December 13, 2010

So there I was...

So there I was, attacking a Psilon planet with a fleet of mediums. All the defenders were gone, so it was just me and their missile bases. They had a class-V planetary shield, and also had class-V shields on the missile base, total 10.

I had a hundred medium ships, each of which carried two megabolt cannons. They do 2-20 points of damage. And in two rounds of fire, 400 shots, they didn't do a single point of damage. By all rights they should have won easily.

I've noticed this before: planets in MOO seem much more resistant to beam attacks than they ought to be. Is this a bug, or is it something I missed in the manual?

(I came back a bit later with a new class of ship which was carrying Omega-V bombs, which do 20-50 points of damage, and I obliterated the place.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 11:29 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 151 words, total size 1 kb.

1 I'm not certain, but I think that planets get some sort of natural bonus to account for the fact that they're big and reasonably inert.  I'm pretty sure that planetary shields in MOO2 were superior to their mathematical equivalent in space (although the exact mechanic was somewhat different than in MOO).

Posted by: BigD at December 14, 2010 01:54 AM (LjWr8)

2 Beams are useless, and missiles very reduced in effect (which is backwards, they should be more effective in atmosphere).  But this is meant to make you include bombs, which otherwise, wouldn't be worth it.

Posted by: ubu at December 14, 2010 05:07 AM (GfCSm)

3 If memory serves (and it may not), beams and torpedoes get half damage against planets, before the reduction from shields; missiles and bombs do full damage.

Posted by: Griffin at December 14, 2010 08:18 AM (pqWeu)

4 I am 99.99% certain that beams get halved when used against planets, with that occurring before shields are applied. So the megabolt's 2-20 against 10 total shields is completely ineffective.

I am not sure about torpedos and missiles. Bombs obviously get full damage.

Posted by: haphazard1 at December 14, 2010 04:13 PM (KTbd7)

5

Everything you guys are saying is consistent with what I've been observing, so I guess that's the answer.

Likely they did this for play balancing purposes. If beams were 100% effective against planets, no one would ever need bombs.

Or hardly ever. I don't carry them much myself since they're useless against enemy ships.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 14, 2010 04:49 PM (+rSRq)

6 Supposedly the atmosphere absorbs the energy from beams, making it less effective.


Posted by: Ymarsakar at December 20, 2010 07:39 PM (tUhkS)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Enclose all spoilers in spoiler tags:
      [spoiler]your spoiler here[/spoiler]
Spoilers which are not properly tagged will be ruthlessly deleted on sight.
Also, I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice. (Even when you think you're being funny.)

At Chizumatic, we take pride in being incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent, and unfair. We do all of them deliberately.

How to put links in your comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
7kb generated in CPU 0.0061, elapsed 0.0176 seconds.
20 queries taking 0.013 seconds, 23 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.