Another Question

Does anyone know how the:

Weapons Range Short
Weapons Range Medium
Weapons Range Long

Parameters in the Settings.txt file work?

Is it like:

Anything below the Weapons Range Short value is considered as Point blank, anything between the Weapons Range Short and the Weapons Range Medium values is considered as Short Range and so on ?

Or is it:

Point Blank is 0 and anything below Weapons Range Short is Short range, anything between Weapons Range Short and Weapons Range Medium is Medium ?

or maybe completely different?

What i am trying to do is to add more combat influence to the ship strategies, the influence at the moment is marginal at its best.
As an example, you have two ships, same type, same tech and everything.
One of the two is set to maximum Range while the other one is set to point blank, the max range ship is unable to keep the point blank ship at range, given they have the same speed.

This has many reasons, mainly the way how the ships move in combat but i dont see any chance to change that.
Other reasons are the "Combat Ship Minimum Turn Angle To Cause Deceleration" parameter in Settings.txt (45 works way better) and the relative short direct fire weapon range combined with some defensive bonus components that you can not counter.
Like: Hull bonus, scattering and stealth armor that lower the effective combat range even more.

All in all this makes long/medium range combat with Df weapons kinda pointless and it also makes small hull sizes stronger than they should be imho.

My aproach to change this was to:

1. lower the hull defence bonus, right now it is like 15 to -15 step 5 from frigatte to baseship
2. Up the default weapon range and to hit% from 120/-60% to 200/-40% (200/-20% for APB/Polaron)
3. change the Weapons Range Short/med/long parameters to match the new ranges and change the
"Combat Ship Minimum Turn Angle To Cause Deceleration" value to 45 ( has some effect on the time
needed to close in on point blank)

Right now, i only changed 5 weapons for testing purpose, DUC as the base weapon to balance the rest against it. APB twice the damage output of the DUC at max range but only half the damage output at point blanc. Phased Polaron, half the APB damage output, skips normal shield. Meson Blaster, same as DUC but only half damage, skips shield. Finaly Ripper Beam, quad DUC damage output but only range 50 (might still be too much).Weights and reload times are the same, for testing purpose.

It works way better. The strategic ship settings have a noticeable effect on combat, much more than before.

2x