Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Lykurgos88 on December 22, 2015, 02:03:04 pm
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So, I have been wondering for a long time now about a certain behaviour that has apparently been around since the retail version of FS2: The way how difficulty level affects the beam refiring rates (and apparently all the other weapons too?). I have encountered more and more missions where changing the difficulty to a higher level would actually make those missions easier to complete. This is especially true in Shadow Genesis, but affects everything else too. Most notably, the "proving grounds" mission in FS2 gets easier to 100% when playing at "insane" difficulty.
I think this has been the single most counterintuitive feature of Freespace saga - the fact that in some missions, player can "optimize" between player survivability (easier difficulties) and more dangerous friendly capitals (higher difficulties). As a metagame it's not something that I enjoy, and I really try to ignore it by playing on medium all the time. Sometimes however, a very challenging mission appears, and changing the difficulty to "very easy" doesn't always help with all the objectives, especially if player doesn't have any weapons that can hurt corvettes or destroyers. Sometimes, missions are very reliant on friendly capital ships doing their jobs right.
I know it has been FAR too many years to suddenly address this now, but better late than never, I guess? (unless this has already been discussed and I missed the memo - in that case shame on me... :( )
I think the community should have a serious discussion about removing the whole "dynamic refire rate" feature and reset all the refire times to match the "normal difficulty" setting. Or, if this has already been discussed on this forum, I would like to know what was the conclusion. I know the rule about not "breaking the retail", but I truly feel that standardizing the capital ship weapons for all difficulties would greatly help mission makers in their quest to balance their missions.
What are your thoughts on this? :)
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http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24don.27t_insert_random_turret_fire_delay: (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24don.27t_insert_random_turret_fire_delay:)
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24Friendly_AI_Fire_Delay_Scale: (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24Friendly_AI_Fire_Delay_Scale:)
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24Hostile_AI_Fire_Delay_Scale: (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24Hostile_AI_Fire_Delay_Scale:)
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Yeah, that setting is great. In BP difficulty doesn't affect beam refire rate.
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Flak of Doom :shaking:
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So this is after all a mod/campaign based feature. Huh. :wtf:
Still, I wonder why so many are content with those default values. I can't be the only one who initially got confused why harder difficulties sometimes felt easier than "easy" difficulties. From an intuition standpoint, it makes no sense. The more there are Large beams in mission, the greater the effect.
EDIT: To clarify, it's totally different to have Large beams with a minimum waiting time and having small beams with minimum waiting time. Every time there is a friendly destroyer against a hostile corvette, the destroyer wins with a margin that is comparable to the difficulty. And that margin consists of depleted mission time and lost capital ship hitpoints.
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Still, I wonder why so many are content with those default values.
If I can hazard a guess, it's just not knowing that this option exists. There's thousands of tweakable settings in FSO and it's hard to keep up with all of them.
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Yeah, it's a flag. And if you turn it off all weapons will fire at full tabled rates, like they do on insane with only a small random delay that will not affect anything but the fastest ROF weapons. Remove that random delay too and you get true tabled firerates for all weapons which is what you should use if you don't want ROF scaling.
Many are content with those values because they never took the time to write their own AI-profiles table or simply make specific weapons always fire at tabled rates while still downgrading AI fighter weapons if you're not playing on insane.
Obviously the best fix is to simply remove every difficulty aside from insane :P
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The way I see it, easier difficulty settings are more forgiving because the player (who always fires at the maximum rate) has more of an affect on the mission. The lower the turret fire rates, the faster things happen, and the less room there is for pilot error. It makes sense to affect both friendlies and hostiles equally as the net effect is to accelerate the mission and thus diminish the impact of Alpha One.