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HOST/PHOST Differences |
The differences are grouped according to who is affected, the host or the player. Also, each difference has been labelled as either a major difference or minor difference. Thus, the player or host who only wants an idea of the major differences between HOST and PHOST need not read all items.
Thomas Voigt's BSIM
v2.2
(or a more recent version) program is an excellent simulator of both HOST
and PHOST combat.
In PHOST 3, there is a link between PHOST alliances and HOST-type alliances (the "locking alliance codes" mechanism). When you offer a PHOST alliance on all five alliance levels, PHOST automatically creates a HOST-type alliance, just as if you had used an ffX friendly code. This link between PHOST and HOST alliances is meant to enable compatibility with add-on programs that make use of HOST-type (but not PHOST-type) alliance information. Please see the HOST Alliance Compatibility section of the "Alliances" page for more details.
One difference in PHOST is controlled by the TowedShipsBreakFree configuration option. If a towed ship loses its tower due to mine hits, then the towed ship uses the remaining movement time to move towards its original waypoint at its original speed (if the TowedShipsBreakFree configuration option is enabled). Towed ships can also break free if a towing ship runs out of fuel.
Ship clone orders are treated as normal build orders, except that they override the base's build order, if any. For example, if a ship to be cloned at a base leaves the base and another takes its place, the new ship to be cloned is placed at the back of the queue (since the build order was "changed").
The HOST behavior rationale is that allies should be able to tow each other's cloaked ships into combat. Unfortunately, it has the side effect of giving cloaking races little defence against the Privateers, since even if a towed ship cloaks, it will never escape the tow of a ship with gravitonic accelerators. A cheap Privateer gunboat can tow a cloaked ship to a starbase and just wait for its fuel to run out (due to cloak fuel burn) or its cloak to fail. The towed ship cannot escape.
PHOST enables allies to tow each other's cloaked ships into combat, simply by having the allies give each other the Ship Level of alliance. Thus, there is really no need for non-allies to be able to tow cloaked ships, and the cloaking races can once again escape Privateer tows by cloaking. Thus, it is recommended that AllowTowCloakedShips be disabled.
For a complete description of how towing works in PHOST 3 under both towing models, please see the Towing section of the "Playing with PHOST" page.
The same reasoning holds for planets. Lizard planets are allowed to suffer up to 150% damage in battle but will explode (be conquered) if they end a battle with more than 100% damage.
If the AllowGravityWells config option is ON, then a ship will be pulled into a gravity well after movement is complete except for the following circumstances:
The basic rule is that web mines are no different from ordinary mines. Web mine draining, however, is a Crystal-only racial ability. The owner of a minefield (or web mine) is immune to its effects, while others are not (unless they are allies). Therefore, a Crystal ship will have fuel drained from it if it is in a web mine belonging to another Crystal player (in a custom PlayerRace game, for example).
The ownership of minefields cannot be changed, and this holds true for web mines too. Once a minefield is laid, the race of the ship that laid the minefield is forgotten, and only the minefield owner is remembered (which, in most cases, is the same as the owner of the ship). If the ship laying the minefield is doing so in another race's name (using the miN friendly code or the Lay Mines extended mission) then once the minefield is laid, the ship's owner has no special immunity or claim to the minefield.
Web mines interact with normal mines if and only if the AllowMinesDestroyWebs config option is enabled. The only consequence of this is in the minefields-exploding stage. A web mine will not explode normal mines unless this config option is enabled. Otherwise, it is always true that web mines interact only with web mines and normal mines interact only with normal mines. For example, laying a web mine that overlaps another web mine of a different race will cause minefield explosions (assuming MinesDestroyMines is enabled).
All of the above can be summarized by remembering that there is nothing special about web mines (other than that they drain fuel) and they do not explode normal mines unles AllowMinesDestroyWebs is enabled. Note that this behavior is consistent with the VGA Planets documentation.
Laying a minefield also implicitly generates a mine scan message for that field.