What happens to all the rockets onboard a ship when the ship explodes? Wouldn't it make the ship explosion immensely bigger? Will the rockets ever explode? Do they just get sucked into a void of infinite rocketdom? Perhaps the rockets <i>should</i> explode, considering you are going for a "realistic" feel. I don't think hammer space is very real, unless you live in an anime, like I do.

That would kick ass. Kamikaze runs against Frigates would be fun.

=)

it wouldn't be hard to implement either. just if you have x rockets/missles then the explosion would be x times larger.

Kamikaze makes for poor game play. Historically, it isn't a very successful tactic, largely because thier is no such thing as an experienced Kamikaze pilot. Games don't have that limitation. A game dominated by Kamikaze tactics with one side 'dumbly' crashing its ships into the other one wouldn't be very fun to play. I'm not even sure it would make a very good solo game, but I'm certain it wouldn't make a very good multi-player game.

Well, it's not hard to destroy a ship that's boosting straight at you, so it wouldn't be considered unbalanced. Frigates would also have so much hull protection anyway, that it would take a lot of kamikaze runs to take one down. And add that along with a constant stream of traders docking with the frigate, to sell resources and repair the frigate etc., that it may very well make it a challenging tug-of-war type thing. And if not for increased splash damage, at the very least they could (the devs) simply make the explosions just look bigger visually, just for coolness.

One way to test that theory would be to see if you could boost yourself straight into a AI Bot before it destroyed you. Succeeding in that, see how close you can boost yourself to a defence turret before it destroys you. Since this is one of the leading means of taking the flag, my guess is a half-way decent player can get pretty darn close. If you are close enough that you go boom within rocket splash and the rocket splash is big enough, then it is a successful tactic. If doing so takes no particular skill, then I for one would consider it unbalanced. It's hard enough to survive now when someone decides to lemming on you.

And unbalanced or not, encouraging players to use any 'stupid' tactic is 'unfun'. Stupid tactics have a tendency to overwhelm 'smart' tactics if they work because they are easier to execute. This tends to drive all tactics toward stupid, to the detriment of developing tactics to any further degree (horse cavalry vs. poorly trained infantry during the middle ages). They also have a maximum return on investment. A Kamikazi pilot can never do better than a direct hit on a larger foe. So a game dominated by Kamikazi tactics would never see a progression in skill much beyond that level of force multiplication.

How much damage are we talking about. Well, there is the explosion of the ship already. I'm guessing that's somewhere around 1500. Then there is the collision of the ship already. I'm guessing that's somewhere around 2000. Then you want to add to that 16 x 2000 for the rockets and 16 x 2200 for the missiles, or 67200 more damage.

Now, I don't know how many h.p. you'd like to give a frigate, but lets say 250,000. Then we are talking around 4 kamikazi attacks from newbies to take down a frigate.

I can't speak to your other assumptions about frigate functionality like the 'constant stream of traders' docking with the frigate. I personally don't see a constant stream of anything docking with anything else. Even sector 9 can be quiet for long stretches, and we only have 9 sectors. We may get more sectors, and we may get more players, but I doubt that the devs really hope that all the players are going to meet up in one sector.

Finally, I disagree that it is 'realistic' to have all the weapons aboard a ship blow up if it is destroyed. Certainly a certain percentage of the weapons will 'realistically' explode, but many of them will 'realistically' not. Munitions are designed with a balance between being easy to explode and being difficult to explode. If a bomb explodes too easily, it isn't safe to carry it around. A munition has to be designed to surive a certain ammount of rough handling without going off. This is the reason that so many real munitions are duds and don't explode at all. Just ask the Argentinians about thier bombs during the Falkland Islands war, many of which passed clean through British frigates without being triggered. But even the best designed munitions fail at least 10% of the time to explode even under conditions that they were designed to explode in.

And realism is a poor goal in this sort of game design anyway. Realism isn't necessarily fun.

Like I said, if there are problems with balance, the extra BOOM in the explosion could simply be for aesthetics. You can't tell me that you wouldn't want to see a ship packed with explosive weapons go out with a BIG BOOM, can you?

If we could have bigger booms, i'd take the heaviest ship in the game, load it with every single munition i can get my hands on, undock, fly around, then KABOOOOOOM

"You can't tell me that you wouldn't want to see a ship packed with explosive weapons go out with a BIG BOOM, can you?"

I thought I just did.

The entertainer's compromise would be:

Have kamikaze ships cause one heck of an explosion... visually. But not much damage. maybe add in a cool new explosion animation. Then if you were screaming around dog-fighting near an enemy frigate, and you knew you weren't going to make it, you could end it all in a fireball.

It would add some dissatisfaction to defeat, so log as it did LESS damage than a live ship could ever cause.

But I'd rather the devs focus on re-balance and stuff than worrying about this stuff right now.