limited by a slider telling him what range to fire at.

I just think a lot of problems of this type could be solved with orders that work well. I have had no success making multiranged ships and basically have given up on them, because the ships don’t seem to understand the loadout. If I make an anti-fighter frigate with a beam weapon as well, and don’t delete the Attack Frig and Attack Cruiser orders, pretty soon the thing is on the front lines getting blown to shreds, even at 0% engage. This is limiting at lot of the strategy right there. It just seems like if we had preset behaviors instead of a slider:

Close to longest range and engage
Close to shortest range and engage
Close to longest optimal range and engage
Close to shortest optimal range and engage

and

Do not close, follow formation orders (to have the escort guard the missile cruiser) but attack if within range of longest weapon.

You’ve covered 90% of what you would ever want to accomplish via orders, without adding and subtracting numbers in your head. If you multiply those orders by 3 (for each class of ship), that’s quite a bit of leeway the player has to set it up how he wants. Mind, this assumes that the orders are robust. No wandering off doing something else. But then again, by saying to the ships ‘just do exactly this’ instead of leaving it up to a nebulous percentage slider that the ships ignore anyway, it might make the orders be executed as the player wants, since the logic is simpler.

well, apparently optimum range if you want to hit most is weapons_range/2 anyway.

personally, i have ships in formation/escorting, so not only do i have weapons-position-on-hull to consider (ship length is given information, so that’s not really hard) - but i’m also telling the lead ship where to enage so the support ships are in range.

i don’t find it a problem, but i can see the playstyle which wants to know exactly how everything works/where it is would. i have a friend who was moaning about the ship engagement sliders and cooperative - his playstyle couldn’t cope with the airy-fairy cooperative order (‘but how does it know which nearby ships to support??’) - he wanted to be able to lock formations of ships into everything firing at exactly one target.

i have a suspicion that the anti-ship orders work in a probabalistic way - if you have all 3 sliders at 50%, the ship will divide its fire exactly 3 ways among the three classes of target. if it’s cruisers-30 frigates-60 fighters 30, then frigates get half the firepower and cruisers/fighters share the other half.

i see it as a good thing - too much control leads to micromanagement, and the premise of the game is very much “send them out and fight” with quite general orders. i know the orders are flexible and not precise, so i plan for that.