Radiation Guns

I have my first radiation gun in, for internal testing. Its currently a new type of bullet firing module for cruisers. rough specs:

armour_penetration = 13 cost = 124 crew_required = 8 damage = 10 fire_interval = 2000 min_range = 90 max_range = 600 powerconsumed = 10 shield_penetration = 6 tracking_speed = 0.81 radiation_decay = 0.87 total_damage = 74 damage_duration = 3400

So to explain this, its a laser bullet like normal, that does normal damage in the normal way, inflicting a mighty ‘10’ damage, on whatever it hits (shields, armor etc, as normal.
HOWEVER
if it makes it through to the ship internals it delivers a radiation payload that decays by 13% every 200ms (which is a process tick for this kinda stuff). So in total, over a period of 3,400 ms it delivers 74 internal damage.

The weapon has rubbish shield pen and fire speed, but it compensates with the internal damage stuff. Basically the firing ship could have been destroyed, its weapon knocked out, or the target ship could have repaired its shields… whatever, it doesn’t matter, because the radiation is inside and cannot be stopped before it fizzles out.

My plan is that you would couple these with some anti-shield weaponry, maybe shield stability disruption weapons to temporarily knock shields down. You then hope to get a few lucky shots in with the radiation gun. Once they hit home, the enemy can retreat all they want, they are still screwed :D.

Thoughts?

edit: This will be race-specific, to add to the distinctiveness of the races.

Do radiation payloads stack, or influence other decay rates in any way?

The tracking seems a bit too low. Specially with that fire interval.
Give it salvo fire and lower the damage to increase the chances to hit?

Boohiss. I want to play with these weapons with whatever race i like. More options means more strategy, means more game.

Maybe new race gets a bonus, or their own better versions of these, as the other races have to reverse engineer the technology from the wreckages of battles won…

Sounds like a good Empire weapon :slight_smile:

I like the sound of this. One thing:

I think that “modules with radiation shielding” would be the better choice - kind of along the same line as the “reinforced” modules (carrier bay, crew bay, power generator etc). I agree with the assessment earlier in this thread that a dedicated rad shield becomes a waste of a slot if your enemy fields no rad guns. So maybe put in rad-shielded versions of key systems (crew, engine, power generator, shield generator), maybe even a radiation-dampening armor type?

But otherwise, I believe that Clif has given the proverbial nail a need for some Excedrin. (See if you can parse that hideous pun.)

Making numbers,
they say this weapon is still worse than a cruiser laser dps: 0.042 vs 0.046
add to that that it has worse tracking and less shots (less shots in a timeframe means that poor tracking is a bigger problem)

So what’s the point of using a weapon that is supposed to kill hulls better if a cruiser laser still does that better (more damage, more precision, instantaneous damage) and cheaper.

If your ship dies, it still does spooky damage from beyond the grave. Potentially increasing the damage your ship does. Imagine its a front line ship. Gets one shot off. 1 version you have a cruiser laser, the other you have a radiaton weapon. Ship then dies after 1 shot. Which did more damage? Its that sort of situation.

It’s sporting pulse laser range of 600, which is a fairly strong weapon despite it’s DPS of .02.

The reload is making it a tad unreliable looking, though.

lets talk about this one then.

If both weapons had a EXACT 50% chance to hit per shoot and do damage then:

In what you shot 1 radiation gun, a laser shoots 4,6 times.
Then in 10 “radiation gun” shoots, 5 will hit doing a total of 420
in the same interval we get 46 laser shots
46 cruiser shoots, 23 will hit doing a total 460
And now consider than radiation gun with the stats given, will hit less than a laser gun.

Also the laser gun it’s cheaper and can also bring down shields down.
The only advantage I see on the radiation field is, bit of extra range, and a more colourful battlefield.

I think I’d rather see an area of effect type weapon for radiation damage. A nuke PD missile that affects a group of fighters with a rad dose (since they are lightly armored)

For a beam, I’d think like a meson beam, have it skip armor but be very low shield penetration. And do radiation damage to X random modules.

