putting a lid on equipment resell prices

[Commander McLane]

Screet has reported somewhere that he is actually making money by trading with Q-bombs.

Which means he is either buying them at a station with an insanely low equipment_price_factor and selling them at a main station, or he is buying them at a main station and selling them at a station with an insanely high equipment_price_factor.

I think as the lowest possible equipment_price_factor is 0.5 (right?), the first variant would be really a problem. But the second variant allows for virtually unlimited profits, because the equipment_price_factor of a custom station can be virtually unlimited.

I consider this a bug. Therefore I would ask for putting a limit on resell-values, even if the station you are on happens to have an equipment_price_factor of 100 or more.

[Screet]

Screet has reported somewhere that he is actually making money by trading with Q-bombs.

Which means he is either buying them at a station with an insanely low equipment_price_factor and selling them at a main station, or he is buying them at a main station and selling them at a station with an insanely high equipment_price_factor.

I think as the lowest possible equipment_price_factor is 0.5 (right?), the first variant would be really a problem. But the second variant allows for virtually unlimited profits, because the equipment_price_factor of a custom station can be virtually unlimited.

I consider this a bug. Therefore I would ask for putting a limit on resell-values, even if the station you are on happens to have an equipment_price_factor of 100 or more.

The point is about buying where it's cheap. Even if the Q-Bomb "only" costs a few hundred bucks less, it does add up to trading profit, especially when flying a ship like that Dredger Trader (I suggest not - I should have stayed with my Boa Class Cruiser, I really was annoyed about making that decision). Another EQ part worth trading is the military laser, for as long as you do it only with side-mounted ones or are sure to be able to fly back safely with plasma cannons.

Selling in costly places is somewhat restricted, though. For example, the prices on the HMS Churchill were triple....but it did not pay off anything better than buying the stuff where it's cheap and selling it at a normal priced system station.

I guess the best idea would be to restrict the money paid for such eq selling a bit further. Why should the stations pay full price for used equipment?

Concerning the amount of money: It's less than what you get with a fully loaded trading ship, however it does very noticeably add up to it.

With RS installed there are systems where one could fly to the shipyard, buy (or sell, sometimes the prices are higher) EQ and then fly back to the main station...and have almost 6K profit. That's a point where I would definitely call it a bug, as I'd expect shipyard and station to have the same price....still I guess noone would want to make 100 such runs in order to buy a new ship or something like that, and I mainly did it because of curiosity. Cash flows in very quickly in this game, at least if one does care to either fly a few (20's enough) tons of cargo around, even when doing something else, or goes for bounty hunting.

BTW: I did even make profit using energy bombs sometimes. Not as part of weapons trading, but as part of "clean this area of space up" after immense thargoid battles. Seldom there are also pirates with over 20 ships around - if their bounty is high enough, you can easily guess that you won't lose money, although lasering them out is the real fun and makes more profit as no cost for a new bomb arises.

I still have to understand what missiles are good for, in this game. Doing the next part of ionics (I wish I would find those government vessels more often - I have to jump out of the system and come back in, just to have a handful of them appear, so where's the masses of them?), I get missiles for free. I guess I could sell them each time I dock somewhere else, but what would it be good for? They're the cheap ones anyway. However, when I fire those things, they do almost never hit the target, but rapidly fly around it. If you've ever played Warcraft III and saw the lightning shield in action...I've seen ships give a very similar visiual with three missiles permanently circling them in short distance at high speed...

Screet

[Frame]

Regarding the spinning missiles, that is usually when your are targeting small ships. missiles detonate at a range of 25 meters from the Ship you are firering at this is checked every 5 seconds... or so...

As far as i can read from the code, the missile is checked against the targets collision radius. The collision radius is calculated by getting the most position extreme vertex, and that will be the collision radius...

This is a problem for small ships, like the sidewinder with a collision radius of 32.5, but due to how the code checks for desired range achived for missiles, it is half that... namely 16.25.. and the physical diemensions of the sidewinder is 65.000 x 15.000 x 35.000, so the missile only have the height Diemension of Sidewinder in which to detonate, and only then 1.25 meters of collision area, that is not occupied by the sidewinders hull... as the missile also seeks to avoid shattering against the hull of its target...

This means that the missile can almost never get within 25 meters of the sidewinder, and the 5.0 interval makes it even harder to hit the exact time of which the ship is within 25 meters.. In short it is impossible...

If we omitted the collision radius, the problem would get worse for objects like large stations or the anaconda... The missile would simply shatter against the hull or take evasive action, which it does.. it tries to get as close as possible without crashing into the object it is chasing...

One obvious Theoretical fix to this is to set the range to 50 meters instead of 25 meters, while there can be side effects in regard to area damage. Upping the missile damage would have yet again other unwanted sideeffects, like player survivability of a single missile hit...

Here is the code in Question...

From what i can read of it, it even further halves the range of which to detonate... or send ("DESIRED_RANGE_ACHIEVED") to the AI to react upon...

of course is this the wrong section, which i doubt, then i´m all wrong...

