Ship and Combat balance?

The environment puts strong limitations on the lower bound. The bolt to acceleration relationship puts strong limitations on the upper bound. Ship accelerations must actually be fairly close to one another, or the fast ship will soon be unbeatable. From the example posted, a 100m/ss dodge will never score a hit on a 200m/ss dodge if the bolt speed is 3000m/s. And this is actually my largest complaint about EoC. You start in a tug, that everything seems to hit, and end in a patcom that nothing seems to hit. Better to have them closer, and all combat more challenging and fun.

So it looks like what we end up with is capitol ships with values down around the minimum that still can fly safely. And then the small warships clustered pretty close together somewhere above that. The cluster point is chosen based on the average accel rate that is liked, and then the average bolt speed is picked to match. A speed where the bolt can hit a dodging ship at some selected optimum range.

Problems like this are welcome in engineering because they solve themselves. Out of an infinite set of solutions, there are really only a few that work. And that takes a lot of trouble out of finding them.

The frustration comes from not getting what you want. Like a painter that orders and 8x10 foot canvas and gets an 2x3 foot instead. Months of planning and design get tossed, which is never fun. However, once you give up wishing to paint where there is no canvas, you realize that the size restriction has done nothing to choice of color, composition, etc.

Accel is only one of a dozen of ways in which one ship can differ from another. Rotation, shields, armor, hit points, weapons, fire arcs, heat, power, ammo, loadout, etc.

JT: Forgive me for summarizing you post, but what you want is a player max speed of 1000m/s?

GrandpaTrout, we may want to go with your idea of making missiles targetable, as it could open up an area of combat we could use. Perhaps certain classes of ships shouldn't be able to 'dodge' not unlike naval ships of similar classes. Make combat more about ship to ship missiles. Intercepting threats, rather than dodging them.

By "certain classes" do you mean add abilities to the cap ships to allow them to intercept missiles?

Ah, just realized there is another constraint. AI max speed must be kept lower than the bolt speed or the AI will overrun its own weapon shots. So it will need to be down below 3000 for the current US bolt speeds.

Perhaps that is why PS has higher bolt speeds? To keep the player from out running them? This is building into quite a tangled web.

I'm looking for a player speed that's roughly equivalent to the old Edge of Chaos (1000 for the Tug, 1800 for the Storm Petrel, etc.), since that's what's familiar to me (and probably other players) who don't disengage flight assist automatically. Even in combat I tend to keep flight assist on, since it lets me make smoother maneuvers without being forced to oversteer -- to get closer to the target, I can use my laterals while pointing my main guns on target, instead of having to use my main booster and losing sight of the target for a few seconds.

Based on what I've seen, bolt speeds are Newtonian, so a ship travelling with negative velocity faster than its bolt speed launches bolts with negative velocity compared to an immobile observer. I can say for certain that bolts definitely pick up lateral velocity if fired at an angle off of the platform's vector, at the very least (e.g., if you're travelling north, facing west, and firing, your bolts will be travelling northeast).

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