Kilrathi ship weapons?

Ijuin

Admiral
Even though there have been adequate descriptions of the weapons loadouts of Confederation fighters in Standoff, I am still a bit unclear on the Kilrathi fighters.

First, which Kilrathi craft will carry torpedoes? I am pretty certain that the Grikath and Gothri will, but what about the Hriss, Jalthi, and Grathra?

Second, what will the Krant be armed with? In WC1 it had twin lasers, but that would give it a weaker gun loadout than the Drakhri in Standoff.
 
Yeah, a good question.

First, the Krant will have twin mass drivers instead of twin lasers in Standoff... We tried to give it a bit of an upgrade from the decade-old variant in WC1, while keeping it inferior to the other fighters. It might seem like it lost some of its character (no more long range or fast refire), but giving it particle cannons would make it too powerful... It basically ranks as a light fighter by comparison, and as the site's description suggests, mostly any respectable carrier won't throw these at ya. :p

Now, bombers. The Gothri is the ultimate Kilrathi bomber with 6 torpedoes. The Grikath and Gratha both have 4, and the others have none. As it stands, the Gratha is basically a watered-down version of the Grikath for earlier/easier missions (we don't want to frustrate people with torpedo-chasing over and over and over like Starlancer did ;))... so the Gratha is kinda like the bomber to match poor Confed fighters, in the sense that you can annoy them and keep them from doing their job even when you're outnumbered or flying a poor ship (taking a Stiletto against a couple Grikaths would get you killed so fast it isn't even funny :p).

As for the Jalthi and Hhriss, they're pure dogfighters. The Hhriss is the better balanced ship, while the Jalthi has a impressive weapons loadout. They're both just a bit less fragile than the Jalkehi armor and shield-wise (the Jalthi being better defended than the Hhriss), but both lack the added protection of the Jalkehi's rear turret. In the Hhriss's case, it's also considerably more maneuverable than the Jalkehi, while the Jalthi is practically the same, IIRC.
 
Ok, so the Krant with the mass drivers to me comes across as being rather Scimitar-like--is that the intent?

I can see that the Stiletto is going to fare very poorly against anything with a turret since it has neither long range guns nor the protection to take more than two shots from a turret without being damaged.
 
Ijuin said:
Ok, so the Krant with the mass drivers to me comes across as being rather Scimitar-like--is that the intent?
Well, not really, but if by Scimitar-like you mean "near obsolete", then yeah. :p I think the Krant still handles quicker than the Scim... I'm not sure how the survivability would compare (I don't remember the Scim's stats).

Ijuin said:
I can see that the Stiletto is going to fare very poorly against anything with a turret since it has neither long range guns nor the protection to take more than two shots from a turret without being damaged.
Yup, the Stiletto's best defenses against turreted ships are its HS missiles and WCP's poor turret gunner AI. :)
 
Dyret said:
No speed, no handling, no armor.
And of course: NO SHIELDS!

Actually, the Scim was slow (360kps), turned almost as badly as a Raptor (6/6/7), had fairly weak shields (4/4) and armor (6 front/back, 5 left/right), and had 2 mass drivers, 2 DF, and 3 HS missiles.

In comparison, the Krant had the same speed (360kps), somewhat better maneuverability (7/10/7), stronger shields than even a Raptor (8/8 versus 7/7 for the Raptor and Rapier), better armor (9 front, 8 left/right, 10 rear) with a similar weapons loadout of 2 lasers, 2 FF, and 3 HS.

But compared to the Salthi, that was still better, especially armor-wise.
 
1. What will the torpedo runs in Standoff be like?
2. Will the destroyers have antimatter guns like in WC2?
3. Will the cockpit be visible when looking to the sides and rear?
 
1. Not enough like WC2, I'm afraid. :(

For starters, most ships need 2 to 4 torpedoes to be destroyed (can't do anything about it now).... Second, Flak in Standoff seems to hit more often than in WC2 (I'd still like to change this).... Third, capships also have other defensive turrets (lasers, mass drivers, etc) in Standoff, which makes things a lot more complicated if you get in close range before you have a torpedo lock. It also means that depending on your approach angle, the chance that the torpedo will get shot down can get really high. This was done intentionally as an attempt to make Standoff feel a bit closer to what the novels describe. Finally, ships are now actual 3d models, which means that turrets can't shoot through the capship's hull (mostly :p), so in other words, capships now have blindspots, and not all of a capship's turrets are effective from the same angle.

Overall, torp runs are harder than in WC2 if you just go straight in at full speed, but they're easier if you take the time to think your approach trajectory through (apart from the side-effect that no matter how successful you are, you'll need do to more than one run)... finding a blind spot, or at least an angle from which the turret fire can't lead you (and your torps) properly due to your speed (thank god for weak AI) makes runs much easier, and it works most of the time.


