Capture de Fralthi. Doable?

I like that the UE missions were actually a challenge. It is as it should be--only the easiest level could be won on the first try by any but the best pilots.

In WC1-4, four to one odds against in a single wave were slim--there was no way you were going to survive without using missiles unless you were facing light fighters and were in something with decent power and maneuverability yourself. In WCP/SOP, you were facing odds of four to one OR MORE against in nearly every mission, yet you could still tear them apart because the Vampire was far superior to them while the Devastator had turrets shooting out of every side, along with a main gun that made torpedoes unnecessary.

In UE, you are going up against enemies that are flying ships superior to your own instead of the other way around. This makes intelligent flying more important. Having fewer enemies of greater difficulty is a lot better than a swarm of weak insects.

BTW: I noticed a distinct lack of Skate cluster/bombers in UE. Too bad--I liked those.
 
Originally posted by Ijuin
BTW: I noticed a distinct lack of Skate cluster/bombers in UE. Too bad--I liked those.
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Shhh... don't mention them :p.

As for the Epee... sure, you can't afford to sit still. It's a light fighter. I'm not sure if you're complaining about this or simply stating the facts, but it seems rather logical to me that a torpedo-bearing light fighter requires different delivery tactics than a bomber would.

Delance: I don't know if the Banshee had autoslide in WC4... if it did, then I guess we simply forgot about that :p. As for the lasers, it seems to be a problem of the WCP engine. When you link your guns in WCP, it seems that the refire delays are also linked. So, if you fire four lasers together, the refire delay is not 1/4 of a second - it's 1 second. This wasn't the case in WC4, where the refire delay on a laser was 1/4 sec, no matter how many lasers you were firing.
 
Originally posted by Quarto
Shhh... don't mention them :p.

As for the Epee... sure, you can't afford to sit still. It's a light fighter. I'm not sure if you're complaining about this or simply stating the facts, but it seems rather logical to me that a torpedo-bearing light fighter requires different delivery tactics than a bomber would.
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Indeed. In a bomber you can ideally go straight in and launch your torpedoes directly, while with the Epee you may have to break off and try a couple of times to get it. Having the single torpedo does mean that you need a "pack" of at least four Epees (four light torps are the minimum usually to kill any cap ship--you will need more if any of the torps get shot down).

Delance: I don't know if the Banshee had autoslide in WC4... if it did, then I guess we simply forgot about that :p. As for the lasers, it seems to be a problem of the WCP engine. When you link your guns in WCP, it seems that the refire delays are also linked. So, if you fire four lasers together, the refire delay is not 1/4 of a second - it's 1 second. This wasn't the case in WC4, where the refire delay on a laser was 1/4 sec, no matter how many lasers you were firing.
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This was one of the things that always annoyed me because it amounts to the effect that, if ALL of your shots hit a target, then having X of a given gun will not give you any more damage per second than having only one. The only advantage is that you can fire a huge volley all at once. This is why three volleys from a Vampire can kill a Manta, yet it still takes the same five seconds or so that it would using a Panther.

An even more annoying scenario, however, is that you can actually get MORE damage by having pairs of lower-power guns than you can by having quads of powerful ones. Let's take the Vampire and the Panther again as an example:

Intuition leads us to believe that firing the quad Tachyon guns (Particle guns turned off) on the Vampire will destroy a target sooner than the 2 Tachyon/2 Ion guns on the Panther. Indeed, a volley from the Vampire's 4 Tachyon guns will cause 70 X 4 = 280 damage, while a volley from the Panther's 2 Tachyon/2 Ion guns will cause (70 X 2) + (30 X 2) = 200 damage.


However, since there is a refire delay of 450 ms for each Tachyon gun, that means that it will be 1800 ms before the Vampire can fire its Tachyon guns again, whereas the Panther can refire its Tachyon guns after only 900 seconds. This means that after 1800 seconds, the Vampire's 4 Tachyon guns has done 280 damage, while the Panther's 2 Tachyon guns (assuming that they hit the target) have done 2 X (70 X 2) = 280 damage! That means that after 1800 ms, they have done the amount of damage, and that's before adding in the damage from the Panther's 2 Ion guns!

Add in the Panther's 2 Ion guns, which require 350 ms each to refire (total refire delay 700 ms), and you will see that they have also fired twice over the 1800 ms period, and are halfway to being ready to fire a third time! The damage from the two volleys from the Ion guns is 2 X (30 X 2) = 120. Add that to the 280 damage from the Tachyon guns for that time period, and you have 400 damage by the Panther! Compare this to the 280 from the Vampire!

