Oh, the rocket pod mentioned above could work like an unguided version of the swarm missles... except w/ a higher velocity. Instead of 1 rocket at a time, fire a group of 10 small ones in a pattern. Make the damage for each rocket kind of small and give them a short flight time. Is a lot like the deadfire rocket packs found in so many space board games...

Yes, I think it could. I'd had the same thought, but not so generally. The way I was going to approach it was have a single shot produce a cluster of munitions, kinda like a swarm, only with a dispersion pattern like is used for the gatling - a true space shotgun.

Here are my entries:

Disrupter: (S) - 2000 cr
Energy: 7/shot
Speed: 350 m/s
Damage: 155
Range: 1400m
Repeat: 0.1 sec

Light Autocannon: (S) - 900 cr
Energy: 6/shot
Speed: 130 m/s
Damage: 450
Explosive Radius: 10m
Proximity: 5m
Range: 500m
Repeat: 0.2 sec
Ammo: 50 (5 cr per shot)

Flechette Cannon: (S) - 2300cr
Energy: 12/shot
Speed: 120 m/s
Damage: 1500*
Range: 500m
Repeat: 0.4 Sec
Ammo: 30 (40 cr per shot)
*Special: The flechette cannon shoots 6 separate munitions in a semi-random spread pattern. Each munition does 250 damage.

Heavy Autocannon: (L) - 2350 cr
Energy: 12/shot
Speed: 145m/s
Damage: 550
Explosive Radius: 20m
Proximity: 10m
Range: 600m
Repeat: 0.3 sec
Ammo: 40 (15cr per shot)

Anti-Matter Cannon (L) - 5600 cr
Energy: 40/shot
Speed: 165 m/s
Damage: 1600
Explosive Radius: 40m
Proximity: Contact
Range: 800m
Repeat: 0.4 sec

X-Ray Laser (L) - 8000 cr
Energy: 30/shot + Special*
Speed: 500 m/s
Damage: 1900
Range: 1500m
Repeat: 0.7 sec
Ammo: 20 (200cr per shot)
*Special: Your ship takes 100 damage whenever you fire the X-Ray Laser.

Streak Rocket Launcher: (S) - 2400cr
Energy: N/A
Speed: 70 m/s + 10 m/s^2 (max. 170 m/s)
Damage: 850
Proximity: 25m
Explosion Radius: 50m
Range: ~10s (roughly 1250m)
Repeat: .5 sec.
Ammunition: 12 (80cr each)

Radar Guided Missiles: (S) - 6000 cr
Energy/Shot: 0
Speed: 130 m/s
Damage: 2100
Explosive Radius: 30
Proximity: Contact
Range: 15 seconds
Repeat: 0.5 seconds + Special*
Ammo: 8 (80 per shot)
*Special: Must maintain 'red' in targeting reticule for 0.3 seconds to obtain 'lock'. Loses lock if target is no longer primary target of firing vessel.

"Improved" Ion Blaster: (S) - 300 cr
Energy: 5/shot
Speed: 150 m/s
Damage: 275
Range: 600m
Repeat: 0.15 sec

The Gauss Cannon, Plasma Cannon, and Phased Blaster need work as well, but I'm not sure what to do with them.

My next idea:

Homing Missile Pod (L) - 10000c
Energy: 200/shot
Speed: Pod=50m/s, Missiles=120m/s
Damage: 1500hp/missile
Range: Pod=500m, Missiles=1500m
Repeat:0.5/s (One every 2 seconds)
Ammo: Homing Missile Pods - 1000c
Max Ammo: 5

This fires a pod which travels 500m and explodes, releasing 10 homing missiles which all lock onto any target within 750m. If multiple targets are present, some missiles go to each target. Makes a good anti-pirate/anti-bot weapon.

My suggestion then:
The Boid Swarm Launcher(L)

those who dont know the boid algorithm: its an "intelligent" algoroithm where each member of a flock keeps distance to eachother on the way to a target. They thus avoid collisions and obstackles while following a target.


Energy: 150/swarm
Speed: 80 m/s
Launches 14 boids/time
Manouverability: high
Damage: 300/boid (max damage is 4200)
Range: 1km or 30 seconds
Ammo: 28 (2 rounds)
Distance to eachother: 50m
Explosion radius: 60m
Triggers: 40m

Theese are fast, long range and dangerous, but due to how the boids work you can outmanouver them or make one explode "at an end" and thus take most of the swarm down in the keelwaters.

I can quite imagine someone launching them to get people "off their heels" instead of as a real weapon, taking one load of theese in frong would be painful, but not completely destructive for most ships.

To avoid them you'd have to do a merry dance around the asteroids, and even then you are likely to have them split up and come towards you.

roguelazer/spider: The problem I have with multi-warhead weapons is that they create a huge ammount of lag. Before server optimizations, swarm missiles use to ruin the game for me. If you create an effective swarm missile weapon with large numbers of munitions, you are encouraging two things. First, you are encouraging a 'dump strategy'. That is, the player just dumps as many weapons into the air as possible and lets god sort out the details. That takes no skill. Secondly, you are encouraging server load because you are rewarding players for creating a large number of weapons that require fairly constant updates.

Is the boid thing like a flock of geese? Where they fly in a triangel and the further back they are the easier to fly it is? We need geese missles, with three levels, 1, 400ms missle, 2 300ms missles, 2 200ms missles, 2 100ms missles. But each one gets caught up in the drift of the first one, makeing each one 400ms, but if the first one is distroyed there will be 2 flocks of 300ms missles, if the first one of a flock is destroyed then they will go 200ms, etc.

Suicidal Lemming: No, it isnt, its where the missiles avoid eachother though.

Celebrim: I was well aware of that, but I didn't want this to be an "assault" weapon as such, unless you deploy it smartly I'd like it to be "drop it and get that bugger light ship off my traderoute"

Here are some links for more boid information :
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

The issue about lag is real, as this would cause a big amount of re-calculation on each boid at each step, but can be reduced by " standard" of cutting down awareness radius and so on, but thats an implementation detail more than anything.

Flocking weapons (by the way swarm missiles are essentially boids but they may not actually keep distance from one another... hmm.) can be implemented without creating extra network lag. They just have to be as deterministic as possible and implemented as one "object" rather than 10-20 separate ones.

That isn't to say that it's necessarily a good idea, gameplay-wise. But I tend to stay out of those discussions.

Well, the swarmers are close, but they dont have the thing that would make boids "interesting" in a real sense, fire a swarm at one end of a small asteroid after an enemy at the other, a true boid/flock would spread itself out to keep distance, and then go different routes on the asteroid to avoid eachother and collission. This is the real amusing show of boids in a simulation, esp when you try to avoid them (cough, ho humm) having missiles appear from each side of a 'roid and then regroup would feel quite a bit unpleasant when in a light fighter ;-)

esp. if they are fast and agile, but not individually very painful.

Spider: As far as I know, no AI currently has the ability to see asteroids.

Secondly, once AI has the ability to see asteroids, I'm hoping that you will lose the ability to see through and retain targeting locks through asteroids.

Yeah, the bots really need to be able to see roids... I've seen them issue on the ones in s4 too many times to count...