Shield Regeneration Questions

Okay, I'm making the formulas and data for my EVO ship design contest, and I have a few questions about shield regeneration, which is what I've found to be the most difficult part of the ship resource to figure out.

1. I've tinkered with a bit of simple math and figured, according to the EV/O Bibles, that the formula for calculating the number of shield points regenerated per second is equal to 0.3Shield/ShieldRe. It matches most of the numbers in the EVO Ship Guide, so it's probably right. Right? And does it have a separate value (armor regeneration) when ships are down to armor (in which case it would be 0.3Armor/ShieldRe)?

2. When you add a shield regenerator (or whatever outfit that boosts your shield regeneration), according to the EV/O Bibles, it says that your shields are improved by a third of a shield point per second. Does that mean a third of a shield point or a third of a percentage point of shield? And again, does this apply the same way to armor? I was confused because the EVO Outfit Guide states that bigger ships get a smaller improvement in shield regeneration levels than small ships when getting this outfit, though I can't see how that works.

Help will be appreciated.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

Ooh... Man, that's a technical question. I believe that a shield point rather than a percent is indicated, but the rest is way beyond me... and even what meager advice I can give should be taken with a grain of salt. Sorry I don't know more, and good luck getting some answers.

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If at first you don't succeed, use more duct tape.

shieldre is in frames per shield percent regenerated (except in evn, but we won't go there for now). thus shield percent regenerated per second is 30/shieldre. shield points are shield/10 unless shield is negative, in which case it's abs(shield)/2. so if shield is positive, then they regenerate at 3shield/shieldre points per second, and if shield is negative they regenerate at -15shield/shieldre points per second. i don't think armor is divided by anything, and if that assumption's correct then armor regenerates at .3armor/shieldre points per second. i'm pretty sure shield regenerators are simply added to shieldre (so if your ship has shielre 18 and you get a regenerator for -15, you'll be regenerating six times as fast, but you'll only get a 10% increase adding the same regenerator to a ship with shieldre 150). this is why regenerators, in general, benefit small ships more than big ships (you'll note that most small ships have lower shieldre numbers than big ships have)

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if you find yourself in bed with a raving lunatic, don't worry: looks can be deceiving, it's probably not me

Okay, great, thanks nighthawk. The interesting thing about this formula was that I discovered that the Voinians have tremendously better regeneration rates, even though they used armor (7.5 armor points/sec vs. less than 1.5 shield points/sec for all UE ships). Yet for some reason the UE Destroyer still mauls the Frigate...

One thing about the benefit of shield generators though -- isn't the statement that it benefits small ships more referring to a relative benefit? Since it raises the number of shield points per second, ships get the same gain in regen rate always. It's just that relative to a large ship's total shields, it doesn't help as much in reducing the amount of time it takes to regenerate all the way.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

Actually, I find that armor regenerates points (not percent) at the same rate that shields do. When regenerating armor, it just takes how fast the shields regenerate points and regenerates the armor at the same speed, I think. So Voinians have really sucky recharge. 😄

The benefit to small ships isn't really that relative. In terms of the shieldre number, it's a relative benefit, but the relative benefit there makes a concrete benefit in the game.

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I'm always assumed that armor recharges at a slow standard rate and all the Crescent ships had high shield recharge rates. If that's true, that's probably why I can kill a few Voinian Cruisers with only a Crescent Warship.

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"Veni, Vidi, Vici"
"I came, I saw, I conqeured."
Julius Caeser

I thought that the armor recharge was that same no matter what the shiel rechange was. For some reason, I also feel that I am right (Yet I may not be).

Isn't the shield regen. just how many frames it takes to recover one shield?

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Originally posted by NNNormal:
I thought that the armor recharge was that same no matter what the shiel rechange was.

No, armour recharge is the same as shield recharge in Escape Velocity and EV Override as far as I know.

Here's the EVO Bible segment on shield recharge:

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From the Override Bible:
Shield recharge speed, in number of frames per shield percentage point regenerated; bigger numbers here make for slower recharging. 30 ? 1% per second.

So, it works based on percent, not actual points, and it's in terms of frames.

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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://members.aol.com/darthur1/talon-ev/")Talon Plugin for the original Escape Velocity(/url)

(This message has been edited by David Arthur (edited 10-20-2001).)

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Originally posted by David Arthur:
No, armour rechare is the same as shield recharge in Escape Velocity and EV Override.

