vEoCUtilities and Enhancements to “Unleashed Mod”

Hello All,

The original impetus to what has become a prospective “code mod for EoC modders (if there remain any)” was my enjoyment of Bineshi’s excellent “Unleashed” mod and my desire to add some playability features that would complement my play style (which involved an extensive Act 0 anti-Maas campaign using the Pinguin Armed Merchant Cruiser and a hunting style in Act 1 of lurking near remote L-points waiting for hostiles to show up).

I’m at a place in vEoCUtilities where I have some tools that are almost working right regarding .ini file defined arbitrary turret-ship configurations and I have begun to fiddle with Unleashed Mod’s turret-ship combat management code to test new turreted-ship configurations. This is leading me toward the need for some additional .pog packages with threat assessment and target assignment functions which should be useful not only for turret control but more generally for wing-men and potentially for fleet management (conceiving of a fleet as a set of squadrons assigned various tasks analogously to the way that, in Unstable Space, the player can create multiple wings with complex compositions and diverse assignments).

At the moment, I’m working on two simple turret test-beds, the Pinguin armed cruiser, which has two point defense turrets, and a modified old-style gunstar equipped with 4 Unleashed-style twin light assault cannon turrets (identical to the two anti-ship turrets on the Pinguin) and two Unleashed-style point defense turrets. I’m working on the targeting code for the point defense turrets first as that is simpler than targeting spacecraft that can maneuver and flee if badly damaged.

The original Unleashed missile targeting code was very “quick and dirty”, but effective. It also, at times, would shoot friendly missiles, as in the Act 0 Scene 2 episode when some Carva Cartel ships intervene to defend Cal from an onslaught of hostile Independent tugs.

In its present revised but still incomplete state, the missile targeting code accumulates the factions of all ships that have become hostile during the current flight session and selects only missiles whose faction is in the set of hostile factions. These are then sorted by range. It would be straightforward to further filter only hostile faction missiles which are approaching the turret, or the turret parent (or another sim, such as a station, that the turret is assigned to protect). I will probably need to implement this additional filter soon. In a dense fight, there may be many missiles fired by a hostile faction that are in range but not approaching the sim protected by a point defense turret, and it would be helpful to filter these out to make the defense algorithm more effective.

The less complex current procedure works really well for the Pinguin when individual missiles come within range of the pd turrets. But the revised code is still very quick and dirty and I am confident that it will perform poorly in situations in which multiple missiles come within range within a time period short compared to the schedule on which the turret targeting is updated.

What is needed is a set of independent schedules that simultaneously perform the following:

1) periodically examine the missile threat environment and construct lists of missile threats to each friendly sim, ranked by the severity of the threat

2) update the assigned target lists (lists of missiles to be targetted) for each point-defense turret. Pd turrets can be
assigned the defense of their parent sim or the defense of a nearby
sim (for example gunstar pd turrets could be assigned to protect a nearby station if the gunstar itself is not under attack).

3) control the firing of the point defense turrets on their respective current targets

4) for each pd turret, “damage assessment” of fired-on missile threats, removal of destroyed missiles from the assigned target lists and assignment of the next missile target in the list.

I’ll try to build these concepts into the MonitorShips main ship control loop of Unleashed mod, and then when they are working split them off into separate package functions.

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If this could be got working, ships equipped with point defenses would become much harder to damage with missiles. This seems reasonable to me. The Seeker missile does about 20% damage to a Devastator Corvette hull, and it is quite easy for the Pinguin (which has 4 launcher mountpoints) to overwhelm a powerful ship with a barrage of missiles fired in rapid succession. One could make the missile warheads less destructive as a way of balancing this, but it is plausible that a heavy weapon detonated in contact with the ship hull would do grievous damage (as a contemporary analogy, recall that a single Exocet missile sank the UK Destroyer HMS Sheffield in the ’80s Falklands Crisis).

A highly effective pd algorithm coupled with preserving the powerful efficacy of Seeker and better missiles would strongly incentivize the mounting of point defenses on all valuable ships. Such ships could still be destroyed with mass missile strikes, but these would be much more costly to the attacker in terms of the damage done per missile fired, since few missiles would typically get through a good point defense.

When this is working well for the player ship Pinguin, I’ll generalize it to track and counter missile threats to non-player faction ships, starting with the above-mentioned gunstar. Gunstars are way too fragile at present in Unleashed Mod. For example, the Mod assigns a pair of old-style gunstars to the Junkyard station, but these are routinely wiped out by 3-4 ship patrols of interceptors and corvettes. IIRC, in the old IWar-1, gunstars were designed to be able to withstand small Indie fleets. They presumably would have kept pace with ship developments into the EoC era. If they are given good AI-pilot-controlled turrets and smart target priority code to maximize the effectiveness of the turrets, they would become very tough again and would be a stronger deterrent to Marauder attacks, which is one of their purposes.

Better anti-ship turret (including independent targetting of different turrets on multi-turret ships) and pd function on Destroyers and Cruisers would also make these powerful ships even more powerful, as befits their function as the cores of combat fleets.

I’ll try, within a few weeks, to put up some videos of the Pinguin fending off a missile barrage and a gunstar defending itself from a squadron of strafing fighters.