Code: Select all

- (void) behaviour_intercept_target:(double) delta_t
{
	double  range = [self rangeToPrimaryTarget];
	if (behaviour == BEHAVIOUR_INTERCEPT_TARGET)
	{
		desired_speed = maxFlightSpeed;
		if (range < desired_range)
		{
			[shipAI reactToMessage:@"DESIRED_RANGE_ACHIEVED"];
		}
		desired_speed = maxFlightSpeed * [self trackPrimaryTarget:delta_t:NO];
	}
	else
	{
		ShipEntity*	target = [self primaryTarget];
		double target_speed = [target speed];
		double eta = range / (flightSpeed - target_speed);
		double last_success_factor = success_factor;
		double last_distance = last_success_factor;
		double  distance = [self rangeToDestination];
		success_factor = distance;
		//
		double slowdownTime = 96.0 / thrust;	// more thrust implies better slowing
		double minTurnSpeedFactor = 0.005 * max_flight_pitch * max_flight_roll;	// faster turning implies higher speeds

		if ((eta < slowdownTime)&&(flightSpeed > maxFlightSpeed * minTurnSpeedFactor))
			desired_speed = flightSpeed * 0.75;   // cut speed by 50% to a minimum minTurnSpeedFactor of speed
		else
			desired_speed = maxFlightSpeed;

		if (desired_speed < target_speed)
		{
			desired_speed += target_speed;
			if (target_speed > maxFlightSpeed)
			{
				[self noteLostTarget];
			}
		}
		//
		if (target)	// check introduced to stop crash at next line
		{
			destination = target->position;
			desired_range = 0.5 * target->collision_radius;
			[self trackDestination: delta_t : NO];
		}
		//
		if (distance < last_distance)	// improvement
		{
			frustration -= delta_t;
			if (frustration < 0.0)
				frustration = 0.0;
		}
		else
		{
			frustration += delta_t;
			if (frustration > 10.0)	// 10s of frustration
			{
				[shipAI reactToMessage:@"FRUSTRATED"];
				frustration -= 5.0;	//repeat after another five seconds' frustration
			}
		}
	}
	if ((proximity_alert != NO_TARGET)&&(proximity_alert != primaryTarget))
		[self avoidCollision];
	[self applyRoll:delta_t*flightRoll andClimb:delta_t*flightPitch];
	[self applyThrust:delta_t];
}

Cheers Frame

[Screet]

One obvious Theoretical fix to this is to set the range to 50 meters instead of 25 meters, while there can be side effects in regard to area damage. Upping the missile damage would have yet again other unwanted sideeffects, like player survivability of a single missile hit...

Hmmm....the strange stuff is, that my Merlin, which has definitely a wrong size (less than a cargo canister!), did get hit by missiles, however it might have been that those were "lucky" hits as the ships did send their missiles during fly-by when they were closest. I could not move my hand to the ECM in order to prevent my death (obviously a boa class cruisers shields are much stronger than those of the Merlin)...which was the reason why I did remove missile operations from my joystick and instead placed the ECM on the easiest to hit button

I guess that increasing the range could endanger those who use missiles in such a way...however, I'd say it's even more realistic if missiles work by splash damage instead of having to do a real hit. In RL, it's proximity...even for torpedoes, they do not have to make contact with the enemy, as in that case they would do less lethal damage.

Concerning the code: I guess the yaw control has been introduced later to the game...and I did not see that this is taken into account in the formula. Should it be?

Screet

[Commander McLane]

Doing the next part of ionics (I wish I would find those government vessels more often - I have to jump out of the system and come back in, just to have a handful of them appear, so where's the masses of them?)

The government ships are added in groups of five next to the station, and then fly towards the Link base. Therefore the routine is to kill them all (preferably out of sight of the main station), return to the Link base, get your ship refitted, and return to the main station for the next wave.

Note: A new wave is only added when all five previous ships have been killed.

And you can kill the weapons platform as a bonus, it is also added again for the next wave (not sure right now whether it is also counted as a kill each time; I played Ionics long ago). So in each run you can reduce the number of government vessels only by five (or six).

Yes, it is a tedious task, if you start with a number of around 200. But somebody has to do it. It's for the good cause!

[Screet]

Note: A new wave is only added when all five previous ships have been killed.

That might explain a lot! They do not fly together, but spread more than a scanner range apart...and in my case, they did not head to the link base, but - if I did not destroy it - towards the weapons platform.

Thus I was leaving the platform alive and then running back and forth between it and the system station.

I guess I had to hyperspace before, because one ship wasn't destroyed after some time and thus I could initiate the next wave by jumping to another system and back again.

The weapons platform did not get rebuilt with the waves, but everytime I jumped out of the system and back in, and everytime I did quit the app and start it again. That's something the SIRFs could use...as they vanish after quitting/dying.

Anyway, I finally got them all last night...and some hundred pirates, too Just a little bit more and I've made 500 kills in a few hours

Screet