Oolite Bulletins

man, i tip my hat to you if you can shoot owt w/ side lasers!
one of the things i liked about the Amiga Elite was the dogfighting, it was more like World War 1 biplane scraps than current warfare. I liked to get up close and personal rather than blatting something for 10km away. Injecting towards a group of pirates and playing chicken then turning and getting into a scrap w/ a Wolf and a couple of Mambas was great fun. Sadly in Oolite the "chicken" aspect involves certain ships hitting their injectors and ramming you

anyway, my next ship is going to be a more standard Elite-looking thing, and i'll stick 4 weapons posts on her for all the purists

Killer Wolf wrote:

Sadly in Oolite the "chicken" aspect involves certain ships hitting their injectors and ramming you

If it helps any, this has been dramatically improved in the upcoming v1.74. I have not had a ramming incident for weeks now and I am fighting against Fer-de-Lances and Asps very frequently. I am sure you will find dogfighting much more challenging when next release comes out.

that's good news! i swear, there were times where i was convinced some ships had been spawned w/ a missileAI.plist!

Killer Wolf wrote:

that's good news! i swear, there were times where i was convinced some ships had been spawned w/ a missileAI.plist!

Some weeks ago the ships code did not try to avoid collisions with their targets, at least for some behaviours like intercept...I don't know whether this has changed by now.

However, modifying collision distances appeared to do quite some trick already and at least intercept should switch to a different behaviour before a collision could happen.

Screet

Am I missing something. When I unzip this download, I don't seem to get a file.oxp...just the files which would go inside the file.oxp...

H

Total thread derailment but this image (given it's name) from another thread, rightly belongs here:

(http://igossip.com/photos/FredSmithson_ ... Dominatrix[/b]_Dollhouse.jpg)

I wouldn't mind taking that for a test drive

Rustybolts wrote:

I wouldn't mind taking that for a test drive

I'm affraid that would test drive You.

Hemlock wrote:

Am I missing something. When I unzip this download, I don't seem to get a file.oxp...just the files which would go inside the file.oxp...

H

are you using winzip? i noticed it did that when i test d/l'd it at work :-/
the separate folders and contents came out ok but would have had to create a new folder called dominatrix.oxp and stick em all in. it was zipped using ALZip, so i dunno if that misses something out WinZip needs to do a proper decompression?

Yeah WinZip...I'll make a separate folder. Thanks much

H

Got into a fight with two of these at the weekend (and the Typhoon Class Cruiser they were escorting, yeah I know, overkill) and it didn't end well, although not directly because of the two Dominators. I was able to draw a few interesting observations.

1 - Intentionally or no, these are big ships and present quite a large target. This is in itself quite a drawback. I wouldn't change this, as a large model does explain where all the gubbins has gone to make the ships so fast, tough, carry so many missiles and still have a reasonable cargo bay.

2 - Their energy and regen is obscene. Admitedly an Anaconda is not an ideal combat ship and I was under fire from the Typhoon, the other Dominatrix and one other ship (rogue viper I think), so the circumstances were not ideal, but the bloody thing would just not die. I think the energy regen on these is a touch on the high side. Even reducing the rate to 4 or 5 would make these ships obscenely tough, as it stands, against a military laser, they are off the charts. Will have to test one in combat against a Caddy, see how it fares.

3 - They look really good, especially when manouvering in low orbit above a planet.

4 - For their power, they are on the cheap side. The base cost could do with pumping up a bit, say by around 100k for each model type, maybe more. Not sure if they should be as expensive as a Caddy, they lack turrets, the DNC and are a larger/easier target.

5 - The frequency rate of the ship's appearing in shipyard's is too high. A frequency rate of 0.5 or less would be better and the minimum TL for their appearance should probably be higher as well. The OXP in it's existing format means they appear pretty much everywhere above TL6, which just looks odd.

I think maybe the energy level is a main factor. i took the standard Viper Interceptor as a guide, and that has a recharge Rate of 6, but energy of only 280 :-/ i think maybe i'm not understanding how energy relates to game play. it seemed sensible that a big ship w/ lots of toys, especially the Reapers w/ their cloaks etc, would have a big power plant, but mebbes i should know the levels down a bit? having said that, they're not called a "Dominatrix" for nothing, as they're supposed to dominate Naval space in a fight, so i don't want to make them too much of a pushover.

someone else mentioned the prices, i'm totally outta touch w/ the ship market it seems! i'll tweak that as well.

thanks for the feedback.

I think there are two approaches to making a ship tough. Either the low energy, fast recharge route, which is good for nimble ships like the Viper, which can recover quickly if they can stay out of harms way or the high energy, low recharge rate, which is used for the bigger hauler type vessels. It takes a while to bring down an Anaconda, but you can eventually whittle it away providing you're not interrupted.

Now I admit I've yet to properly test the resilience of the Dominatrix, but it strikes me that it will take some time to beat one down unless the pilot throws everything (Missiles, drones and lasers) at one.

I've dropped, on my machine, the energy recharge rate to 4 and 5 on the different model types but kept the overall energy the same. I'll see how that pans out when I get chance.

I'll go the low-energy-high-recharge route, seems to make the most sense.

when testing, i found they *are* just as killable as anything else but admittedly they were doing that odd behaviour of heading somewhere and flatly refusing to react for ages (if ever) when i was shooting at one. i think if you pick up a general fighter w/ a military laser and have a crack at one you'll find they're a good fight but not impossible. i hope :-/

I noticed that odd behaviour as well, certainly made them easy to shoot in my Anaconda, although they did seem to eat up everything I could throw at them.

It may be the odd behaviour is related to those Dominatrix which spawn in escort roles rather than straight pirate/trade roles. Which is an issue the falls outside of this OXP.