Hi guys,
A question that's been asked a bit by a few peoples I know is "how did you calculate the 'strength' ratings for the ships in Nova"?
It's actually pretty straightforward; here's how we did it.
(-) We started with an idea of how we wanted the ships to face off versus each other
(-) We then put the ship resources togther, and allocated them weapons, shields, etc.
(-) Once that was done, we began testing the ships versus each other (this was back in the "combat_beta" days).
(-) With the advent of new engine technologies from Matt Burch, Jason went through and worked up a set of numbers based on the ability of the ship to fight; weapons, shields, turn rates, etc.
(-) Once he'd put these numbers into play, we tested the ships versus each other, and got feedback from testers. That's the most important bit: testing!
For an upcoming update, I had a bash at codifying the ship strength ratings into a formula, to see how closely I could match Jason's end figures. It turns out that this little algorithm will get you fairly close, in a mathematical fashion:
(total amount of damage ship can deal out in one second) * (total shields and armour)
Since the shield refresh rates in Nova aren't large enough to affect this algorithm, it works quite well. To work out how much damage the ship can put out (potentially), all you need do is work out how much damage each weapon type can do per second, then go from there (remember to factor in how many of each type of weapon there is). This doesn't allow for 'optional' weapons which can only fire one at a time, but since it makes this mistake for all the ships it seems to work out okay. 
This little formula doesn't cover turnrates, but by and large Nova ships hit what they aim at, so it works out okay. Some manual tweaking may be required. 
all the best,
Dave @ ATMOS
ps. While doing this, I found a little something of interest; an IR missile does half the damage of a Radar missile... but fires exactly twice as fast, so it's capable of putting out the same amount of damage over time as a Radar missile but at far less tonnage and far less cost! Get multiple IR launchers and go nuts!
pps. The Radar missile is harder to jam, of course, which is nice.
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(This message has been edited by pipeline (edited 08-13-2002).)