I’ve been curious why boosting provides a flat bonus in an area (this is new boosts, not off grid) no matter how many ships are receiving said boosts. Boosts are quite high percentages that apply across an entire fleet, and it irks me that a command destroyer can boost 250 ships.
Having a boosting ship’s boosting effectiveness be determined on how many ships it boosts would require larger fleets to have additional boosters to achieve the same effect a smaller fleet would have from just one.
Hull class could generate a base # of ships they can boost to 100%
Command Destroyer - 15
T3C - 20
Battlecruiser - 20
Command Ship - 25
(yes, I understand boost strength already is affected by hull size)
Wing Command, and Fleet Command could marginally increase the base number of ships boosted to 100% (capped to +100% of normal between the two)
5% increase per wing command
15% increase per fleet command
Here’s a rough formula concept and what it results in
MIN(1, SQRT(25 * Booster # / Fleet Size)) * Max Current Boost
(in the example below it is “simulating” a Damnation without wing/fleet command)
Honestly there are a lot of implications to this I haven’t thought about & the number values for hull-boost count are probably not well thought out.
The shower was only 10 minutes.
In theory I find your idea fascinating that there be limitations on boosts along the lines that you are describing. I could think of even more ways in which there could be restrictions along the same line of thought. In practice, however, it is impractical and there is no benefit to such a feature. It does not solve a problem, it does not enhance gameplay or make it more interesting (the idea is interesting but not the gameplay itself), and would introduce issues such as “who gets the boost?” among others.
Ah, yes. Let’s add in another set of calculations which result in a floating point modifier applied to a modifier applied to a modifier. Crunching this in the middle of a large fight will absolutely not lead to more performance issues on the boost ticks.
Even with the sarcastic reasoning I am deadset against this (4 nested operations to find final effects per boost is a good wallop to the non-existant stack) aside, these numbers do not scale up enough with additional focus on command links and skill investment. 20 for command destroyers and battlecruisers, 25-30 for t3s, and 40-50 for command ships would still cause some of your stated intent without nearly the same level of issues.
Yeah, TBH I don’t like the current AOE boosts but they do make sense for gameplay requiring fleet cohesion.
With the grid expansion update, it kinda seems weird you can’t boost an allied ship on grid with you when the signal propagation time would be tiny. ( I see command ships as super computers that are optimizing subroutines on other ships ) Something like this would require: “If you’re on the same grid, in fleet, you get boosts”
I don’t know how boosts are coded, I assumed it would be: Apply x% boost to ships within x km in the postgis quad tree (Maybe 8-way tree because 3D space). If higher % replace.
This would just be additive % until max %. You already have to have a count of the number of ships you’re boosting because you’re going to iterate some kind of list / data structure.
So, as it is
1: Check module’s activation range.
2: Check position of boosting ship.
3: check distance to members of fleet on grid, apply already calculated value to them.
4: calculate all of the new values for the ships getting boosts.
Frequently 2-3s lag on boosts applying with only 40-50 in fleet and ~40 on grid
As it ends up with your suggestion:
1: Check module activation range
2: Check position of boosting ship
3: Check distance to fleet members
4: Check total # of ships boosted.
5: Apply formula to boost strength, with 1-5 lookups for this formula depending on how many variables, calculate final boost strength
6: apply boosts as calculated
7: calculate all values with applied boosts.
3 extra steps in the chain, which require lookups deeper into the sequence, and more FLOPs for every module.
