Small problem: Something I've noticed recently is that often fighter monted energy weapons bypass the shields of other fighters entirely. Sometimes it's me in my jury-rigged Excalibur dropping a Zartoth to 43% right through it's pristine forward shields, or a Gothris vaporizing me with a single salvo from its particle guns. I did some poking around the forums, and heard it mentioned that capital ship turrets have a special flag that says they never pierce shields.
So I opened up my weapons.tbl file and added the "no pierce shields" flag to all of the fighter guns, made a new pilot, but had no effect. Now, I know the weapons.tbl file is in the appropriate place and all because I've jury rigged fighter scale reaper and tachyon cannons for a Excalibur. Is there some other setting or variable I need to be tweaking in order to make it so the only way Kilrathi fighters can hurt my hull is by eroding my shields?
On a somewhat unrelated note, I've also been doing quite a bit of tinkering with the weapons. It takes no more than a cursory glance at the various guns to realize that the best fighter in the entire universe would mount either meson blasters, mass drivers, or in the mod lasers and neutron guns, as they take effectively no energy at all to fire continuously. The only way these guns can be rebalanced sanely is to make sure there's a reason to be using all of them. Roughly grouped, I decided that Lasers, Ion guns, and Meson blasters were all "light" weapons, Mass Drivers, Neutron guns, Photon cannons, and Reaper cannons were all "medium" weapons, and Particle guns, Tachyon cannons, and Plasma cannons were all "heavy" weapons.
The WC3 damage/power ratios are completely insane; there's no reason anyone in their right mind would ever choose a photon gun, and given their incredible D-P ratio of 3.75 Mass Drivers are simply the dogfighter's best guns. I reasoned that there must be some way to keep the feel of WC3 fighter combat and weapon diversity without making some guns obsolete. The method I came up with after some experimentation was this: lighter guns would fire faster, but their shots would do less damage per hit and would be less efficient overall. Heavier weapons would do more damage a shot, and they'd be more power efficient, but they'd fire less shots so accuracy would matter more. Additionally, many of the heavier guns have lower velocity projectiles than the medium and lighter guns, which makes them more suited for destroying bombers and capital ship turrets than for fighter swatting.
Thusly, if you are flying a heavy fighter hull like the Thunderbolt, you'd have two of each kind of "slots", if you will. Instead of, say, 2 plasma, 2 photon, and 2 meson you could opt for 2 particle, 2 reaper, and 2 lasers for a balanced loadout weighted towards antifighter work. Additionally, presumably you could underfill the slots and opt for 2 particle and 4 mesons, or 6 lasers.
I ended up making a large table, tracking my "target" damage/power ratio for each gun, the final "adjusted" damage/power ratio to take into account miscellaneous tweaks, rate of fire, range, no. of shots before the battery is drained, damage/second, and damage/full battery. Here are some sample "tweaked" guns:
The laser now fires for 15 damage, consuming 1.2 units of power (Freespace style, 12 WC style), every .2 seconds, for a range of 999. It deals 70 damage a second for 60 power a second, and puts 5 shots out a second. Additionally, the laser has a higher velocity projectile than most, as in the WCSaga demo and in WC3 proper.
The photon cannon now fires for 48 damage, consuming 3.365 units of power (Freespace style, 33.65 WC style), every .4 seconds, for a range of 1049. It deals 120 damage a second for 84 power a second, and puts almost three shots out a second.
Finally, the plasma cannon now fires for 80 damage, consuming 4.8 (WC: 48) units of power per shot. It fires every .6 seconds, for a range of 999. It deals 133 damage a second for 80 power a second, and puts out almost two low velocity shots a second.
I can make the table available to those who are interested, and also am willing to take any suggestions for an alternate weapon balancing system or improvements to this.
