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1396

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Star-Wars-Inspired Combat/RPG (v1.3.4) Update 10/01

« on: October 31, 2019, 07:55:59 PM »

Download

Main Mod Directory

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tkdrcv13rkj9ox4/AAD__6SLl40l2SmhH_i2Xaf0a?dl=0]https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tkdrcv13rkj9ox4/AAD__6SLl40l2SmhH_i2Xaf0a?dl=0]https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tkdrcv13rkj9ox4/AAD__6SLl40l2SmhH_i2Xaf0a?dl=0

Update consolidated notes:

- Better performance as a whole (hopefully 40%-66% better)
- Less overpowered carriers.
- Larger battle size.
- All bugs fixed to my knowledge. (please correct me if not)
- Better weapon toolitps. (see detailed notes)
- Better balance between each hull size as far as deployment and combat strength is concerned.

Spoiler

Campaign Content Additions and Balance Changes
-------------

 --- Campaign Changes:
-------------
    - Advanced and rarer vessels are less accessible as a whole in markets, and should no longer be salvageable through post-battle recovery (Enemy-wise) though you can still find them as derelicts from warzones for now (changing that later).
    - Starting options contain less starting vessels than before with the exception of harder starts such as Pirate or Adamantine Consortium.
    - Increased minimum bounties active at a time.
    - Reduced amount of enemy raider bases active.
    - Increased payouts for bounties.
    - Removed use of autofit in NPC fleets.
    - Added many portraits from various portrait packs for the player and re-added new faction portraits as well (with permission).
    - Removed several portraits from Archean Order factions (most of the anime style ones) to save for future lore.

 --- Faction Changes:
-------------
    - Further increased Luddic Church vessels' effectiveness.
    - Reduced most factions' use of dedicated carrier vessels (Improves large-scale campaign performance.)
    - Hegemony Condor now gains Targeting Feed ship system instead of Burn Drive. (Carrier changes make this necessary.)
    - Luddic Church Condor now gains Reserve Deployment ship system instead of Burn Drive. (Carrier changes make this necessary.)
    - Removed use of Retibution fighters, Thermal Pulsers and Thermal Cannons from Sci-Corps fleets (personal preference. It had too much of a Christmas kind of feel )
    - Added many more portraits from various portrait packs to factions (with permission).
    - Restored the CIVILIAN tag to faction freighter conversions so that they won't autodeploy in combat anymore. (Pirates, Adamantine Consortium, Damaged, Trader Guilds)
-----


Combat Balance Changes
-------------
 - Frigates: Added built in hullmod that lets frigates low-flux boost up to 35% max flux and increases damage dealt to fighters by 100% and incoming missiles by 50%.
 - Further increased hitpoints of Atropos torpedoes and Shockwave rockets.
 - Increased flux cost of Punisher Artillery System to be inefficient like other non-missile Fire Support weapons.
 - Slightly reduced hit damage of Devastator Cannon.
 - Reduced hit damage of Antimatter Blaster by 20%. (Was too good for being so flux efficient despite the short range.)
 - Increased flux per shot of Plasma Cannon. Almost inefficient.
 - Increased Peak Performance Time on many rare ships and all phase ships.
 - Increased armor penetration and burst damage of the Claw bomber's light tactical laser.
 - Reduced Heavy Thunderbolt Launcher's damage per second by 33% (Not its strike damage).
 - All dedicated carriers now have a large penalty to their low-flux speed bonus to better prevent kiting. (Carriers now absolutely require escorts to offset their combat range.)
 - Reduced Fighters per wing by a range of 33% - 50% in all cases but the highest tiered fighters.
 - Increased fighter bay amount in dedicated carriers and most combat carriers past the destroyer-sized hull size.
 - Increased supply per deployment gap between hull sizes.
 - Increased supply per deployment gap (slightly) between pure assault-class and fighter-carrying hulls.
 - Increased fighter replacement times substantially.
 - Increased the benefit of the built in carrier hullmod reducing fighter replacement times.
 - Changed Barrage Hammer launcher back to alternating fire behavior. (turns out linked fire makes it weaker to flak rather than stronger overall as I had hoped)
 - Further increased the range threshold of Safety Overrides. (continuing to improve Luddic Path combat strength)
 - Reduced the CR decay per second on dedicated carriers to allow them to more effectively retreat since their speed has been greatly reduced.
 - Greatly reduced total flux per shot of the Guillotine Cannon to make it more efficient considering its other drawbacks.
 - Increased time between bursts of the Heavy Fissure Cannon to make it more in line with typical ballistic strike weapons. Dps remains the same but overall strike potential reduced.
 - Shade (Ad) and Afflictor (Ad) now have Phase Jumper ship systems instead of their original design's ship systems.