You're usually right about these things, but are you sure? When I was working with Skyhawk on Xenocide, he was of the opinion that the armor recharge rate was fixed, and fairly slow at that. I tend to respect his judgement about the engine, as he spent almost as much time making it his bitch as Martin Turner, and wrote down about everything he ever figured out to boot.

Someone should test this out. I'd volunteer, but I'm lazy and hate stopwatches.

-reg

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"Oh crap. I'm going to hell - I put the Bible next to Mein Kampf again."
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In that case, for the time being, I'll just remove the armor regeneration information from my contest form.

Speaking of the contest, I need someone who has a form mailing script that I can legitimately use (my webspace provider provides CGI but no sendmail program for scripts).

As for testing armor regeneration, I might try it, but with my already unbelievably busy schedule...

It'd be of great help if someone else did do that great service to the EV/O community. If no one else does, I might get around to it eventually... (scratches head and tries to to define "eventually")

(of course, if Matt came out and told us, it'd be nice, but I'm sure we'd all rather see him slaving away at EVN :D)

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

(This message has been edited by Firebird (edited 10-18-2001).)

as was stated, shieldre is frames per percent. i'm not sure if it translates that to points per frame (which i would doubt. if it did that, it'd be pointless to have us make the conversion to a less intuitive format just so it can convert it to an intuitive one and use the converted value in the calculations), but i know armor regeneration is affected by shieldre. a good test would be to time the regeneration to shields from 50% armor and then time the regeneration from there to 50% shields. if the two numbers are equal, then each regenerates at 1% per shieldre frames (i suspect this is the case); if not, one can use that to figure out the relationship between the two. also, as to the regenerator outfit thing, the reason the benefit is higher for small ships is like this:
small ship: shield=100 shieldre=15 (i.e. 10 points, at 2%/second=.2 points/sec)
large ship: shield=1000 shieldre=60 (i.e. 100 points, at .5%/second=.5 points/sec)
regenerator: value=-10
small ship (modified): shieldre=5 (6%/second=.6points/sec: 200% increase, .4 absolute)
large ship (modified): shieldre=50 (.6%/second=.6ponts/sec: 25% increase, .1 absolute)
thus the small ship gets 4 times the absolute increase and 8 times the % increase in shield regeneration, better in both cases

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if you find yourself in bed with a raving lunatic, don't worry: looks can be deceiving, it's probably not me

From what I've seen, in EV....armor regen is constant.
In EVO, armor regen seems to be same as shield regen.
(Evidenced by putting dospect armor on an azdara- it regens
armor fast enough that one can park infront of an angry
Igazra and blow it away.)

Wow..my fingers don't appear to be in a spelling mood...
Curse those strand ships!

(This message has been edited by Starfish (edited 10-19-2001).)

Only problem, nighthawk, is that the shield regenerator outfit modifies shield points per second (I think it's an improvement of a third of a shield point per second), according to the EVO bible.

But, I do have reason to believe your test, but since I already created a plug-in for combat simulations (for the contest), I should be able to test it myself to double-check.

By the way, is there anywhere where I can get a program that will process my HTML forms? I have a CGI script, but that's useless unless I have a program (usually sendmail) that will physically send that e-mail. I need this so that all I have to do to begin my contest would be to write out some more information, deal with this armor regeneration issue, and release it. The only reason I want to deal w/the regen issue is because it'll help people assess the power of their ship if it relies chiefly on armor (i.e. a Voinian ship) for protection.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

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Originally posted by Firebird:
**Only problem, nighthawk, is that the shield regenerator outfit modifies shield points per second (I think it's an improvement of a third of a shield point per second), according to the EVO bible.
**

Ok...question. I know it's off the subject, but here it is anyway. Has anyone noticed if the EVN bible says anything about giving ships standard-non weapons? Like giving them a Missile Jammer, for instance? I was dreaming up a sensor ship, and I thought it would be cool if I could put on Color Coders (I donno the real name!).

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Visit my (url="http://"http://www.madman80513.vze.com")My Website(/url)

You can give them physical outfits but not clean legal records, maps or the like.

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"Veni, Vidi, Vici"
"I came, I saw, I conqeured."
Julius Caeser

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Originally posted by Firebird:
By the way, is there anywhere where I can get a program that will process my HTML forms? I have a CGI script, but that's useless unless I have a program (usually sendmail) that will physically send that e-mail. I need this so that all I have to do to begin my contest would be to write out some more information, deal with this armor regeneration issue, and release it. The only reason I want to deal w/the regen issue is because it'll help people assess the power of their ship if it relies chiefly on armor (i.e. a Voinian ship) for protection.

Most decent ISPs will provide a Mail-form CGI.

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