Hello! My name is Adam and I'm in charge of the technology web as part of the Rank: Warmaster development team, which includes creating the guns, buildings, systems, and equipment you'll see in the game. Today I'll be talking about the different types of weapons you'll be using to make your foes regret their life decisions.
Under the hood, there are four different classifications of weapons; beams, pulses, missiles and cones. Beams act like standard sci-fi lasers, focused zero time-of-flight weapons that deal damage over time to a single point as they're held on a target. Pulses include all non-guided, ammo-based projectiles such as autocannons and railguns. Missiles are self-guided projectiles that seek out your selected target until they hit or run out of fuel. Cone weapons are similar to beams but affect a short range cone-shaped area instead of a tightly-focused beam.
Thematically, these categories can be used to represent the most classic sci-fi weapon archtypes. Pulse-class weapons function as rapid-fire machinegun type weapons, or slow firing but hard hitting cannons. Cone-class weapons can model both broad-spectrum energy waves as well as kinetic flak blasts designed for point defense. Beam-class weapons make the expected laser beams and particle streams. Missile-class weapons work as, well, missiles and torpedoes and any other guided weapons.
By massaging the different attributes available to each weapon class, we can start also get some more interesting effects. A missile-class weapon with a slower velocity but a much longer lifespan can be skinned as an assault drone or smart-mine that hunts down the enemy and explodes upon attaching to their hull. A pulse-class weapon that's very slow but deals devastating damage can be used to represent anti-capital ship torpedoes or plasma spheres that trade off guidance for the extreme damage capability needed to penetrate the toughest armor. A narrow but longer range cone-class weapon could easily represent the iconic main gun of a certain space battleship.
As development continues, additional attributes are slated to be added to the technology web, giving us more levers to pull and knobs to twist to customize the capabilities and behaviors of each weapon class. Please stay tuned!
Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.
