In a recent post ('Tweaking hidden ship stats, values & attributes' 101) I began seeking a little bit of help and advice on the statistics vessels have in BotF that come into play during combat as I'd decided to 'tweak' some of them to make battles seem more 'realistic' (yeah, I know...
) as some of the various classes seemed either more powerful or weaker than I felt they should be.Anyway, at one point in that post I mentioned Defense and Agility and said "their titles speak fairly adequately of their function". At the time (not having thus far thought overmuch on the subject) that seemed true.
Last night, however, after browsing through a number of threads in the Modding forum, I happened across part of a post from someone (I forget exactly who
) which said that "the Defense value is a modifier that decreases the chance of being hit by enemy weapons during combat". Okay, I hear you say, fairly obvious. Then it occurred to me that Agility is also a modifier that decreases the chance of being hit by enemy weapons during combat...This started me wondering how Defense and Agility interact in the game when the program resolves tactical combat and it wasn't long before I realised that both values are quite a bit more complex than I'd previously realised...
Take 'defense' for instance. It represents a ship's defensive capabilities with regard to a hostile's likelihood of scoring a hit in an engagement and has nothing to do with how tough it is (in terms of shields and hull strength) or how well armed it is weapons-wise. (If, instead of a
starship, we were talking about a modern fighter-jet or submarine it would
cover such things as ECM (electronic counter-measures) or design elements that contribute to the craft being that much more difficult to target successfully.) In the Star Trek universe, we almost always hear at least once in any battle of any significant length talk of 'acquiring (or
losing) a weapons-lock', and even once such a lock is established both torpedoes and directed energy weapons can still miss. I've never come across any references in either TV, film or novels to what we could call 'space ECM' so that may or may not be involved, but that still leaves the design of the ship which could contribute to it's Defense value. Things such as size, configuration, hull composition, shield harmonics, etc, etc would affect it either positively or negatively. Also special features such as 'stealth technology' would add to what could be called 'passive ECM', after all if it's harder to detect, it's more difficult to shoot at!
On to 'agility', which when you think about it, is even more complicated than I'd first assumed. It would perhaps be better called 'combat manoeuvrability' as that's what it really is. It presumably gives both a defensive bonus (the whole 'moving target' thing) and an offensive one (modifying the various weapons values) as a more agile combatant can both more easily evade incoming fire and manage to achieve a far more favourable attack position.
I'm curious to know if anyone has played around with Defense and Agility, and what they found out when they did. Do the two values interact when combat is being resolved? Has anyone figured out how they operate? How does the game process them, are they applied directly, as it were, or (like crew experience and damage control) are either of them used in conjunction with another value, perhaps one stored in trek.exe or one of the files in stbof.res that relates to another aspect of the particular ship type such as 'Ship Function' for instance (ie Destroyer, Strike Cruiser, Command Ship, etc) ???
