Initial firing delay for weapons

posted on March 4th, 2011, 2:04 am

I keep looking for a way to force weapons to chain fire instead of all firing at once, and still be able to specify a different hardpoint for each shot to come from.  The best I can do at this point is just have a bunch of different weapons with different reload times, and live with the fact that they'll all fire at once in the opening barrage before settling in the the firing pattern I set up.

It occured to me that if it was possible to tell a weapon to hold fire for a specified time before its first shot, it would help.  A good example would be the Galaxy class' phasers - in many episodes, they fired rapidly from multiple emitors, but you never saw them all fire at once.  Take it a step further, and you could even have a couple short phaser shots with short lifespans, followed by a high damage shot with a long lifespan (think "Yesterday's Enterprise" when the Ent-D destroys the Klingon ship).

I can't make this work using one weapon with multiple shot delays (shotdelay0, shotdelay1, etc.) because, even with a HardpointShift, you're limited to bouncing back and forth between two hardpoints.  You also would be limited to a single ordnance file, which means all shots have to have the same lifespan and damage.  By using multiple weapons with some sort of delay fire command, though, just about any combination would be possible.

posted on March 4th, 2011, 2:32 am

One way of skirting this is giving your weapons slightly different ranges . It's not ideal, and admittedly it would be nice to have a command that can hold fire like you suggest 

posted on March 5th, 2011, 5:19 pm

I've played around with using different ranges on stations in stock A2, and it works really well if the station's weapons outrange most attacking ships.  Attaacking ships have to close in to return fire, and take even more damage the closer they get. 

For ships, though, without any kind of movement in battle, they're just going to engage from their longest weapon range and the shorter range weapons only get a chance to fire if the enemy chooses to close in.  I really miss the cloverleaf and circle movement patterns, as they would partly address that...

posted on March 5th, 2011, 8:46 pm

In stock there is a "shotAccel = x" line, but I've never tested it out and don't know how exactly it works. It's possible that a particular value might make the weapon seem to delay before firing. I also have no idea if it works in FO or if it's one of the things that's bugged.

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on March 5th, 2011, 9:16 pm

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on March 6th, 2011, 1:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

ShotAccel just refers to the acceleration of the ordnance from when it is fired to when it reaches its terminal velocity.

EDIT: I believe you can get ships to circle in combat via this function in the RTS_CFG.h file:
int CIRCLE_IN_PLACE_DURING_COMBAT = 0;

Not certain on that one though