I’m not sure I like the damage over time thing, really, unless it affects an area and the time is short.

Oh, and have any beam be a spinal mount! (you can do a spinal with a SMALL allowed arc of fire, BTW).

I don’t know for sure but I would say that limited arcs for weapons would break the game or just need a MAJOR code rewrite.

Um, no. 1st shot happen the moment you get into range. Fire interval applies after that. I am talking about the gun firing one shot exactly. Each gun gets 1 shot, and thats it.

Most attacks involve the ships flying right at each other anyway. I think the code needs a couple major changes right now.

  1. Weapons need a way to have certain targets disallowed FOR JUST THAT WEAPON. Either as part of the weapon’s module file, or as an order (the former seems easier).

  2. When spinal mounts are written in, have it be a new slot type. If that slot has a weapon in it, then the ship attacks by heading towards the enemy target (as all ships already do). Give the weapon a small arc of fire, a few degrees on either side of dead ahead to make it easier.

regarding the comparison with cruiser lasers, my point is that this weapon can do a lot of internal damage with a single shot. If you briefly take down enemy shields, you might get 1 or 2 laser shots internally, but when the shields are back up, the rest could bounce off or get absorbed by shielding.
With the radiation gun, if you get a shot under the shields, then you do a bunch of internal damage without needing to keep the shields down.
I think the weapons used to take down shields (shield disruptor bombs) are under-used, and I may balance this out by upping their stats in some direction.

But currently this never happens in GSB, unless you rely on disruptor torpedoes to take down enemy shields (I think I’ve seen one, maybe two challenges that made heavy use of these…)

Of course, if you changed the game so that shields could come back up then this gets really interesting.

i.e. once a shield goes down, have the shield module ‘silently’ recharge, and have it come back up when it reaches maximum charge… Perhaps just have it recharge normally, but just set it’s stability to zero when it goes down, so you can lean on the existing code (although I guess currently disruption is per ship, not per module?) Couple this with making damage to a shield module dimish (1) it’s current strength (2) it’s maximum strength (3) it’s recharge rate (4) it’s current stability, and you have a fun game mechanic - disrupt the shield, then try to knock out the module before it comes back up.

This would also make a new class of weapons interesting - shield ‘burners’ - weapons that deal some fraction of their damage to the shield module itself, when they strike a shield.

hmm that sounds too complicated, keeping things simple and balanced is the key, TA:CC managed this with all the decent custom units that came out, boosting the game to well over 800 mostly balanced units, something that no other RTS has done since.

This game is similar, theres always a way round fleet designs and the quest for the ‘perfect’ fleet is ongoing, but we must resist the temptation to create weapons/modules that are there to fill the Game’s mathmatics just because they can. For instance, atm I rarely play with certain types of shields or weapons as I don’t ‘see’ their benefits in-game, whereas something obvious such as dam-delay and shield by-pass weps would be obvious and fit in somewhere on some fleets (like the link-gun lasers, prox mines, fighter anti-fighter guns, and radiation Ideas)

Actually most of my combats involve a huge amount of broadside and rearward firing. I’m sure it’s an effect of the engagement ranges I set, as well as my addiction to the Keep Moving order and the fact that I can’t seem to decide between Co-operative and Vulture, which results in my ships flying inside an enemy’s shield and firing at a different ship half a kilometer away.

But I blame it on the Captains because that’s what Admiral’s bars are for. :slight_smile:

For what it’s worth, the main reason I don’t use the disruptors very often is that they seem to take a halfway decent skirmisher frigate and turn it into a high-priced brick. The cost leaps up, the speed plummets like a dead pigeon.

Or at least that’s how I recall it. I haven’t looked at them seriously in a while.

The disruptors cost more to maintain than ion cannons, which are the highest single frigate DPS weapon around, as well as the de facto shieldbreaking weapon of choice.

I’m not sure what could be done with them. The nature of their damage means they do not ‘cooperate’ with other weapon systems until they fully take the shield down.