[crizza]

Ok, just did a mission with the Marcus glaive and it's nameplate was running diagonal over the tower thing behind the beam cannons.

[SaltyWaffles]

IDK if anything drastic or permanent really needs to be done. If the Valarie was set to fly in a straighter line, I don't think the cannons could engage. What's happening (from what I can see) is that the fore section of the ship turns up when the Indus arrives, so the Indus ends up being at a relatively high angle compared to the Valarie (roughly 20 degrees or so)

Or just have the Indus show up from/attack from a lower angle, where none of the Diomedes' beams can shoot. Assuming the Valarie keeps heading in a straight line like before, it shouldn't be too much of a problem (I hope).

[Aesaar]

Battuta fixed the Valerie-Indus issue pretty much the day it was reported.  Will apparently be packaged in some future patch.  For the time being, just set the Indus as invulnerable.

crizza: yeah, it look weird there.  The old Chimera had the nameplate arranged vertically on the middle segment, which looked weird too.

[Phantom Hoover]

why wouldn't the valerie just roll over

[Aesaar]

Because it isn't supposed to kill the Indus.

[An4ximandros]

There's a Plotium Singularity stopping the Valerie.

[General Battuta]

I spent a while trying to finesse the Valerie's waypoints to have her fight 'smarter', but it turns out the deck was already enormously stacked in her favor - she had 20x engine toughness and more than double hull toughness, whereas the Indus got nothing - so I left her with a bit of bad helmsmanship while evening some of the other factors in the fight.

[Phantom Hoover]

"Bad helmsmanship" is a bit of an understatement when apparently nobody on board thought to bring their guns to bear on the frigate that was ripping them to shreds.

"But sir, if you'd just roll the ship slightly we could save the lives of the entire crew and deal a serious blow to the UEF!" "Dammit Lieutenant, that's not my call! Command ordered us to attack in this orientation and I'm damned if I'm going to disobey them!"

[Aesaar]

Let's just say the Valerie's engines get ****ed up by the Indus' guns and it couldn't turn.  Lucky shot.  Maybe Battuta could give a line to someone that makes that clear, if people care so much.

Can't actually destroy engine subsystem because it apparently ****s up the Atreus cutscene because the Indus is out of position.

[General Battuta]

"Bad helmsmanship" is a bit of an understatement when apparently nobody on board thought to bring their guns to bear on the frigate that was ripping them to shreds.

"But sir, if you'd just roll the ship slightly we could save the lives of the entire crew and deal a serious blow to the UEF!" "Dammit Lieutenant, that's not my call! Command ordered us to attack in this orientation and I'm damned if I'm going to disobey them!"

Her guns do bear, though - enough that she can do some real damage. Even murder the Indus in the currently released version of the mission!

The time for making major changes to that mission is past. It'd take hours of re-work and iteration to make sure nothing broke in any edge cases, and Darkest Hour is already probably the second most work-intensive mission we've done so far. I don't think my sanity could handle a major rebalance.

Without a bunch of armor her engines get popped really early on, though. So consider whether you'd rather have bad helmsmanship or the Valerie dead in the water 

[Aesaar]

I'd rather have dead in the water, myself...

[Scotty]

Can't you change armor classes via SEXP?  Why not drop the armor class during the relevent portion of the mission?

[An4ximandros]

Honestly I see this as the reason for why Tables are worthless as cannon clues, they are swapped around every mission, so how do they rely any useful info?

Now if Darius/Battuta/BPDevs released the "Commander's essential guide to the Diomedes Corvette Class" we might get into something.

[Mars]

Honestly I see this as the reason for why Tables are worthless as cannon clues, they are swapped around every mission, so how do they relay any useful info?

They don't.

[Luis Dias]

I'm still confused at how tables should give us clues about cannons.

[Aesaar]

You don't?  Weapons.tbm might help you with that.

[Droid803]

Tech descriptions are more meaningful to canon than statistics, both are in the tables. The tables do give a lot of clues about cannons though, in both ships and weapons.

[SaltyWaffles]

I spent a while trying to finesse the Valerie's waypoints to have her fight 'smarter', but it turns out the deck was already enormously stacked in her favor - she had 20x engine toughness and more than double hull toughness, whereas the Indus got nothing - so I left her with a bit of bad helmsmanship while evening some of the other factors in the fight.

Sorry for the late post, but I'm curious (and eagerly awaiting updates on the upcoming models--no pressure intended, just in love with such awesome work).

Why not, perhaps, remove the double hull toughness (and much of the engine toughness), but make her maneuver more intelligently? If it did work out well enough (and I don't know if it would, of course), it would make for a much more entertaining and interesting fight between the two ships. Since the dialog in the mission doesn't mention any meta-factors coming into play with regards to increased durability or whatnot, wouldn't it be easier to follow/better for immersion if the (visually explicit and demonstrated) reason for the Valarie's destruction wasn't due to jarringly bad maneuvering (or lack thereof)? Or, perhaps, you could retain the current dynamic by having the opening salvo from the Indus be a lucky hit (in part due to the great positioning it got when jumping in) to the Val's engines, drastically curbing or outright disabling its maneuverability.

Obviously, this is just speculation; I haven't done any testing with it, so I trust your judgement. Again, this is more out of curiosity than anything else.

EDIT: Missed a post up there, sorry. Though that does leave the question about the possibility of making the Valarie crippled from the opening slavo of gauss cannons from the Indus' (possibly accidental) shock-jump flank attack. It would help to mitigate the Worf Effect plaguing the Diomedes class right now and not make the Valarie's captain confusingly dense.

----

As an aside, what exactly is the deal with the Hyperion-class cruiser being so large for its capabilities and role (assuming it was due to the necessity of working with the existing model and its size), especially given that the Aeolus is roughly half its size while being (relatively speaking) almost as effective in every aspect?

[General Battuta]

Please feel free to draft up a mission with improved Valerie waypoints for me; submit it with a couple sentences of testing outcome for your 10 test runs and I'll see about merging it into SVN.

[QuakeIV]

e: not that i find any fault with this mind you, he can do whatever he feels like with his time