Ship Experience
Adam Zakreski
about ships gaining experience under various conditions. I couldn't find
any other references to ship experience on his site. Does anyone have any
info on this?
Adam
Matthias Gietl
news:%Sm68.38838$M3.57...@news1.telusplanet.net:
stefan reuther extracted infos about ion storm behavior out of host.exe.
http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/~sr21/ion.html
there you will find a formula. it is used to compute if your ship gets
damaged by an ion storm. one of the parameters in this formula is the
experience.
matthias
Akseli Mäki
There's some more stuff under the details page.
Mark Beilke
I have always wondered if this really works in the way that the program
implies. It is one thing for a program to compute experience each turn and
compute damage based on that experience, but it is a different thing to
actually accumulate and use that data in later turns.
There are other areas of the host program that are from old coding that no
longer applies. For example, if you tax lizards at 75% or more, you get one
of a variety of messages saying they are running for the hills and are dying
at a very high percentage. However, that hasn't been true since about
2.something and no one dies. There are many other examples like this.
Even though the program has formulas in it, one needs to weigh that against
the data available. Many people that have been programming add-ons,
simulators, etc., have decoded the file structures of both the host and
client side information, so why hasn't the "experience" ever surfaced as
something that could be reported while it is accumulating? (Maybe I am
wrong and no one has thought to look for it, but I doubt that.)
I am presuming that the experience is calculated in a turn and the damage
from an ion storm is calculated according to that experience. However, I am
skeptical about the information on experience actually being accumulated
from turn to turn. If the information isn't accumulated, it would only be
the motions that give you experience in the current turn that helps you in
the damage calculation.
Beerbelly
"Matthias Gietl" <grim-...@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:Xns91A8B548FC8E6ma...@62.153.159.134...
Peter Ratschitzky
Mark Beilke wrote:
> I am presuming that the experience is calculated in a turn and the damage
> from an ion storm is calculated according to that experience. However, I am
> skeptical about the information on experience actually being accumulated
> from turn to turn. If the information isn't accumulated, it would only be
> the motions that give you experience in the current turn that helps you in
> the damage calculation.
The points are accumulated. UFO4VPA remembers the points and uses that
information when a ship is threatened by an ion storm. It then tries to
calculate the expected damage (if any). The results are far from
perfection but it works more or less.
To give you an example, even a small terraformer can survive an ion
storm if it has rank 9 drives, full cargo and fuel and has moved around
for 50+ turns (= 50 exp. points). The problem is that normally these
ships have low tech drives and are mostly sitting around at the same
place which means that they have no chance to survive.
Gaining experience points by surviving ion storms is not so important
because ships either survive the storm because they are heavy enough or
they are dust. The really important part for the small ships is gaining
points by moving around _before_ an ion storm arrives.
Regards,
--
Peter Ratschitzky, Munich (Germany)
The author of UFO4VPA. Download at http://www.chiasma.de/vgap/ufo4vpa/
Akseli Mäki
>I have always wondered if this really works in the way that the program
>implies. It is one thing for a program to compute experience each turn and
>compute damage based on that experience, but it is a different thing to
>actually accumulate and use that data in later turns.
The experience is calculated and is *very* cumulative. But the reason
why it doesn't really "pop up" anywhere is the experience is pretty
useless. Ships get 1 point of experience per every turn they have
travelled with warp 6 or higher. Gravitonic ships need warp 4 or
higher. Towing or intercepting is ok. Capturing a ship in combat gives
40 points, killing one gives 20. A ship doing alchemy will get
round(supplies used/100) points. When ship is inside a storm, it will
get trunc((storm voltage-140)/20) experience. The ship doesn't need to
survive the storm, it will still get the experience and the next ship
with the same ID will inherit the experience points of the ship which
previously had the same ID.
Ships only use the experience when they try to survive in a ionstorm.
But, that is not really important because ships which got nice
experience are typically strong enough to survive a storm without the
experience, and ships which would need the experience to survive in a
ionstorm don't tend to have much of experience.
Most important thing in keeping your ships alive in a ionstorm is to
load them heavy before they enter the storm. That is because the ship
mass used by the damage formula is not really calculated separately,
it's just taken from shipxy.hst file, which is not updated by actions
in TRN before ionstorms work their magic. Meaning whatever mass the
ship had in the RST, is the mass it will use to block the damage. I
lost a bunch of Meteors when I towed my Rushs with them into enemy
terratory which was inside a nasty ionstorm. As the enemy had glory
devices, I gave the Meteors no extra fuel, just as much as they needed
to move and at the start of every turn I gave them more fuel. But when
they started to gain damage I loaded them full of fuel&cargo and lost
them anyway, even thought they were pretty heavy mass.