[REQ] Simple way to tweak deck gun damage levels?

[panthercules]

Searched around a bit, but couldn't find what I was looking for. I D/L'ed the set of tweak files I found in the modding tutorial link, and tried the sub gun tweak files, but they only let you tweak a small number of factors and the amount of damage inflicted didn't seem to be one of them

Here's what I want to do - been playing around with RFB and generally I really like it, but I am a little tired of pumping almost all my deck gun ammo into a small/medium freighter and seeing no damage or effect until maybe the 170-180th hit or worse. I don't want to get involved in the "realism wars" of discussing whether Beery's RFB settings are correct or not - I suspect they're pretty darn close, and I don't want to revert to stock values and start sending DDs and 7,000 ton freighters to the bottom with 10 or 15 shots. But I would like to up the damage levels inflicted by the deck guns by maybe 5-10% or so, and see if maybe I can start doing some visible damage and at least disabling if not sinking at least some of the smaller merchants with maybe 70-100 shells.

Anybody know if there's another set of tweak files or some other way to easily play around with these settings without totally screwing up a bunch of other stuff in the process?

[Mush Martin]

its the shells hitting power that you need to tweak to increase
damage. by way of example in Uber for SH3 we have the 88 mm
is set with hitting power of a 12.7 cm range and rate and such are
on the gun but hitting power as such is a shell thing.

[kv29]

look here:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=117182

be aware that if you set the gundeck EF factor lower than 5, you won´t see any damage (holes) on the ships. 5 is around half the stock value for the 4"25 deck gun. I set mine all to half values.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by kv29

look here:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=117182

be aware that if you set the gundeck EF factor lower than 5, you won´t see any damage (holes) on the ships. 5 is around half the stock value for the 4"25 deck gun. I set mine all to half values.

Yeah - I had looked there, but I can't find the instructions on how you actually change the settings. I don't see any settings for anything like this in the gun tweak files I D/L'ed, so I'm thinking either I need some new/updated gun tweak files or the parameters to be tweaked actualy lie in some other files. I've only just started playing around with the minitweaker, so maybe I'm reading right past it in those threads, but can anybody point me to the place where I can actually play with those EF factors?

[CaptainHaplo]

You have to change the values in the shells file for each gun size - If your not sure how - just let me know what you want the various values to be (shell speed, damage max and min, along with radius min and max for the 3/4/5 inch gun) and I will mod it for ya and post it. Note that the radius is as important (if not more) to the damage calculation because a medium damage shell with a small damage radius doesnt do much - with a large radius its only a few shots to sink a target. Let me know.

[Mush Martin]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

You have to change the values in the shells file for each gun size - If your not sure how - just let me know what you want the various values to be (shell speed, damage max and min, along with radius min and max for the 3/4/5 inch gun) and I will mod it for ya and post it. Note that the radius is as important (if not more) to the damage calculation because a medium damage shell with a small damage radius doesnt do much - with a large radius its only a few shots to sink a target. Let me know.

So that would imply I was wrong after all. Hmmmm on a different thread we were speculating that Impulse governed damage
where radius governed visual effects. wrong again damn

[CaptainHaplo]

Its all good - radius actually does affect the size of the visual hole only because the hole is based on the area of damage. Same way with Torp radius damage. As a test - set the shell radius up to something huge - like 1000 - and about 500 in damage. When you hit a ship - the whole thing visually disintegrates most of the time.

[kv29]

radius has a visual impact only if efectivenes is set to 5 and above. Thats why I set all shells to half the stock value (only EF, I left radius untounched). you´ll need to put a lot of rounds to sink it.

Yesterday I catched a large freighter in the middle of a storm at night (I couldn´t see a thing so I stalked it by sonar only ) and put 3 torpedos on it. Then I manned the deck gun and put around 20 shells on it (my reload time is set to 30 seconds). The ship was badly damaged but still refused to go down so I finished the job with another torp.

[Mush Martin]

Thanks Guys this is helpful.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

You have to change the values in the shells file for each gun size - If your not sure how - just let me know what you want the various values to be (shell speed, damage max and min, along with radius min and max for the 3/4/5 inch gun) and I will mod it for ya and post it. Note that the radius is as important (if not more) to the damage calculation because a medium damage shell with a small damage radius doesnt do much - with a large radius its only a few shots to sink a target. Let me know.

I guess I'm not being clear enough - there are no such radius/damage parameters showing up in the sub gun tweak files I D/L'ed from the modding tools thread - only a few parameters like storage amounts, speed, reload time, range, angle and tolerances, and gun barrel movement. I can't find any "shells files" in what I D/L'ed, (just a tweak file for each type of gun - no separate shells files for those guns).

So - are there some updated/different tweak files that everybody else is playing with here and I need to get somewhere? Can someone point me to a link where those files can be D/L'ed? Sure would appreciate it.

[CaptainHaplo]

Actually I had to check and prove myself wrong - the file you need to edit is shells.zon - JimBob wrote a tweakfile for it and you just change the min/max damage and radius - its not in each specific gun file. My fault. If you cant find the file, let me know and I will upload it.

[kv29]

here you go...
http://rapidshare.com/files/39126081/Shells.zon.html

this is mine tweaked.

[Bando]

http://www.sendspace.com/file/kzrnxj

He panther, above link gives you the file from jimbob, so you can tweak it yourself

Cheers

Bando

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Bando

http://www.sendspace.com/file/kzrnxj

He panther, above link gives you the file from jimbob, so you can tweak it yourself

Cheers

Bando

Awesome - thanks a bunch

I've only played with .dat files so far - now I get to graduate to .zon files

[panthercules]

Thanks again - worked like a charm. I tweaked the max EF values up to 5 as someone suggested. In two trial runs at the artillery practice mission in the sub school, I still didn't notice damage decal type graphical indications of damage from the hits, but I did manage to start up a couple of fires after 20-30 shots, and both times the ship (a fairly small freighter, IIRC - maybe an 1,800 tonner?) went down after about 65-70 shots. That's getting pretty close to where I'd like to see it from a game-play perspective - still not easy (I assume a larger ship would have taken even more hits, but I'll have to test that theory), and something that will take at least a good 30-45 minutes or longer so you'll be exposed to some meaningful risk of intervention from air patrols or nearby escorts (on my last RFB 1.28 patrol, I was actually run off by a Japanese flying boat apparently responding to my target's distress calls after I'd sat there pounding him with my deck gun for a while - it was so cool), but still at least a chance of doing some damage to either finish one or two off or soften them up for a coup de grace.

I only had time to try the sub school mission where the ship is already standing still - if I get a chance I'll whip up a little test mission with the ship moving so I can see if this helps with causing enough damage to disable a ship and make it easier to finish him off with a torp. I suspect the "ideal" max value from my perspective might be something like 4.5 rather than 5, but I wonder if the value has to be an integer to work - anybody know?

I also noticed that there was also a minimum EF number (I think it was "1" in my case - I didn't mess with it yet) - I assumed that this was creating a range of potential damage and the game will sort of randomly pick a value between the two numbers - makes me wonder if maybe I could drop the minimum EF to "0", and thus (assuming an even distribution over the range) decrease the percentage of shots that would have the increased damage effect - thus still having a chance to do some significant damage but probably taking an even longer or more variable number of shots in order to do it. That's what I'd really like to see - less certainty, with a realistically high probability that you're wasting your time and ammo, but at least a reasonable chance that at least the smaller ships could feel some serious pain and maybe even some of the bigger ones could suffer some sort of disabling/enfeebling damage along the way.