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Topics - Nooblies

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Suggestions / Missile firing and venting/overload

« on: September 19, 2013, 02:11:44 AM »

Currently in the 0.6a patch it is possible to fire missiles while your ship is venting or overloaded. While this is currently considered a bug, I feel that it is actually a fun feature that helps further distinguish missiles from other weapon types. It also adds utility and interesting tactical choices to missile use, for example using an annihilator swarm as cove while venting. Lorewise it also makes sense, as missiles currently don't require and flux investment in firing and hence could be thought of as separate to the more flux inhibited ballistic and energy weapons.

As such, I feel that such a feature adds an interesting element to combat and helps distinguish missiles, and so would request that such a feature be left in. Added a poll to see what the general consensus on the way missiles currently work is.

Suggestions / Dominators and the AI

« on: December 18, 2012, 08:11:03 AM »

Dominators under AI control seem far too reliant on shields and refuse to close in with enemy ships. This means that they spend most of the time trying to back off and vent due to added flux from shields, rather than closing with the enemy and trading blows, which would allow their superior firepower to defeat the enemy. For instance, several variants of Dominator can defeat an Onslaught in a face-off when under player control, yet fail to so much as cause hull damage when under the control of the AI.

For an example of this, put a standard Odyssey up against the three Dominators in the refit scenario. The majority of the time the Dominators lose horribly, often failing to do more than scratch the armour with the stray pilum or two.

The AI also seems to enjoy trying to snipe low flux, shielded ships with annihilators rather than close the distance and use more effective kinetic weapons on the outdated Dominator, which is nothing more than a waste of missiles.

General Discussion / Amusing quirks of Starfarer

« on: October 14, 2012, 11:13:16 AM »

Just thought I'd start a post about the interesting or amusing things you've seen or noticed in starfarer.

For me, it's the fact that more often than not a veteran talon wing will actually lose in a fight against a regular talon wing. Must be something to do with the speeds that they move around and formation keeping, but a strange and illogical occurrence nonetheless.

Suggestions / The Onslaught and TPCs

« on: October 13, 2012, 11:14:20 AM »

The AI will quite often end up firing its TPCs before they are aligned with the enemy ship. For an easy example of this, make two onslaughts face each other. They end up using burn drive and ending up 45 degrees off being able to hit each other with both cannons, and will end up opening fire before they have turned sufficiently to actually hit anything, ending up wasting all of the charges and running up flux for nothing.

It also seems very hit and miss with accuracy, where it will often fire when only one cannon can hit, leading to half of its shots missing and so builds up unnecessary flux.

As an aside, the onslaught seems to use the TPCs very sparingly, preferring in most cases to just maintain shooting the Mark 9 cannons and heavy autocannons, even with an enemy in range and directly in front of the onslaught which is at high flux/armour tanking. In a lot of cases it would be preferrable to use the TPCs instead, due to the better damage and flux per second against armour, yet it rarely decides to fire them.

Suggestions / Fighter AI and engines

« on: August 23, 2012, 06:34:20 AM »

Just thought I'd share an annoyance I have with fighters currently.

More often then not, I find that my fighters (especially the two fighter wings) end up being destroyed because they get their engines taken out and stop. Normally, a ship continues on its previous vector when its engines get taken out, which somewhat reduces the ability for the enemy to target the disabled ship and smash it too badly.

This doesn't seem to be the case with fighters though. For some reason whenever a fighter wing strays through an annihilator swarm or otherwise takes enough damage to lose engines, instead of floating past the battlefield and getting out of danger they will tend to stop on the spot as though being hit by a tractor beam. Now obviously this is by far the worst thing they could do, as this is where the crossfire from friendly and enemy ships is thickest and where they are least likely to survive.

As this behaviour makes fighters less effective then they could be and means they take higher casualties than they should (this is especially annoying with Gladius or Thunder wings),and as fighters seem somewhat sub-par when compared to frigates or destroyers since the introduction of ship systems, I feel that changing the behaviour of fighters so that they don't inexplicably stop in the worst possible places could nothing but a positive change.