Realizing this, it stands to reason that the only benefit to having lots of the same type of gun is the ability to do more damage per volley. Having one or two each of different types of gun is far better in terms of damage per second. Surprisingly enough, the Vampire would actually be more powerful if one pair of its Tachyon guns were "downgraded" to a less powerful type of gun, because its Tachyon guns could then refire faster (doing the same amount of damage per second).
 
Originally posted by Ijuin
Indeed. In a bomber you can ideally go straight in and launch your torpedoes directly, while with the Epee you may have to break off and try a couple of times to get it. Having the single torpedo does mean that you need a "pack" of at least four Epees (four light torps are the minimum usually to kill any cap ship--you will need more if any of the torps get shot down).
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Think small. Maybe a single light torpedo is weak for taking out a heavy cap ship, but it can be very useful against light smuggler transports and other light capships.
 
Originally posted by cff
Starlancer? Really? I only run into problems on 2 missions. The one where you have to blow the satellite dish and the "The Ion cannon is targetting us" thingy.
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Actually, Starlancer had what seemed to me like a hundred of "intercept the torpedoes" missions, and those almost always required me to replay the mission and memorize where each wave of bombers was going to come from.

Originally posted by Ijuin
BTW: I noticed a distinct lack of Skate cluster/bombers in UE. Too bad--I liked those.
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Maybe I'm just imagining things, but I think the Skates were removed to free up some VDU graphic slots, since there's a hardcoded limit on those.

--Eder
 
Originally posted by Eder
Maybe I'm just imagining things, but I think the Skates were removed to free up some VDU graphic slots, since there's a hardcoded limit on those.
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Well... no... actually, it's just because we, uh, didn't know how to use Skate clusters. By the time we figured out what the problem was, the missions were finished and everything looked fine.
 
........Ill just say 2 things..
Delance:
1)WingCommander is not a space combat sim.You cant simulate something that it does not exist......Have you seen Hellcats flying?(wish they were;) ).
Maybe even in Wc1 the box says "3d Space Combat Sim",but thats not it.If it was,even to turn on the engine we should push 100 buttons.Wc physics are not correct either.WC is just a very well done shooting and it has a lot realism.

2)The UE difficulty is OK.I think that UE2 should be even harder.As Ive said before 100 times,Some WC games (cant say names:p ) are very easy even at Nightmare.Wc4 is the only (in my opinion) hard WC to complete at Nightmare,but if you ve played it a lot,its not big deal too..

P.S. Epee sucks LONG LIVE THE HELLCAT
 
Originally posted by Filler
you're so imaginitive, eder
imagine you have a better graphics card :p
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Hey, I'm taking donations :)
(Of course, the first batch of donations would be to get me a new motherboard, my current one doesn't even have an AGP slot :p)

--Eder
 
Originally posted by TCSTigersClaw
........Ill just say 2 things..
Delance:
1)WingCommander is not a space combat sim.You cant simulate something that it does not exist......Have you seen Hellcats flying?(wish they were;) ).
Maybe even in Wc1 the box says "3d Space Combat Sim",but thats not it.If it was,even to turn on the engine we should push 100 buttons.Wc physics are not correct either.WC is just a very well done shooting and it has a lot realism.
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Yes, Wing Commander is a space combat sim. It even says so on the box, but that's besides the point.

And yes, you can simulate things that doesn't exist. Actually, nowdays you try to simulate how a new car or plane will work during the project using computer simulations. Then you make the necessary changes without having to actually build a prototype.

The essential part of simulation is that the objects on the simulation are not real, they are... simulated...
 
If it was so easy to fly a space ship ,we would all be in NASA now delance......WC IS NOT A SIMULATION

come to reality !
 
Originally posted by TCSTigersClaw
If it was so easy to fly a space ship ,we would all be in NASA now delance......WC IS NOT A SIMULATION

come to reality !
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So every single simulator on the market today is not a simulator. Do you really think is that simple to operate a WW2 destroyer against a german U-Boat? Or an F-15? All those are games, just like WC. You are not making any sense.
 
Actually, *you* are not making any sense.

WC doesn't even begin to attempt to capture any of the aspects of space flight as it exists in our universe. So, in this universe, WC doesn't simulate shite (dare I say, WC dissimulates space flight :)). What WC simulates is a different universe (so I guess if you lived inside that universe you could claim that WC is a simulation).

