Thanks for the feedback so far, guys.

The things most unique about torpedo's right now are:
1) They have arming time, and are not very useful at close range
2) Once they start moving, they constantly accelerate, giving them the ability to be the fastest moving projectiles in the game. Unless given insane tracking, this makes them generally bad at hitting quick moving targets, but great at hitting large and slow targets.

For this reason, I'm thinking of making them more geared towards long range, low tracking, but high damage. I think the suggestion where their damage changes over time is a pretty decent one, and actually quite doable, but maybe we make the damage increase over the range of the torpedo, making them the weapon of choice for long ranges, provided you can actually hit. Mag cannons would then be more the weapon of choice for long rang against faster/smaller targets, and lasers would be the primary weapon for close/fast targets.

Jeff, your change to torpedo code last fall made them actually quite bad at hitting long range targets, even ones that move rather slowly. They're still not great at point-blank range, but do rather well between 300 and 600 range or so because of pretty great tracking and lower speed. I still feel that that change deserved further review because of this.

Long range and low tracking is a very poor combination, especially if you throw in the historically low DPE. You just aren't going to be hitting with these against any of the usual targets.

I've always thought of the energy based ones to be more akin to Romulan Plasma Torps. And Gunner missiles akin to Federation photon torps.

What about a power fall off like what a happens to Romulan Plasma Torps once they exceed optimal range, but can still go past that with less damage output, as they burn the warhead as the fule source.

Torpedo's have 3 stages in their life:
1) Arming phase
2) Acceleration where they accelerate and steer towards their target
3) Coasting, where they go in a straight line at their current speed

A lot can be changed by tweaking how long the acceleration phase lasts relative to the coasting phase. The longer we allow the acceleration phase, the worse the homing will be because the torpedo will be going faster. Also, the worse the sync will be between client and server, because accelerations are basically impossible to sync up correctly.

The trouble with this is they become very similar to Blackhole Generators. Longer range=more damage is the hallmark of that type of weapon, and I dont think that that throne should be violated, even if they do currently kinda suck.

I don't understand: how can the homing be better if its tracking cuts off earlier? Once the homing phase is done the torpedo has very little chance of hitting a target that's moving even a little bit.

When you originally made the change to torps, the impression I got was that you'd be looking for feedback on specific weapons so that this extra parameter could be tuned properly. In practice, none of the feedback I gave seems to have made it through.

I think that a weapon with no end-phase tracking that's meant for long range hits is a fundamentally flawed design. The only thing it's good for is stationary targets that you can't afford to get close to and use a better weapon, and there aren't too many of those in game.

Just saying that the longer it accelerates in terms of absolute amount of time, the less effective the tracking becomes during that phase, since the max speed keeps increasing. The other side of that, though, is if there is enough tracking on the torpedo to get headed in the right direction given the max speed, then the faster it's going, the more chance it has of hitting its target.

I don't think we should put torpedo's back to their previously technically broken state, where they would accelerate without turning, then turn without accelerating, as that makes them super-good at hitting small, fast moving targets, and I feel like that niche is better served with lasers and mags. Maybe we should look at increasing the max speed, increasing the acceleration time, and then doing something like giving 1/4 or 1/2 tracking during the final phase? That will let them make small adjustments in the end part, but still make them immanently dodge-able by the smaller ships. (Dodging *should* be a fun and important part of the game.)

I agree that the old system had to go. The measures you suggest would definitely help make this weapon type viable! Look forward to testing.

Hit small fast moving ships with mags? Mags are some of the easiest projectiles to outrun and dodge. The ones that do go fast enough to catch a fast moving ship usually have almost no DPS whatsoever.

Let torpedoes choose their target themselves if original target was destroyed or nothing was targetted at all.

This is purely a "feel" suggestion and not taking into account the game balance; from other games and from movies I always did expect torpedoes to be like:

- very low rate of fire
- very high payload (aka damge) per shot
- low speed
- very long range
- very good tracking on most of its life-time
- able to be scammed with counter-measures
- low energy usage but needs material to be used (e.g. ammo)

I'm aware that this basically would break the game balance once more.

What could be saved and would make it an interesting but not mainstream weapon to be used would be:

very low RoF & high dph & high dpe & good dps

These would make them a fun "to play around" weapon for stealthy or very fast gameplay;
Players could design high dph and high dps setups.
This would be balanced through the hard to hit factor.
Also being able to use efficiently such a hard to use weapon (and to boast with that ability) keeps players motivated.
They would not replace the current mainstream weapons as those have superior dps.

@up:
I on the other hand rather see torpedoes as weapons with high rof and high elec usage so they are fired in 'volies'. Something like how zebra torpedoes look like now, u fire volie of them and need to regenerate for another volie.

Jeff if you want a great background on space warfare including torpedoes I suggest reading David Weber's Honor Harrington series of books.

David goes into detail describing the various weapon systems and their uses. There are tons of space battles and the various weapons used in them.

Start with On Basilisk Station.