PopulationControl.oxz

[Redspear]

I dug a little deeper into the logic for a police ship heading back to the station. If the Witchpoint-Planet location where they are created is in the last 10% of the distance from the witchpoint to the planet, they will head back to the station. Otherwise they will be heading to the witchpoint.

Assuming for the moment that reallocating patrol strategies were a simple matter...
Suppose:

• All launching vipers head to the WP
• Once at WP the majority head on to the star and from there back to the station.
• A small remainder (say 10% or so) head back from WP to planet (just because it will occassionally look more interesting)

Given that Planet to WP is well policed (and that lost vipers are replaced at the station), WP - Planet need not require additional police as thei already headed along that lane in numbers, just heading in the opposite direction.

Police losses will likely mean more police on the Planet - WP lane, less on the WP - Star lane and less again on the Sun - Planet lane. That makes sense from a player view as the WP - Planet is the most typical route to the station. Any masslock delays enroute to the star (and then on to the planet), whilst still annoying, add to the idea of the sun being further away without actually requiring it to be so.

[Edit] *shuffles through pages of source code* Hmm, maybe I was wrong about that simulation thing...

I remember that being talked about but I think it may have been more as a suggestion. IIRC ships are simply generated randomly along the lanes and allocated an appropriate heading.

[phkb]

What I could do is, rather than use the WP-Planet-Sun triangle (and the core code then picking a random spot on it), I could force that part of the spawning code to use the WP-Sun and Planet-Sun lanes specifically. At the moment, 1/6th of the total quota of police go to the WPS triangle, but I could split that 50/50 on the other two tracks, or even drop the 5/6th of the WP-Planet number to (maybe) 4/6th, and add the remainder to the other two lanes.

[Redspear]

So by reducing the proportion of WP-planet police patrols masslocking would be less time consuming on a typical WP-station flight (more police headed in opposite direction)?

[phkb]

It would probably slightly reduce the number of police on the WP-planet land, but not necessarily the direction they’re travelling in.