In the majority of gaming situations, players are up against the unknown. If you design your weapons to be too powerful, you waste resources on weak targets. And if you design your weapons too weak, you put yourself in more danger while having to launch more strikes against strong targets.

Launching a variable number of projectiles at once is a great solution, but it requires fancy weapons technology, or a huge capacity for carrying rounds. It also reduces strategy in gaming situations. Simply selecting a number of death balls to launch against a particular enemy wouldn't be much in the way of depth. However, if there were a reasonable limitation (1-10 death balls), it might add a little depth to an otherwise typical engine.

Realistically speaking, I would have to say it would be rather impossible to predict how many strikes it may take to destroy a certain enemy. Even in situations where you've taken hundreds of that enemy down, each one will vary in damage before being destroyed. In the real world, too much is better than too little. This is something that isn't translated to gaming very often, though.

All 300 at one?

No. I play games to have fun and be entertained. I also enjoy the challenge of trying to complete something. You might as well just have a game with 2 screens. PRESS START TO WIN and YOU WON! 300 shots at something while chasing it through a dangerous environment is the way to go!

Actually, this is an important situation for game balancing.

In a game, if you had a weapon that did a lot of damage to a single target, then if you encountered a small number of tough enemies, it would be the best weapon to deal with it. But if you encountered a lot of weak enemies, then that weapon would not be very effective.

However, if you had a weapon that only did a small amount of damage to any one target, but could attack many targets simultainiously, then this weapon would be very poor at attacking a single tough enemy and be perfect for taking out that hord of weak enemies.

This situation occured in a game of (PnP)D&D I was running. The party encountered a tough monster that could resist any weak attack on it (through damage reduction and regeneration). However, I also sent them up against a hoard of Goblins (weak enemies but they usually occur in mass swarms), around 20 of them.

When the party tried to attack the tough monster, they could not damage it enough until they brough their character with the abilities needed to deliver powerful attack that did enough damage to significantly injure it.

However, when they encountered the goblins, they tried that same tactic, sending in the "Big Guns". However, they began to be overwhealmed by the sheer numbers of them as the powerful attack could not kill them quick enough. But then they managed to get a relativly weak character into the melee, but one that could do multiple attacks each round.

This character, although not thought of as their main combatent, was killing far more goblins that their toughest fighter and ended up driving the goblins back simply because they could attack multiple targets each round and even though their damage potential was far lower than the fighters it was enough to kill the goblins.

Using these ideas, you can make a natural Streangth/Weakness between abilities or attack in a game. This creates interesting tactical choices (especially if you are fighting a moderate number of moderately tough creatures as well as the single big tough ones and the hoards of weak ones).

I think it could lend itself to a novel sort of play. If time, survival and ammo supply are your concerns, then you could be faced with the dilemma of quick/good/cheap. You can do it quickly and well, but it'll burn through your ammo. You can do it well and cheap, but it'll take multiple small salvos to figure out how much gun it takes to kill him, which allows him the opportunity to counterattack, or you can do it quick and cheap, but you might underestimate him, necessitating a second attack anyway and taking away the advantage of the "whallop".

Worrying about ammo, knowing that you can't afford to let that guy get a shot off, and knowing that there are six more bad guys behind him that you'll have to deal with when he's gone can all lend depth and fun to a game.

I'm envisioning this in a turn-based context, where you decide how much "charge" to put in your gun for each round, and your energy core is drained by each one, or maybe the gun can overheat, or whatever.

I think there's a game to be made there.

Reminds me of the game, Silent Storm. Pistols were low damaging and used up less time units to fire. There were rifles and machine guns as well, which normally take out an enemy in one blast, but used up about half of your time units. The problem was character leveling. A character using a pistol became accurate and skillful much faster than anyone else because they had to aim and fire more often.

At one point, my pistol-snap-shot-sniper character could take down eight hostiles with head shots in one turn and still have time to take cover.

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Original post by AngleWyrm Let's say a target spaceship has 100 hit points before their weapons are down/engines out/whatever. After modifiers for ECM, Evasive Maneuvers, etc, our ship has a 50% chance to hit. Which comes to about 250~300 shots to take down the target. Let's go with 300 shots, just to be sure. At this point, would you like to deliver all 300 shots immediately?

Spreading so many hits out over time like that (small increments) will usually result in a fairly predictable battle results. Battles would be simple attrition if you do all the hits simultaneously. It WILL give the player time to take countermeasures (if they have any in the game mechanics),

A coarser grained battle result system (say 10-20 rounds of fire) would allow more 'luck' to be involved -- where a lucky sequence of hits could lower your enemy's abilities sufficiently to turn the battle one way or another.

Some game systems work with very predictable results (enough that they might simply use equations to decide the outcome), and others play out with alot of player interaction possible.

I dont see much point to a battle if it isnt interactive. If I just have to run a calculation to see who wins then hit the run away button or the kill with 300 shots button, I am going to toss the game out the window bitching about how stupid a game it is.

Reminds me of the Metal Storm weapons. Their top-of-the-line model exceeds one million rounds per minute (theoretical rate of fire, it doesn't have that kind of ammo capacity).

But I assume that, realistically, it would alter the hit percentage. I mean, if you fired 300 shots at once and you were aiming right at the enemy when you pulled the trigger, all 300 should hit. And if your aim was wrong, all 300 would be wasted.

If I had the choice, I would prefer a medium power, medium rate-of-fire weapon. At least 240 rounds per minute and as strong as you can make those rounds. Allows for some slide-over hits versus trying to get that big blob coming out of your space ship once every 3 seconds to hit home just once.

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Original post by JasRonq I dont see much point to a battle if it isnt interactive. If I just have to run a calculation to see who wins then hit the run away button or the kill with 300 shots button, I am going to toss the game out the window bitching about how stupid a game it is.

The game Massive Assault has no luck at all. The player can tell who's gonna win any conflict before engaging.

I'm not talking about luck, Anglewyrm. I'm talking about skill. If the player doesn't have to actually fly around aiming at his enemy shooting at them then where is the fun?