[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Atuday

I think that altitude should not matter although perhaps range to target should. What I mean by that is missile x takes y amount of time to travel a given amount of distance. If an aircraft is high up enough it would be easier to avoid the missile but it would still be coming after them.

On the flip side of this things with the lancer style of aim and fire where dodging is much much harder due to the speed of the projectile need to be balanced. This would possibly include decreasing damage over distance. Nothing is scarier than trying to fly a reaver through a hail of lancer shots because it is so hard to dodge them.

I chose altitude over distance because that provides pilots with reasonable guarantees that climbing = safety from most ground-AA. It also allows ground-based AA to be effective across larger ground distances. Damage degradation over absolute value of z difference makes sense. It doesn' thave to be linear. It could be like EVE where you have an "Optimal" range and a falloff distance. That's a good way to do range so it is reliable up to a certain point and then quickly drops off. I like that based on the z axis and not the distance though. Of course all weapons should have an effective range so maybe some combination of the two could work where the veritical distance has more of a weight than the other two components.