--- Faction Hullmod Changes:
-------------
 - Simple Core Systems now increase armor by 100 in addition to its usual effects.
 - Updated Core Systems now increases max flux by 20% in addition to its usual effects, and the shield damage reduction bonus has increased.
 - Luddic Church now has even more increased speed but reduced hull flexibility as far as weapon loadouts (Lower Ordinance Points) and variants have been adjusted accordingly.
    - ^(Similar to Luddic Path- but a less patched-together zealous feel because of the removal of both permanent weapon failures and low PPT associated with Pather hulls.)
    - ^(With these changes, I'm hoping to provide capitalization on strengths and minimalization of weaknesses from an AI standpoint.)
    - ^(To the player, the hulls will seem more balanced as far as player piloting is concerned since previously the hulls mostly provided benefits over drawbacks.)

--- Station Balance Changes:
-------------
 -
--- Ship System Changes:
-------------
 -

--- Ship Changes:
-------------
 - Increased Legion max flux and dissipation.
 - Added an additional Large Ballistic turret slot to Legion.
 - Added additional fighter bays to Legion, Executor, Astral, Megalith, Nightreaver, Epiphany, Odyssey and Pillager hulls.
 - Increased Havok armor.
 - Increased Shrike armor.
 - Aegis now designated a light cruiser. (Better fits its size and power)
 - Added an additional two Large Synergy turrets to the Executor in place of its former side-facing medium Synergy turrets.
 - ^(Adjusted variants accordingly.)
 - Increased Justicar, Revenant and Megalith max flux, and dissipation (reduced their potency a bit too much last update.)
 - Increased Revenant weapon count.
 - Increased Megalith and Revenant fighter bay count and ordinance points (Not as high as before).
 - Re-adjusted cruiser and destroyer speed.
 - Increased Malevolent and Astral max flux.
 - Reduced Malevolent armor and slightly increased Megalth armor.
 - Added additional fighter bay to Eagle to synergize wtih its standard ship system and soften the blow of the number per wing reduction to fighters.
-----


Bug Fixes
-------------
 - Fixed calculation of Simple Core System's shield damage increase in its description to match its actual effects.
 - Fixed calculation of Updated Core System's shield damage decrease in its description to match its actual effects.
 - Added rarity modifiers to all ship hulls (actually missed the very presence of that column in the ship.csv file, ugh)
 - Corrected Adamantine Consortium faction start to use correct ships instead of the Tri-Tachyon variants.
 - Removed chance for an error to occur during campaign start due to overrides within the settings portion of the mod.
 - Dedicated carriers should now act accordingly among all faction variants and attempt to avoid the front lines and remain behind combat vessels.
 - Hopefully fixed issue with some faction starts causing Galatia to not properly reconnect with the Core World's economy.
 - Jangala is now finally a Hegemony starfortress instead of a Persean League starfortress.
 - Xanathos now actually acts like a black hole instead of a standard star. It is now an extreme hazard.
 - Corrected flux per salvo and other statistics. (They are no longer in the description but actually featured on the tooltip)
 - Corrected the Adamantine Consortium mistakenly constructing Archean Order stations for raider bases. Now uses Adamantine Consortium stations.
 - Fixed post designations for Archean Order to make more sense from perspective on their ranks (hopefully).
 - Corrected Citizen rank for Adamantine Consortium to something more appropriate for that faction's setting.
 - Added descriptions to ships, weapons, ship systems and fighters that still needed them. (Some are still placeholders for the lore update)
 - Fixed faction starts that sometimes wouldn't assign officers to vessels.
 - Fixed faction starts that sometimes wouldn't assign officers to the player fleet at all.
-----


Misc
-------------
 - Polished Adamantine Consortium stations look to have better lighting at the edges.
 - Polished Condor (Ad) sprite to better match new theme for the Consortium.
 - Updated Antimatter Blaster sprite to match modern Starsector.
 - Increased battle size defaults (can still be lowered) due to better performance.
 - Hopefully increased performance in late campaign during max battles by 25%-40%.
 - Changed engine color of conversions that change tech to match the tech that the hull is being converted to.
 - Reduced fleet strength variance in Random Battle and Random Fleet Battle missions.
 - Changed Retribution sprite to better match a Hegemony-dominated production.
 - Increased the radius of orbit for several Archean Order entities to help prevent their patrols from crossing the event horizon of Xanathos.
 - Added more important details and statistics to most weapon tooltips.
 - Helmsmanship skill tier 3 increased to 50% flux level threshold in order to reflect recent frigate changes.
-----

[close]

1397

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 31, 2019, 02:58:35 PM »

Code: java

WeightedRandomPicker<String> portriatIDs = Global.getSector().getFaction(Factions.PLAYER).getPortraits(FullName.Gender.ANY);

From there, you should be able to modify portraitIDs any way you like.

