Combat system

The Combat system... It has many things that has to be calculated with, resulting a really complex system. Lets see a sample, and i will comment it with the things that happening in those moments. I hope this article will help you understand the working of the whole combat system...

Okay we walking the planes with a nice and huge heavy mech, called a seth. First of all, its a really heavy mech, resulting low movement speed. Smaller robots can move faster, Bigger=slower. It can go with 30kph. We seeing an Intakt, which is a small ew (electronic warfare) robot. Ew robots use less weapons, more ew gadgets, like sensor dampeners, demobilizators and stuff. For some unknown reason, we want to kill this guy.

First we have to target him. A double click will do fine. Now the Targeting computer starts to target him. The Seth heavy mech locking time, which giving us the target lock time is 7,5 sec. And we wait until we done with the locking. As we start locking, the Intakt's owner can see on his hud that we targeting him. So guess what, he will target us back too. (intakt has same 7,5 sec in this case)
Targeting also have a maximal range. Seth's locking range is 337meter. You can target only under this, and if your target moving out of this range, you automaticly loosing it.

After the locking is done, we can finally shot at him. The target will take damage if:

• There's no object between you and him. Line of sight working. Any plant or rock piece can be used this way as a shield. These terrain objects have hp too, so if it takes enough damage, it will collapse, and it will no longer annoy us...(but there are many plants, trees, rocks and decors...)
• Tracking speed. In our case this can be a headache. Every robot has a tracking speed. Its always represented in an angle/sec. So if you standing in a position, and you aiming at your target, if your target runs in circles faster than your tracking speed (which gives us an angle) then you will miss. Plus, the intakt runs at 61kph, which is double of ours... So he just have to move faster around us, than we can track him, and he can toy with us. damn.
  
• It has to be in our weapon range. Every weapon has an optimal firing range, after that, its dmg will lower (depending on range) and then becomes zero. Its called as falloff. Rockets dont have falloff. Their dmg becomes 0 after optimal range.
  
• The last two important stuff(tracking&weapon range) can be viewed trough graphics, at here.
• The website also mentions a miss chance with turrets, so i will copy the whole thing to us...

  Turrets: Target size / Hit accuracy

  The quotient of the two parameters show the chance of hit. For example the target size of Your enemy is 5, Your weapon's accuracy is 7. Due to this formula, the chance of hit in one cycle is (5/7=0,71) 71%. In case the enemy's target size is 4, and Your weapon's accuracy is 4, the chance of hit is (4/4=1) 100%.

Now the second question is how much dmg it will take.

• Because im lazy i copy the following sentence from the website, which is the part of the Turrets: Target size / Hit accuracy. We have rockets too, and well... Rockets aint no Turrets. Plus, Rockets cant miss.

  Missiles: Target size / Explosion size

  A major advantage of ballistic warfare is that missiles always hit. Unlike turrets, where the denominator element of the quotient is given by the weapon, the explosion size is a property of the ammunition (the missile). The quotient of the target and explosion size shows, how much of the missile's damage affects the target. For example the target size of Your enemy is 5, Your missile's explosion size is 7. Due to this formula, the missile unfolds only (5/7=0,71) 71% of its total damage. In case the enemy's target size is 4, and Your missile's explosion size is 4, the missile has a full effect (4/4=1) 100% on the target.

• We have cycle times too. Its showing us how quickly a weapon can shoot. Not every weapon shooting at same speed, so maybe a faster shooting can be useful, but it will cost us more ammunition.
• Resistance...

Resistance. Well usually an mmorpg holds some types of dmg, like "fire, arcane... etc." If a wizard casts something at you, like.. fireball, than your fire resistance gets to work, helping you to reduce/resist the damage. In perpetuum, its much more complicated. The damage types(=resistances) the following: Kinetic, Thermal, Seismic, Chemical. The weapon itself does not containing the damage type. The bullets/rockets/cells has the damage type... and not only one! Every ammo has at least 2 type of damage. Like the Medium Photokinetic Energy cell damages 16 kinetic damage, and 28 thermal dmg. So, if someone shoots at you, at least two of your resistances will work. This resulting many things. First of all you cant fully resist a shot. Its nearly impossible. Secondly, you cant pick an ammo that will be fully effective against your target. We even have 3 and 4 type of damage containing ammo, The 4 damage type holding bullets usually named with some "multi", like Multifocal energy cell. (Chemical-8/Seismic-8/Kinetic-8/Thermal-36) This means that its just damn hard to resist. To balance it, these really powerful bullets costing you -50% optimal range. So you can go against all resistance, which will luckily be enough to kill any1, but you have to work on half range, giving them an upper hand.


Now we are happy, we know all that we need to know. Our seth can be beaten by the tiny Intakt if it comes too close, so we play for staying long range. Smaller robots can use smaller weapons... Resulting at this case no more chances for the intakt to win the battle. (and we are twice as heavy guy as him)

Well yea. This is how the combat system goes... basically. This article contains the rules, about the game system. But how will the battles to be win, what can we do with an EW modules, and how can it modify a combat, it will be told in the next article.