Obviously this is just a suggestion I had, and campaign/officer stuff/whatever should take priority, but if it is as simple as a few tweaks to the fighter AI and doesn't take up too much time I feel it would be a good improvement to both the AI and fighters in general.

Suggestions / Fighter AI and repairing.

« on: August 07, 2012, 05:57:12 AM »

Just thought I'd share a thought I've had for a while concerning fighter wings and how they decide when they head back and repair.

Currently, a fighter wing will stay in combat until it has taken a specific amount of damage (often when a few fighters are down to quite low health and no armour). However, due to the total health being taken into account, it can often be the case where several fighters in a wing will have virtually no armour and only around 50% health left, yet stay in combat with their formation, which often leads to their untimely demise when re-engaging in combat. As the wing is already damaged beforehand, this also means that it is much more likely that there will be few or no survivors after the attack. As such, damaged fighters end up being more of a liability in combat, as they aren't really combat worthy, yet are still kept around to determine the wing's overall combat strength.

Due to the aforementioned issues, I was wondering if it would be better to make damaged fighters "peel off" from their formations and return to a carrier where they would wait for the rest of their wing to return before going in to repair. I feel this would greatly increase the chances of the fighter wing surviving (especially in the case of the two-fighter wings, which at the moment suffer disproportionate losses compared to the larger wing sizes, and where the decreased durability of the individual fighters in the wing has a greater impact) and would also prevent cases where a fighter wing will just wait around in the combat zone while waiting to reform before heading back for repairs, which often means they take more losses than is necessary.

Obviously this is a fairly minor issue and is more likely than not something that would require a fair amount of work (new AI coding etc) for something that has somewhat minimal gains, but I thought I'd just throw the idea out there.

Suggestions / Auto-resolve during battles

« on: July 11, 2012, 10:38:18 AM »

While auto-resolve usually works to an acceptable degree, at times (especially when fighting larger fleets then your own), it can sometimes turn what is an easy win into a fairly horrible loss.

For instance, while playing with a small group of frigates after starting a new game, I decided to attack a fleet fielding a buffalo mk 2, two lashers, a hound and a bomber/fighter wing. After destroying all of their ships bar one lasher and a (then retreating) talon wing (the lasher of which was hiding somewhere on the fairly large map) and while still fielding a lasher, two hounds and a talon wing, I decided that it would be faster to just exit the battle and let auto-resolve deal with the rest.

Much to my surprise, when it went to the post battle screen, the auto-resolve had decided that their remaining lasher and crippled talon wing had managed to go rambo on my fleet, as the lasher and talon wing had taken no further damage and managed to destroy my talon wing and one of my lashers, take my hound down to 4% health and force my other lasher to sabotage itself.

This seems to happen somewhat often when fighting fleets that are originally more powerful than your own, as I can recall a few times when auto-resolving while chasing the odd retreating Tempest or wasp wing (after decimating the Tri-Tachyon Attack fleets) a similar situation occurring, where the auto-resolve decided that the remaining frigates/fighters managed to defeat my fairly healthy fleet by themselves.

As such, I'm wondering if the game continues to count retreated ships into the overall fleet strength used in the auto-resolve calculations, or (more possibly) removes ships from your fleet combat strength if you've taken enough crew losses to ordinarily be unable to commit them to combat, even though they are still in the battle and you still consider them combat assets.

While the way auto-resolve calculates fleet strength may make it downright difficult to change (as I suspect it is already a fairly complicated calculation), and while a fairly minor gripe that can be mostly ignored or passed off as a quirk of a few specific situations, I was just wondering if there would be a way to make the ships currently deployed in combat exempt from crew checks (assuming such a thing exists) to make the auto-resolve more reliable for ending what should be easy wins.

Suggestions / Ballistics, Ammo and the AI

« on: June 05, 2012, 02:16:47 AM »

After running my conquest through the simulation a few times, I've noticed that it doesn't seem aware of the fact that several of its weapons have run dry. This ends up with the ship repeatedly trying to beat down the shields of the enemy ship with a single Heavy Mauler (which does as well as you'd expect). This is particularly annoying due to the fact that the other side of the conquest still has near full ammo reserves, which would be far more effective.

