Introducing Repair Ships to POBs

[Its Raisu]

So... I got curious about whether i could make the Repair Ship something that was usable for POB construction.

And here's the result.

In the video, due to my offline test server's repair_per_repair_cycle being 60,000. With the other settings being used, this comes out to 1500 healed per shot, which is 30k healed after 20 shots.

Why?
Because, currently, it takes quite some time to get a new POB established. You're entirely at the mercy of the repair tick timer and whether the base is found by those who would siege it. This allows POB builders to invest into actively constructing the POB by using repair ships after it has been deployed.

In addition, currently, when there is a siege against a POB, attackers can attack a base at any time of the day and it's only a matter of whether defenders are available and capable of clearing them out. With the threat of POBs being able to be repaired by repair ships at any time of the day, attackers will also need to be vigilant rather than waiting for player counts to drop before attacking.

At the moment, this doesn't check whether the POB's shields are up and I sort of like that it can work even when its shields are active. However I could see changing that to where the repair rate is reduced to 1/2 or 1/4 when defense shields are active.

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Development process stuff...

Initially, I was just getting the repairgun code to work on POBs in general because I was having trouble getting hits to register on POBs when the Nanotool Gun was set to 1 damage.

I wasn't able to find the cause, but I was able to work around it by setting the gun's damage to 2 and having the repair gun work on damage values between 0 and 2 instead of just values between 0 and 1.

Then, I wanted it to repair the same way a normal POB repair cycle would by consuming 2 Robotic Hardware, Reinforced Alloy, or Hull Segments and then applying the same repair amount as defined in the plugin. However, this was now allowing a 4 shot per second gun to do the equivalent of 20 repair cycles in just 10 seconds. So I started looking at ways to slow down the repair rate while keeping the consumption rate the same -- such as by using the commodity's health similarly to how commodities with decay are lost over time.

In absence of that however, I was able to use RNG chance for a similar effect.

Code:

repairship_chance = 0.05 //Chance that 1 repair commodity is consumed when applying the repair from a Nanotool gun on a repair ship.
repairship_rate = 0.025 //The fractional amount of a repair cycle that is healed for each shot from a Nanotool gun on a repair ship.

These two base.config variables allow control over POB repairs through repair ships to either speed up / slow down their repair rate or increase / reduce the amount of commodities consumed.

The ones listed above result in 1 commodity being consumed roughly every 20 shots and 50% of a passive repair cycle every 20 shots.
After 40 shots, this will typically consume 2 commodities and heal 100% of what a passive repair cycle would.

Note about the variables on my offline test server moved to video

[Busy Miner]

Wow. Impressive work. Hope this gets implemented into the mod. But the base must be green, otherwise it counts as attack, mustn't it?

[Xenon]

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[Hawksmoor]

[Hemlocke]

As much as I despise POBs, I do enjoy that something practical, InRP and a new gameplay opportunity with commodities for POBs being far more integrated than usual.

You've stolen my heart with making repair ships more useful.

Though the placement of the nanotool is stupid, why is it on the grabbing hand instead of on the actual welding arm. EXPLAIN DEMMIT

[Typrop]

I'm of two minds on this.

On the one, sieges can be even longer, which is very painful.

On the other, just like shoot the repair ship lol.

Apathetic, though I guess I wouldn't mind the implementation.

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[Groshyr]

What Hem said. Great work!

[Czechmate]

Thanks for the effort, implementing this seems like a no-brainer

[sasapinjic]

I belive this will be good for gameplay,nice work.

[LuckyOne]

Oh no, here come the followers of POBism...


Personally, this seems great to me, now during a base siege the defenders can ninja repair the POB (if the attackers can't keep up the siege for the whole time, or get driven off).

The consumption rate numbers could be tweaked, I suppose if it ends up too much of a buff to the defenders, promoting more RM shipping and giving the siegers more time to destroy the repair / supply ships. Or simply as you said, reduce the effectiveness if the base shield is up, so attackers can keep up the pressure even with a single smaller ship.