However, all the other examples you provided, even when you referred to simulating objects that don't exist, point to the simulation of something as it would exist in our universe (unless you meant to say that NASA engineers who are entrusted with simulating the next version of the space shuttle go "Hey, what if space looked really cool and there were talking cats and stuff?" prior to estabilishing the parameters for their simulation programs)... so you can't possibly compare those to the simulation of a WC ship or weapon, since, let me reiterate my point, WC simulates space combat according to the laws of a universe that doesn't exist.

If WC claimed to be an Alternate Universe Simulator, I'd agree that it is. If you really think WC simulates space combat as it could happen on what I and most other human beings refer to as "space", though, you need to go out more. Or maybe stay home and read a book on basic physics. In fact, someone who thinks like that would probably benefit from either :)

And if you're a bit smarter than that, when you say that WC is a Space Combat Simulator what you really mean is that you acknowledge the fact that WC simulates space combat only as it could happen in a universe that can't possibly be the one you live in... But in that case, you would never even mention the word "realism" in the first place.

--Eder
 
My thoughts -

WC is deffinately a Space Combat Simulator. No question about it. However, my deffinition of simulator and yours are different. By simulator, I (and probably Origin) mean nothing more than game, that's based on space combat, and looks realistic. They didn't imply physics.

In terms of the deffinition that is something that is designed to be exactly like something else, to simulate it exactly, like what the do in NASA deffinately isn't WC.

WC is a simulator in the first sense - it's a game - a simulation based on space combat and *roughly* on our universe (not exactly... just roughly). It is not a simulator of space flight.
 
Originally posted by Eder
WC doesn't even begin to attempt to capture any of the aspects of space flight as it exists in our universe. So, in this universe, WC doesn't simulate shite (dare I say, WC dissimulates space flight :)). What WC simulates is a different universe (so I guess if you lived inside that universe you could claim that WC is a simulation).
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How do you know how space flight could be on 2670? Ships on WC have accel abs, and other devices that manipulate inertia. You smiply don't know there won't be technology hundreds of years from now that will allow ships to fly as in WC. But that's besides the point.

WC is a game. Space Combat Sim is game genre. WC fits in it. Not every single simulation game must be an exact replica of the real thing, nor must it be possible in our universe. If people were do adopt your point of view, there would be no space combat games at all... Not even I-War.

Space Combat Sims are simulators of something that doesn't exist so far - space combat. They are more or less realistic, and they are very different from other kinds of action and arcade games like, say, Galaga or Space Invanders. So Freespace is a space combat sim, but Star Control is a action/strategy game.
 
Originally posted by Delance
If people were do adopt your point of view, there would be no space combat games at all... Not even I-War.
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Did you even read what I posted? :rolleyes: Like Needaham pointed out, I stuck to the definition of SIMULATOR as a GAME which takes REALISM into account...

So under my point of view, as you put it, there certainly would be Space Combat GAMES, but not SIMULATORS, SIMULATORS being the kind of games in which the REALISM comes in - this whole discussion started from your talk about realism in WC, remember?

Therefore, let me repeat myself - if you consider WC a simulator in the simple sense that it's a space combat game, that's fine. You can do that. BUT if you do that, please leave the word "realism" out of the discussion. It makes no sense to talk about realism unless you're talking about a simulation in the "true" sense - taking physics and all those other things that boring games are made of into account :p

--Eder
 
Originally posted by Eder
So under my point of view, as you put it, there certainly would be Space Combat GAMES, but not SIMULATORS, SIMULATORS being the kind of games in which the REALISM comes in - this whole discussion started from your talk about realism in WC, remember?
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Let me repeat myself, then. That's your point of view. Fine. Good. You can post all day long saying "space comabt sims doesn't exist". Even better, go do that on the space combat sim newsgroup. :)

Other game sims out there are not much more realistic than WC. You really think it's that easy to fly an F-15? Why do air forces spend so much money in training pilots? Any kid with a joystick can do it. Not to mention warships manned by just one person. Yeah, that's very realistic.

Space Combat Sims are, by definition, not as realistic as Flight Sims, but more realistic than action games. But regardless of what you may think the game genre still exsit. This is like when people debate that Real Time Strategy games are not real time, or not really strategy.

You are too centered on the physics. See, it's not all about physics. So, there's no sound in space. Who cares? There are many other aspects that differ WC from other space combat games. Other games are 2D, or have exploding enemy ships show power ups.
 
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