neilplus wrote:- a Lepton Beam that subjects the target to a massive blast of charged particles, temporarily disabling it. Divide and conquer for pirate packs.
I like it. Basically a new damage type. Generalisation: Lepton weapons increase a charge in the ship; the higher the charge, the worse its maneuvering, up to a point where it becomes paralised until enough charge dissipates. This of course applies to the player ship, too. We should carefully avoid referring to it as
ion charge.
neilplus wrote:- a Lepton Bomb. See above. Temporarily disables everything in range. Not sure how we explain the fact that your ship remains unaffected, though!
It doesn’t. It works like a Q-bomb, without the cascade effect.
Actually, what all this is suggesting to me is a data-driven approach to weapons. Each laser, missile or bomb is specified in a plist entry, with damage rate for each type of damage – shield, hull, lepton/static charge – and cooling rate. To avoid abuse the game could force a minimum cooling rate/damage relationship. Oh, and the plist should also specify laser colour, which ought to be an attribute of the type of weapon rather than the ship.
I’m not entirely against multi-mounts, as long as they share cooling, although the number of mount points (in each direction) should also be a ship attribute.
I don’t like the E-bomb. I don’t like the ECM, either – it’s an E-bomb for missiles. It acts like a really big EMP, with an either-or effect. ECMs should have a continuous effect of weakening missile tracking, with a chance of confusing them sufficiently so they change targets if another ship crosses their path (technical: if |target-ship - missile| · |other-ship - missile| < threshold). Missiles should also have a tracking cone, allowing them to overshoot and lose track of their target; this cone could be reduced by ECMs. Obviously this paves the way for multiple levels of ECM, and multiple degrees of ECM-hardenedness.
The current EMP effect could be achieved by a more expensive-to-use EMP unit. Or simply be a side effect of the “lepton bomb” - if a missile builds up a big enough charge, it dies.