As such, I was wondering if the AI could use a few tweaks such that it would treat empty turrets as if they were disabled, because at the moment I suspect that it doesn't take weapon ammo into effect when calculating the firepower of said weapons.

Suggestions / Suicidal bombers

« on: May 21, 2012, 07:15:10 PM »

While the AI is fantastic in most aspects, one that I think could do with improving is its use of bombers. It has a bad habit of sending them after enemy ships by themselves at the start of battle, which more often than not ends up with them being obliterated by enemy fighters and even the targets they are going for, as they don't survive well under heavy fire. When fighting the Tri-Tachyon Security fleets for example, they almost without fault end up sending their Dagger torpedo bombers in by themselves at the very start of the battle, while the rest of their ships are grouped up near the top of the map or capturing objectives. Usually their bombers are dead before you even see any other enemy ships. Obviously this ends up more often than not with two less bomber wings to contend with.

Two things I think that could possibly help are:

Change deployment priority to somewhere near the back with capital ships, so they are deployed when the majority of ships have engaged and don't run off by themselves without support. This would also mean that the enemy ships are probably distracted, which makes a bombing run far more effective and less deadly for the bombers. It also gives a higher chance for larger enemy ships to be on the field, so that they have a decent target to attack, a cruiser rather than a destroyer for example. As it is, they get deployed at the start of most battles, which is where they are the least effective and a bit of a liability to their early fleet.

Making the AI prioritize giving bombers light escort, so that they can more safely engage enemy targets and don't wander off on their own, where they are fodder for enemy fighters, frigates or destroyers.

Bug Reports & Support / AI captured ships

« on: May 19, 2012, 04:08:42 AM »

Something I've noticed is that when the AI captures ships after battle, they are usually missing some or most of their weapons (Most captures are from destroyed vessels). While the AI is capable of repairing and crewing these new ships, it seems it forgets to re-arm them, to the point where they can deploy a Medusa with a single rear facing LRPD or Aurora with only a single rack of sabot missiles.

Obviously this is something that could be looked at and a solution possibly found, as captured ships in AI hands are usually worse than useless as of now.

Suggestions / Dummy missiles

« on: May 04, 2012, 03:03:12 AM »

Just an odd suggestion for a new type of missile, the Dummy Missile!

Essentially it's a lump of metal with engines that you fire at enemy ships to draw their PD defenses away from actual threats. Obviously it'd be much more heavily armoured than normal missiles and also slower. For kicks it could also do a tiny amount of kinetic damage on impact.

General Discussion / The Brawler

« on: February 24, 2012, 08:43:34 AM »

So I've been playing around with brawler variants, and while decent enough against single targets, anything with salamanders (or more then a single pilum launcher) completely ruins it. As this is the case with most starting pirate fleets, I'd like to suggest placing a rear facing small ballistic turret just behind the "bridge" graphic of the brawler. I feel this would add greater tactical flexibility and greatly reduce the brawler's weakness to missiles, as it would greatly reduce the current almost complete inability to deal with salamanders and give an interesting trade-off when dealing with pilums, where you could either continue forward and soak them with your shield (and so allow you to return fire), or turn your back and hope the single turret could deal with all of the incoming missiles (losing your ability to put out damage in the process). While the omni-shield generator hull mod could somewhat solve this issue, I feel that losing 10 of 45 ordinance points is too high a price to pay to make the brawler viable as a starting ship, and that making such a mod mandatory for viability merely removes choice from the player(I feel it also changes the feel from the pragmatic "armour and forward guns" approach of the low tech ships to more of a mid tech feel, similar to the lasher or wolf).

Bug Reports & Support / Sunder class flux vent disparity

« on: February 24, 2012, 02:03:06 AM »

In the refit screen the Sunder class is currently using 24 flux vents instead of the maximum 20 for destroyers. This can be seen by removing a flux vent, where the flux dissapation decreses by 50 and the number of ordinance points increases by five instead of just one.