Combat tutorial
From VoidWiki
The Combat tutorial will explain the principles behind the cool space battles in Voidwars.
Contents |
A combat tick occurs
Each tick, every armed ship will shoot on various enemy ships (every single weapon of a ship can target a different enemy craft). Two factors are used to determine which vessels will be targeted:
- Ships are most likely to shoot on ships that belong to their Targeting priorities (check info on that specific ship) unless that target is not present.
- The more damage a ship has the more likely it is to be targeted.
But will they hit or miss their targets? Read on.
Weapons and armor
| None | Light | Medium | Heavy | Neutronium | Shields | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scatter | 200% | 100% | 10% | 1% | 1% | 100% |
| Laser | 200% | 100% | 100% | 10% | 1% | 100% |
| Plasma | 200% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 10% | 100% |
| Tri-cobolt | 200% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Ion (EMP) | 200% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 500% |
These two factors are closely linked to each other. One might say that there is one type of adequate weapon for each type of armor. Missiles (scatter type) have full effect on light armor, but they will only do 10% of their damage to medium armor, and 1% to heavy or neutronium. You will notice in Ship Database that all weapons closely follow this scheme in increasing levels - Laser are good for light as well as medium armor, but it gets worse after that. So let's just build lots of those cool Plasma-armed ships? Or, even better, the Tri-cobolt weapon that will nail every armor whatsoever? Wrong, read on.
Weapon speed and manoeuvrability
The next linked pair. Weapon speed is measured in units of °s-1, that is, degrees per second, describing how fast the weapon can turn. A ship's manoeuvrability is measured in ms-2, or meters per second squared. This describes how quickly a ship can accelerate. For example, if a missile with a weapon speed of 1,300°s-1 is fired upon a fighter with a manoeuvrability of 1300ms-2, the weapon will hit with a probability of 50%. Heavier weapons generally have slower weapon speeds, so fighters will be able to evade Plasma fire most of the time.
Conclusions
Well, that was it for the hidden principles behind combat. Other aspects like shield regeneration should be self-explaining. Just keep one important thing in mind: Don't build fleets consisting of only one ship type! Not even if those new plasma corvettes appear to just rock everything. If an experienced player notices that you are fielding a single ship type, he will fight you with the perfect counter-ship only. That is, if new players proudly show up with a swarm of plasma corvettes, a good player will destroy them all with a few laser fighters or laser corvettes while keeping his vulnerable frigates in safe distance.
Keep in mind that big, slow and lightly armoured ships are especially vulnerable - they get targetted by anybody, hit by any weapon, and suffer much damage from any of these hits. Colony or construction ships and assaults (Mk I) are vulnerable.
Good combinations
New players might start with a mix of frigates and laser corvettes. You can take fighters instead of corvettes, they deal out more damage, but are vulnerable to missile fire.
