Gun Balance Update

Gun usage from previous beta

Many of you are probably wondering what I’m doing with weapons balancing right now.  Some guns, ahem, were seriously overpowered while others were just piles of steaming buns.

The graph to the left is data we collected from the first beta.  I believe it’s every time the gun was fired or engaged, that’s why we get into the 1000’s range.  Either way, the Small Howitzer has been tweaked accordingly.

As mentioned in the previous post, we’ve created a new axis to evaluate our guns on.  It’s the type of firing mode (burst or sustained) vs. its engagement distance (from under 150m to 2000m).  The following are some words about each guns and how I’ve tweaked them to fit this new model in order to make each gun unique.

  • Close Range (0-150m)
  • Short (150-500m)
  • Medium (500-1300m)
  • Long (1300-2000m)

Carronade—Close Range Burst
With a little magic, we have proper shotgun functionality now.  This gun is basically is the close range balloon killer and it’s extremely effective at it.  However, you do need to get very close.  What I can do now is set the range and how big the shotgun cone is.  On top of that, I can designate how many shots are released each time you click.  These shots are scattered randomly within the cone towards the target.  It’s not the most accurate weapon but if you get close, someone is going to drop to the floor.

Medium Flak Cannon—Short Range Burst
Not much was done with this weapon.  It was already operating pretty much the way we wanted to.  The major adjustment is that it is no longer effective against balloons.  This change was also made to other weapons that had explosive damage.  So everyone used to blowing balloons with this, sorry 😛

Gatling Gun—Short Range Sustained
This was originally supposed to be used as a balloon killer, but in light of explosive damage being quite effective as well the gatling gun has been improved.  The feel was also a little off.  It fired way too fast and had a lot of ammo.  It was basically a laser.  Not exactly what we wanted.  What I did was decreased the clip size, lowered the rate of fire, and most importantly increased its damage.  The gun now feels like those big artillery machine guns in FPS games where you just rip people apart.  Yeah, it’s pretty cool now.  And there’s a new model/animation for it too! Woo!

Mortar—Short Range Burst
The mortar was already quite powerful… if you could get its shots on target.  There were some issues with the lag but the general feeling of the gun was quite close.  Only small adjustments towards rate of fire and damage were made to the gun.  A small bit of jitter was introduced to prevent this gun from being utterly ovwerpowering.

Missile Sling (to be renamed)—Short Range Burst
This gun was also largely unused.  We’ve had the hooks to do this already but we’ve gone ahead and made it heatseeking.  Every repairable component on a ship gives off some kind of heat signature, the engines being the most.  Shooting the missile in a ship’s general direction will still most likely give you a hit on an engine.  Still playing around with the variables and may even need to go tweak some things in the code until the behavior is as one might expect.  It’s coming along quite nicely though.  You’ll be able to expect more from this gun in the future.

Rocket Launcher—Short Range Sustained
Not a true sustained fire weapon (full automatic like the gatling) but this thing basically fires of missiles just as fast, or faster with the new gatling tweaks.  We decided that this weapon is ideal for area of denial strategies.  Missiles travel up to about 1000m and explode at a distance of 0-200m after that.  The area of effect explosions have been increased as well making it particularly effective at leading enemies or keeping them away.

Small Flak—Long Range Sustained
Another gun that was ignored due to its ineffectiveness and innacuracy.  You’ll be glad to know that this has been tweaked so that it’s like a medium flak cannon, except it fires faster and has more ammo.  Trade off is the speed of the projectile, some leading required if you’re aiming super far away, and a little less damage.  Overall, it was a feel issue and I think it’s getting pretty close.

Small Howitzer—Long Range Burst
The favorite gun.  I halved the clip size to 2, increased the reload speed, and increased the damage.  Wait what?  WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU INCREASED THE DAMAGE?  Hold on a second, I also decreased its pitch and yaw degrees.  It still makes it an awesome sniper fire, taking out guns and engines in one hit, but because its angles are so confined you just can’t use it for close range.  At close ranges, an enemy ship can easily move out of the howitzer’s line of sight.  Long range is an entirely different story.  A skilled gunner on the howitzer paired with an equally skilled pilot might be able to pull off sniping at close range, but at that point I don’t care anymore.  Your crew is just really good 😀