2. Nope, anti-matter guns won't be used against fighters. We might have them in some scripted capship-to-capship combat, but the player only needs to worry about Flak turrets and regular turrets.

The amount of turrets for every capship in Standoff is more or less proportional to what it was in WC1/WC2, with a few liberties taken here and there, mostly for balancing and novel tie-in purposes... For example, the Tarawa-type CVEs have their turret arrangement taken from descriptions in End Run, and the Ralatha (IIRC) has more turrets than it should have (if I used the same proportion as I used on other ships) because otherwise the ship would be shock full of blind spots.

WC2 was all about number of turrets, but blindspots are a big issue in Standoff (specially when the unsolvable collision bug shows up, like in the Dauntless's runway in UE), so balancing it out while staying true to WC2 is pretty much impossible.


3. Nope, I ran some tests but couldn't figure out how to do that... it probably can't be done without deeper editing.
 
Eder said:
WC2 was all about number of turrets, but blindspots are a big issue in Standoff (specially when the unsolvable collision bug shows up, like in the Dauntless's runway in UE)

I still have a screenshot of my wingman comitting suicide laying around somewhere on my computer.

3. Nope, I ran some tests but couldn't figure out how to do that... it probably can't be done without deeper editing

Thats sad. :(

But i still love all you have done to the cockpits. Looking at those screenshots gave me that good old feeling i loved so much when i first played Wing Commander. :)
I also like the changes you have done to the HUD itself.

Nope, anti-matter guns won't be used against fighters. We might have them in some scripted capship-to-capship combat, but the player only needs to worry about Flak turrets and regular turrets.

Something like those annoying capship missiles the bugs used in SO? :eek:
 
Not really like that, more like in UE, where the capships would shoot each other with their regular turrets... except that they'd shoot each other with (previously unrevealed!) AMGs. :p
 
That begs the question: Will the AMG turrets be on all capship models, suddenly appear on "Capship combat" models made specifically for the purpose, or simply be shots that originate from some prededermined spot on the ship that isn't targetable?
 
The most likely is the last option. The shots could come out of strategic spots like the Gilgamesh's big white pods or something like that.
 
That's pretty much what I figured. In that case, would the AMG shot be an actual "ship", that spawns and explodes as a scripted function?
 
Probably not. I think it'd be easier to make them into actual bullets, so that any fighter who gets in the way would be properly destroyed, etc... the easiest cheap trick would probably be placing invisible boxes(tm) close to or maybe inside the capships, giving these boxes regular (non-rotating) hardpoints with AMGs assigned to them, and finally getting the boxes to face each other so they'd shoot themselves.
 
Oh, a question on the Sabre: Do the Sabre's shields recharge faster than the Rapier's like in WC2 or not?
 
Are you sure that happened in WC2? IIRC, Quarto got the recharge data from WC2's files... and what I got here tells me the recharge rates were the same. :confused:
 
Most likely, Ijuin fell victim to an optical illusion :p. According to the WC2 manual, the Rapier has worse shields than the Sabre, but in the game, the reverse is actually the case. And since the shield indicators are percentage-based, the result is that the Sabre's shields appear to recharge faster in the game, while in fact they simply have less to recharge - similarly, the Ferret's shields appear to recharge nearly instantaneously, but only because they're even thinner.
 
Quarto said:
the Rapier has worse shields than the Sabre, but in the game, the reverse is actually the case.

I KNEW it! Thanks for proving me right, Quarto. I always had that suspicion about the Sabre / Rapier shields but never dared to question the dogmas of Joans Fighting Spacecraft. :D
 
Quarto said:
Most likely, Ijuin fell victim to an optical illusion :p. According to the WC2 manual, the Rapier has worse shields than the Sabre, but in the game, the reverse is actually the case. And since the shield indicators are percentage-based, the result is that the Sabre's shields appear to recharge faster in the game, while in fact they simply have less to recharge - similarly, the Ferret's shields appear to recharge nearly instantaneously, but only because they're even thinner.

According to the numbers displayed in the WC2 ship editor utility (the one available in the CIC Files section), the Rapier's shield thickness is 115 while the Sabre's shield thickness is 80. Additionally, the Sabre's shield recharge rate is set to 1, while the Rapier's shield recharge rate is set to 3 (with the lower number being faster). Altering the shield recharge rate parameter in the editor does result in a change in shield recharge time in the game.

The above aside, in asking if the Sabre's shields recharged faster, I was more concerned with percent per second than centimeters equivalent per second (i.e. "does it take less time to reach maximum level?").
 
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