Farbourne
Rear Admiral
Hi Everyone. I'm a longtime reader and very occasional poster, but I came up with something that I thought people might think was kind of neat. If not, feel free to ignore it.
I was playing around with what might be involved in coming up with an objective scale for comparing fighters and guns across different eras/WC games (as groundwork for a possible paper-and-pencil WC RPG, or strategy board game, or somesuch...), and was trying to make valid comparisons among the multitude of different guns in the games. Through WC1 and WC2 there are just four to keep track of, but including Academy, Armada, WC3, 4, Privateer, etc adds a whole lot more. I quickly realized that there was no single metric that could compare any two guns--difference in range, refire rate, power, and damage make some guns good for one thing, and some good for something else. Indeed, this is one of the strategic elements that made Wing Commander such a great game.
However, I held out hope that I could come up with some nice, easy way to compare all the different guns properties at a glance--preferably something graphical. There are four different defining characteristics of the WC guns: damage, range, refire rate, and power consumption. Like most people, I'm not very good thinking in four dimensions.
But then it occurred to me...I could simplify things down to three dimensions, because these characteristics aren't all independent. For example, assuming you're a good shot, it doesn't matter if you do 30 cm of damage per shot firing one shot per second, or 15 cm of damage per shot firing two shots per second--the guns are essentially equivalent in the rate at which they can do damage. Yes, in some circumstances you'd rather have one or the other, as the target's shield recharge rate and the pilot's accuracy play a role in real life, but by defining this equivalence, you can compare the damage rate of two very different guns on the same scale.
Similarly, power consumption is a little meaningless when taken by itself, but taken in conjunction with damage per shot, you get a measure of how much damage potential the fixed amount of energy in your gun capacitors can do, assuming you hit everything you shoot at. Again, refire rate, opponent shield recharge rate, and accuracy will all play a role, but with this simple metric, the efficiency of two different guns at converting energy into Kilrathi-death can be directly compared.
With that in mind, I calculated these indices for all the different guns from WC1-4 (if I remain ambitious, I might expand it to Prophecy and Armada someday), and plot them on three axes--range, damage rate, and damage capacity (per some fixed amount of charge available). This way, people could compare all the different guns at a glance. Here's a picture of how all the guns stack up (attached).
In general, the further a gun is from the origin, the better all around gun it is. It's pretty clear why the Neutron was retired--it's clearly one of the oldest guns, faring relatively poorly in all three metrics. However, the most pointless gun seems to be...the ion. Exact same range and damage rate as the Meson, but much less damage capacity for the same capacitor charge. The Photon's not exactly a very good gun, either.
If you like range, the laser is your baby. Duh. If you crave maximum rate of dishing out punishment, you can't do better than a Tachyon, although the good old Mass Driver isn't bad, either. And to maximize your damage capacity, the Mass Driver leaves everything else in the dust. The Mass driver is arguably the best gun in the games (it was always my favorite) if you can overlook it's relatively short range. But hey, I love to mix it up close in...
I have some other plots normal to the axes looking at just two dimensions at a time--they're a little clearer and easier to read...but I'll only post them if people are interested. I didn't want to clutter up the posting board with something other people think is silly... I also experimented with another (in my opinion) less elegant way of reducing things to three dimesnions and plotting the different guns. Let me know if there's interest in seeing it.
For reference, I had to make a couple of assumptions when the stats of a gun differed from game to game. The only one I remember off the top of my head was the range on the laser (I think I used the WC2-4 value), but I think there were others. I also assumed a fixed capacitor size of 100 nJ. The value is immaterial for comparing guns, although it will scale the units on the damage capacity axis.
I was playing around with what might be involved in coming up with an objective scale for comparing fighters and guns across different eras/WC games (as groundwork for a possible paper-and-pencil WC RPG, or strategy board game, or somesuch...), and was trying to make valid comparisons among the multitude of different guns in the games. Through WC1 and WC2 there are just four to keep track of, but including Academy, Armada, WC3, 4, Privateer, etc adds a whole lot more. I quickly realized that there was no single metric that could compare any two guns--difference in range, refire rate, power, and damage make some guns good for one thing, and some good for something else. Indeed, this is one of the strategic elements that made Wing Commander such a great game.
However, I held out hope that I could come up with some nice, easy way to compare all the different guns properties at a glance--preferably something graphical. There are four different defining characteristics of the WC guns: damage, range, refire rate, and power consumption. Like most people, I'm not very good thinking in four dimensions.
But then it occurred to me...I could simplify things down to three dimensions, because these characteristics aren't all independent. For example, assuming you're a good shot, it doesn't matter if you do 30 cm of damage per shot firing one shot per second, or 15 cm of damage per shot firing two shots per second--the guns are essentially equivalent in the rate at which they can do damage. Yes, in some circumstances you'd rather have one or the other, as the target's shield recharge rate and the pilot's accuracy play a role in real life, but by defining this equivalence, you can compare the damage rate of two very different guns on the same scale.
Similarly, power consumption is a little meaningless when taken by itself, but taken in conjunction with damage per shot, you get a measure of how much damage potential the fixed amount of energy in your gun capacitors can do, assuming you hit everything you shoot at. Again, refire rate, opponent shield recharge rate, and accuracy will all play a role, but with this simple metric, the efficiency of two different guns at converting energy into Kilrathi-death can be directly compared.
With that in mind, I calculated these indices for all the different guns from WC1-4 (if I remain ambitious, I might expand it to Prophecy and Armada someday), and plot them on three axes--range, damage rate, and damage capacity (per some fixed amount of charge available). This way, people could compare all the different guns at a glance. Here's a picture of how all the guns stack up (attached).
In general, the further a gun is from the origin, the better all around gun it is. It's pretty clear why the Neutron was retired--it's clearly one of the oldest guns, faring relatively poorly in all three metrics. However, the most pointless gun seems to be...the ion. Exact same range and damage rate as the Meson, but much less damage capacity for the same capacitor charge. The Photon's not exactly a very good gun, either.
If you like range, the laser is your baby. Duh. If you crave maximum rate of dishing out punishment, you can't do better than a Tachyon, although the good old Mass Driver isn't bad, either. And to maximize your damage capacity, the Mass Driver leaves everything else in the dust. The Mass driver is arguably the best gun in the games (it was always my favorite) if you can overlook it's relatively short range. But hey, I love to mix it up close in...
I have some other plots normal to the axes looking at just two dimensions at a time--they're a little clearer and easier to read...but I'll only post them if people are interested. I didn't want to clutter up the posting board with something other people think is silly... I also experimented with another (in my opinion) less elegant way of reducing things to three dimesnions and plotting the different guns. Let me know if there's interest in seeing it.
For reference, I had to make a couple of assumptions when the stats of a gun differed from game to game. The only one I remember off the top of my head was the range on the laser (I think I used the WC2-4 value), but I think there were others. I also assumed a fixed capacitor size of 100 nJ. The value is immaterial for comparing guns, although it will scale the units on the damage capacity axis.
