Engine destroying weapons

Q · #1 July 22nd, 2002, 01:30 AM

O.K. I can understand that is is not possible to make it an option in the game settings, if the engines only weapons skip shields or not.
But then include both damage types in the game so the modders can choose which one they like. I am not happy at all that MM deleted the weapon damage type "engines only, skips shield" in the next patch because this will completely change the use of these weapons and we have no possibility to keep them as they have been until now.

Baron Munchausen · #2 July 21st, 2002, 05:30 PM

They may still skip armor, though. If so, that makes them still fairly powerful. I haven't been using engine-destroying weapons lately. I wonder if anyone in the beta crowd has been and can report on their effects...

[ July 21, 2002, 16:31: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Rollo · #3 July 21st, 2002, 11:01 PM

Personally I think that MM made a good decision to have engine killers not skip shields anymore. They are still a very good weapon. Keep in mind that they do damage shields now. With 40 damage at range 6 and RoF 1 they have very good values. Of course they still skip armor (even the new emissive armor).

Rollo

Baron Munchausen · #4 July 21st, 2002, 11:19 PM

It makes perfect sense for them to skip armor, too. Engines that work on principles we are familiar with have to be exposed somehow or other to operate. Even if we allow some 'reactionless' or 'inertia-less' drive, it's probably going to have to be large relative to the size of the ship, and dangerous for the crew to be too near to it. So it'll still be very difficult to protect within the main body of the ship.

Fyron · #5 July 22nd, 2002, 12:38 AM

Unless the ship is really big.

oleg · #6 July 22nd, 2002, 01:06 AM

I believe MM realy tried to give us a choice to set either skip shields or not but it proved to be very difficult, like introducing the second line of "weapon damge at distance" for all weapons or something like that.

Not skipping shield for endine destroyers is not a bad idea. They were way to powerfull before. May be we should ask for some increase of damage, say 5-10 points.

Deathstalker · #7 July 22nd, 2002, 03:44 AM

IMO the big problem was when they fixed the "no supplies= no shields and no weapons" problem. All of a sudden engine killers were THE big weapon. You take out a ships engines and they could not fire back or regenerate shields or anything. And with no natural defense (standard non-modded game) it became like PPB, every ship had them. IMO it made games really boring, I used to design battle ships with only heavy mounted Engine Destroyers and a few PDC. They ran right through everything, leaving all these ships stranded everywhere that costed the enemy empire $$ every turn but could not attack/defend. Also made for easy attack/board/quick repair then analyze situations.

What would have been nice was a tech in the shield research field that rendered Ionic Weapons useless (some sort of 'multi-phasic' shielding or somesuch). Same for Tach weapons.

Just IMO of course.