Telepath species

[Daybreak]

When piloting ships telepathic pilots have the ability to affect enemy ships piloted by organic species, by making them miss 20% of the time when battling.

Only affects the ship piloted by telepathic pilot which now has a 20% chance of taking less fire (From organic species only).

This is part of the idea of having more species with ability to affect ships in battle, helping to mitigate the advanatges of having +1 to +3 piloting skills.

[Ophiuchus]

Just talking about the technical part here. This suggestion does not fit the combat system too well. The only place to add such a probability is in the targeting condition.

Only sparing the telepathic enemy leaves two principal possibilities. A chance to miss completely or make it less likely that the telepathic species gets hit.

Making such a chance exactly 20% is mostly impossible because of dependent probabilities.

I also cant think of a good-enough implementation using the available .
One probably would have to duplicate or split conditions for all weapon parts into two cases.
One could e.g. randomly pick only 80% of the telepathic targets.
Something along

Code: Select all

Or [
  And [ [[TARGETS]] Not [[TELEPATHIC_TARGETS]] ]
  NumberOf number = [[TELEPATHIC_TARGETS]] * 0.8 condition = [[TELEPATHIC_TARGETS]]
]

We could also probably introduce a object based variant of Random (i think Random just roles once); like EachRandom (which roles dice once per candidate). Could also be a RussionRoulette condition (this would be similar to the NumberOf effect). The EachRandom effect could take a valueref as probability in order to check if the LocalCandidate is organic or not.

[Daybreak]

I am not a coder, so leave that up to others if this is implemented.

I definitely dont know how the combat system works, or how specific it is, and had assumed that damage would just be 20% less if hit by a ship containing an organic pilot.

I realise that is not in the spirit of how it would work, but thought it would be a good compromise.

of course if the combat system is not "this ship hits that ship" then the above is irrelevant, and may be too hard to implement.

[Oberlus]

had assumed that damage would just be 20% less if hit by a ship containing an organic pilot.

of course if the combat system is not "this ship hits that ship" then the above is irrelevant, and may be too hard to implement.

Combat system picks a valid target for each weapon, then applies damage of all weapons to each target and culls the dead for next combat bout
There is code for direct-damage weapons subtracting target's shield from total damage.
The extra tactical variety from the suggested change comes in with a lot of extra complexity needed to consider species traits of targets and attackers. I don't think it's worth it.
Against Experimentors, that can mind-control organic-pilot ships, one just doesn't use organic pilots. If I had to fight a telepathic species I'd try to do the same ASAP, switching to a non-organic species for my warships.
It will have more uses a species trait for armor regardless of species metabolism.

[Daybreak]

Against Experimentors, that can mind-control organic-pilot ships, one just doesn't use organic pilots.

Thats true, but thats because you lose the whole ship.

If I had to fight a telepathic species I'd try to do the same ASAP, switching to a non-organic species for my warships.

Agree if the organic pilot did not have +1 to +3 piloting skill, but if they did, nobody would swap them out for non organic.

Anyway it sounds like to hard to implement.

It will have more uses a species trait for armor regardless of species metabolism.

True, however these suggestions are more about diversity and about what you have access to around you.