Progress update 2020-02-18:
Version 88 is up. Some things included are:
- CIWS
- ECM on ships
- ECM on missiles
- ECM degrades beam fire control chance to hit
- ECM degrades missile fire control maximum range
- ECCM on beam fire controls, missile fire controls, and CIWS
- Laser warheads
- Fixes to all the bugs reported in the
bug threadHere's a list of the design choices that are in the game as it stands right now:
- Missiles cannot bypass detection by existing less than 5 seconds. Will be optional later on.
- Geo survey default orders limit range to 10b km. I originally omitted the limit because it's arbitrary and inflexible, but valid concerns of excessive fuel usage were raised. I'd like to rework things to make this smarter some day, perhaps by checking low-fuel conditional orders even while fleets are still in flight for an existing order, but to save time and match A4X, it's a flat 10b km for now.
- Hid the research projects for Missile tracking time bonus. As in Aurora 7.1, this bonus doesn't do anything, so there's no point in it being researchable. May revisit later, but for now I'm moving on to save time.
- In-flight retargeting (when original target is lost) (automatic, NOT manual) is still allowed (Might make it optional later on)
- As in Aurora 7.1, laser warheads use missile damage code. It sort of naturally emerged that it's just faster to code it this way and less of a performance hit. I may revisit later on and add an option to use beam mechanics.
- I now treat fuel as a floating point number rather than integer. This is to prevent the "exploit" in A4X where you can travel across the galaxy using 0 fuel if you use small enough sub-pulse times, an effect you often can't avoid even if you want to. Fuel is now rounded to integers for UI display only.
With a few exceptions, my general philosophy is when in doubt, match Aurora4x and revisit later, for better or worse. There's still a whole lot more to add rather than spend any more time in this area. Speaking of which, next up, in no particular order, is secondary stages, shooting things on the ground, shooting things *from* the ground, dust and atmospheric effects on beam weapons, and radiation warheads!