Title: Calculating Ship Point Values Post by: capi3101 on July 18, 2012, 08:39:29 pm Greetings all - my first post on these boards. A Google search a few days ago lead me to the pnp Melee sim that Clay created back in 2007 (and subsequently to this forum). It's an interesting looking game, though it looks as if it was never 100% completed (or, at the very least, the rules were never completely compiled into a single resource). I will be checking it out further.
I myself was considering starting work on a Star Control pencil-and-paper Role-Playing Game, and have spent the last few days over at the Ultronomicon wiki gathering up data on the ships of Star Control II (ships seemed a logical place to start). I've been trying to determine how a ship's intrinsic point value (in SuperMelee) is determined, and so far have not had much success. I was curious if anyone had deciphered how a ship's value is calculated. Were I to do a Star Control RPG, it'd probably use an adaptation of a set of rules I wrote (and eventually published) to create a similar role-playing game for the Starflight series. I do have a different core mechanic in mind but most of the rest should be easily adaptable. Title: Re: Calculating Ship Point Values Post by: oldlaptop on July 18, 2012, 11:46:57 pm Ship point costs are determined by arbitrary values in the source code for each ship. According to TFB, there were no calculations involved:
Quote from: 2007 IRC chat with TFB (robot is Fred Ford, PR3 is Paul Reiche III 00:22 <+Shiver-> How did you guys go about deciding the melee point values for each of the ships? ~snip~ 00:23 <+robot> Shiver-: mostly by feel after long play-testing and emotional attachment. 00:23 <+PR3> There were arguements. Title: Re: Calculating Ship Point Values Post by: capi3101 on July 18, 2012, 11:52:55 pm Well, that certainly explains a great deal of the difficulty I've been having. Thanks, oldlaptop
I might be able to set something up categorically. I did find a formula that had about 84% predictability. Of course, it was a fourth order polynomial and sticking that in an RPG is asking for lit bags of dog crap on one's doorstep... So, I do all the permutations and see what results I get. Title: Re: Calculating Ship Point Values Post by: danzibr on July 19, 2012, 02:07:44 am Hey, have you seen Shiver's balance mod (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod)? It does make changes to the ships, but perhaps more importantly to what you're after, changes their point values to reflect their relative strengths better.
Title: Re: Calculating Ship Point Values Post by: capi3101 on July 19, 2012, 05:49:20 am I just registered with the forums today and only found them yesterday, and I haven't had a good chance to look around just yet. I'll check it out. Thanks.
Title: Re: Calculating Ship Point Values Post by: capi3101 on July 20, 2012, 03:13:15 pm Haven't made much progress the last day or two, but I am still working on this.
Meantime I've got another question. I've seen references to "world units" in dealing with terms of the speed of the ships in the game, and that they are equivalent to a quarter pixel at 320x220 resolution. So how big is the entire SuperMelee battlefield in square world units? Related question - at what distancesbetween combatants does the game zoom in and out? EDIT: Found this - http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4418.msg57628#msg57628 Are those figures correct? EDIT: Found this too - http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4233.msg55335#msg55335 That looks like a more useful answer to my second question. |