octaviusviii

Nice work there Static starter on the tec stuff. Though I'm not sure about changing the neck on the LRM ship. Don't forget that silhouettes of a design is important. [quote]Artists are highly paid? When did that happen?[/quote] Either you know nothing about the reality of skilled artists or you are a bitter no talent hack. Try bringing your skill up and getting some business sense and you won't have to be so surprised that skill makes money. lets see...

The Sulaco and Homeworld designs were done by some of the highest paid people in their professions. I don't think a company like Iron Clad or Stardock would even consider hiring such expensive talent. Contrary to what people believe, art is hard work and the best designers are very expensive in this industry. All the best designs you ever salivated over were probably done by someone who is a top tier designer in the industry. There is a reason why smaller companies art assets are never quite as

People should look at the beta and pre-beta screen shots. They redesigned the ships several times at least (thankfully). The early designs were horribly bad. However some designs I still don't think got enough time. Kodiak in particular. The drone ship, while I don't like it's aesthetic (space snail ftw!) was obviously designed that way very intentionally and that a snail or sea critter of some sort was the inspiration. There is no reason that someone couldn't do a redesign of some ship

you can have a realistic galaxy and I do mean galaxy in Maxis's Spore.

Colt556, I don't think people have a problem with the thematic aspects of the designs. They just think some of the particulars of a few designs are poor and should be altered to have better appeal to them. They would still retain their thematic elements though. What your mentioning isn't so much design but thematic concept that you are approving of. I certainly would not want an advent feel to the tec but I also don't want to think space snail and WWII sherman space tank.

I have to agree with the OP. Being an artist and designer myself, if I was the art director on this project I would not have allowed some of the designs they have currently to pass through to final. Some of them are really really bad (but not as bad as the designs from the beta's and alphas). Some of them are really good. The KOL is fantastic for example. It's not easy to come up with good designs that are aesthetically pleasing yet also have identifiable silhouettes in comparison to a

You know I bought FarCry and I must say I was pretty disappointed... It was NOTHING like MOO-2. I mean what were they thinking? Then I got Neverwinter nights 2 and was disappointed as well. You would think they would at least try to implement some similarities with moo-2. Lastly I got the Sims...wtf?! NOT at all like moo-2, I was sooo pissed. I mean all I wanted was something to replace moo-2! Is that soooo much to ask? What is wrong with developers these days? Don't they see we all want to play

If your XP sp2 system is using 500megs of memory before you even start the game then I think you've got other problems to be worrying about! That is not normal. It should be more like 128-200 megs. My system for example is usually about 132 megs and I suppose I could tweak it to bring it down further..but there's not really a need to. Try disabling some of your background programs and unnecessary stuff that gets loaded at startup. Your performance should improve overall. Also

It's a sad day when people don't know what HAL references anymore. Kids need to read more and watch more classics.

It goes to 11...

Voidster, piracy will always exists and there are things that will make it worse, but I don't think there is anyway you can actually rationalize piracy. Sure you can argue it's not really hurting someone if you pirate then go out and get the item, but the thing is most people don't. Also you are partaking of the intellectual creation, the 1000's of hours of work that people have done without offering compensation simply because you don't think they deserve it. It's a principle thing. But princip

Lol, Subsidized entertainment industry. Just what the world needs. "we don't feel we are getting our due...so we have enacted a new law that will automatically remove money from your pocket and put it into ours." Yes I can see it now. "Mommy when I grow up I want to be an entertainment content provider that way I can get a free check in the mail paid for by our tax payers". Hey I'm an artist so I guess I wouldn't mind getting some free money. Sucks to be everyone else though hah ha.<br/

Ah, I'm glad I wasn't talking crazy before about how shield mitigation doesn't really work as intended by the dev's. It's nice to be validated. So the conclusion I think we can all see now is that the mitigation formula needs to be reworked in order to encapsulate IronClads original vision of less focus firing. As it stands now mitigation could be replaced by recalculating hit-points, shield-points, hull regen, shield regen, and weapons damage and rate of fire. This make mitiga

"mitigation is defined in the player file. shieldData shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage 0.001 shieldAbsorbDecayRate 0.0125 shieldAbsorbBaseMin 0.15 shieldColor ff8FD81D in other words 10 damage causes mitigation to go up 1%." quoted from: DeadlyShoe

actually it goes up 1% every 10 points of damage. The info is in the game files. Taltamir thats a good explanation. Thanks for the info.

"mitigation is defined in the player file. shieldData shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage 0.001 shieldAbsorbDecayRate 0.0125 shieldAbsorbBaseMin 0.15 shieldColor ff8FD81D in other words 10 damage causes mitigation to go up 1%." quoted from: DeadlyShoe

Join the contest :)

Nice compositional work. Overall quite nice. It's a shame your system was unable to handle a higher frame rate as it would of really made this piece shine. Perhaps try doing another one on a friends computer with more horsepower behind it?

Thanks for the information Deadly Shoe. That helps. It still underlines the issue though that shield mitigation could use some adjusting. I'm just not sure about the linear "shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage 0.001" being the best way to implement the idea. It still may work better if its non-linear and/or was definitely more than 10 damage = 1% growth of shield mitigation. A higher damage amount per percent and/or non-linear progression would seem to encourage alternating targets more or spre

Thanks Yarlen.

If that is true then it seems as though the purpose of mitigation is not working the way the dev's envisioned it. As I believe they wanted to reduce the amount of focus firing going on. For mitigation to make more of an impact it needs to go up with the more ships or DPS hiting the target in a non-linear fashion. That way there would be a sweet spot or optimal firing solution. You don't want people thinking "oh well, those two light cruisers caused the shield mitigation to go up to 65

So how does shield mitigation go up? Is it the number of ships firing on the target or is it the damage per second the target is receiving? If maximum mitigation value is reached to soon/easily it kind of defeats the purpose of spreading your targets out.

Wow, that was impressive. Surprisingly good. If only all AAR's could be like that. You should do another one. Perhaps making it like a History channel special this time :) Hopefully Stardock/Ironclad see this. What a cool way to promote the game.

Man I love this game. There is so much more to it than you realize at first. Thanks for the info BigBadB. I really wish Iron Clad had explained armor and mitigation properly to people. I don't think most people understand it.

So how much does mitigation increase per ship firing on one target? There has to be a sweet spot for optimal take-down power.