4. Space Battles

Space battles in Scheme 001 are greatly simplified to what you might have seen in other games. This was done on purpose for an easy test of space battle capability.

For simplicities sake, all space battles are system wide. Therefore, if multiple stations are in a system, they will all be involved in a battle in that system.

All fleets and stations within the system are considered part of the battle. If more than two players are in the same system, they will all fight each other at the same time.

A space battle consists of rounds. Within each round, each ship/station has the ability to attack once. All attacks and damage are simultaneous. The space battle will continue until all remaining ships/stations belong to the same player.

Each ship design has three factors for space battle, the attack factor, the shield factor, and armor factor. Each station also has attack factors, shield factors and armor factors. The different factors are described below.

Attack Factor - The attack factor is the weapon of the ship or station. The higher the number, the better.
Shield Factor - The shield factor is the shields of the ship or station. The higher number, the better. Shields are always full strength at the start of the battle. Shields will regenerate during each round of the battle. The rate that shields regenerate is describe below.
Armor Factor - The armor factor represents the hull of the ship or station. Damage to the armor will only happen once the shields have been depleted.
Computer Factor - This represents the ship's targeting computer, and will enhance the damage done each turn. Stations do not have targeting computers.

Details of a turn

The parts of each turn is defined below:

Determine target
Determine damage
Destroy any ships/modules
Regenerate shields

These steps are repeated until there are no enemies left standing.

Determine target

Each ship/station determines a target for the brunt of their attack this turn. Ships will always be attacked before stations.

Determine damage

Before damage can occur, the probability of damage is determined by this formula:

prob = (attacking attack factor) + (attack computer factor) - (defense computer factor) Damage is then determined as the following:

damage = (prob - random) * (theme damage factor) random is a random number between 0 and 1. The theme damage factor is determined by the theme.

The damage value is substracted from the shield of the target. If there are not enough shields, then the difference is substracted from the armor. If the armor drops below zero, then the item will blow up. For ships, this is immediate destruction. For stations, one module will be selected to be destroyed. Shield modules are always destroyed first. Attack modules are always destroyed second. If there are no more shield modules are attack modules, the station is defenseless and the station will be destroyed.

When a stations modules are destroyed, the appropriate shield and attack factors will be lowered accordingly.

Previous Section - Next Section

Return to: Manual Table of Contents - Universe

Created: 16 Apr 1999
Updated: 20 Apr 1999