Thank you!

1398

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 31, 2019, 12:50:42 PM »

Are there API hooks to modify the list of portraits available to the player faction during the campaign (such as through using a rule command)?

I want to have a script that locks out all but the commissioned faction's portraits when taking on a commission (this will be optional) and reverting back to the settings list when resigning a commission.

1399

General Discussion / Re: Weapon primary roles?

« on: October 30, 2019, 03:58:50 PM »

No its just a descriptive string. All of those entries in that area are just for description. AI hints and tags defined in the weapon.csv file affect AI behavior, as do the weapon's statistics themselves in some cases.

1400

General Discussion / Re: Station Balance - Methodical Analysis

« on: October 28, 2019, 12:29:40 AM »

Very interesting!

(In case it's of interest: the approach I used when balancing these was *mostly* to have them face off against a fixed set of capital ships (iirc, Conquest, 2x Onslaught, Paragon) to see how it goes, and tuning from there. Of course there was a bunch of other testing, as well, but that was the starting point.

A possible additional consideration: I think the stations may benefit from support - especially player support - to varying degrees. In particular the midline one; it's got the most pronounced windows of vulnerability, so it seems probable that when deployed with the player - or even with some AI support - it would benefit more than the other stations. It does seem like it'd be the most vulnerable one solo, vs a swarm of enemies.

Hmm. It seems to make sense that the battlestation tier is where it'd be most disadvantaged... at the star fortress tier, it's got armor plating and drone/mine support, while at the orbital station tier, well, it's just a lot of firepower for that tier; its "support"-type modules added by the higher tiers are comparatively weaker than the "citadels" of the other types and more of its power is in the main module.

I'll say, though, the trickiest part of making these, for me, was coming up with ways to make them feel distinct from each other in terms of gameplay, both attacking and defending the stations.)

This was generally my experience when trying to balance stations as well. Fleet support-oriented stations like the midline style are typically both easier for the player to defend and simultaneously easier for the player to capitalize on its weaknesses, but it also is the most vulnerable station type as far as being surrounded and overwhelmed if not supported at all.

Making them both distinct and balanced is very tough, though. I've noticed certain statistics (drone regeneration rate as an example) have to be tuned to a very, very exact amount or they will just become overwhelming. Any deviance in those stats has to be handled carefully and requires fine tuning through multiple iterations of in-game trials with a specific fleet strength of the same ship variants. That doesn't even include weapon types as a factor. (Beams are less effective on high tech stations than low tech stations, etc, etc.)

1401

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 25, 2019, 03:43:18 PM »

But line 91 is vanilla code:

Code

			String commodity = ResourceDepositsCondition.COMMODITY.get(mc.getId());

What file is that from in vanilla api? What is mc defined as, has it been properly initialized and what does getId() return? A String I assume?

It's weird because get() from ResourceDepositsCondition in this case returns a String, not an Object, according to IntelliJ. So there shouldn't even be a conversion being attempted there.

1402

Suggestions / Re: obey and ignore

« on: October 24, 2019, 11:26:39 PM »

Do you mean getting in the way of a retreat, or the earlier, ramming the enemy tactic?

Ramming through a battle line- weapons firing at anything in range. This particular clip just happens to be a fleet retreating but the idea is "there is no retreat there is only pushing through until the ship has been destroyed" kind of command. The Star Destroyer pushed through many smaller craft to disable the flagship. It let its own mass or secondary batteries handle anything trying to interdict it and went for the actual prize so to speak.

This kind of tactic is incredible important in equal-strength fleet situations where there is a critical support ship like a long range missile cruiser or carrier. It can be easy to miss the importance of such a thing during unequal engagements but it makes all the difference otherwise.

1403

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 24, 2019, 03:20:55 PM »

Not really a question but not sure where else to post this. Thank you very much for the addition of custom data to the weapon tooltips that came with the .9 update! It took me a while to get to it but now that I am there it's very flexible!

1404

Suggestions / Re: obey and ignore

« on: October 23, 2019, 08:20:12 PM »

Eliminate probably makes it way more attractive a target, so it overwelms a lot of it's self preservation, but presumably, not all of it. That said, tooltip saying "At all costs" is kinda wrong in that case.

"we also need a "stay behind the frontline!" or a "stay beside but never before bigger ships!" kind of command. Badly."

What is a frontline, and how do you define it? I agree, but honestly, I have no idea how to describe it.
As for beside, same deal. And yes, I want that behavior, but its hard to describe.

In both cases, it should be something like, Look where allies and enemies are, specifically the bigger ones. Try to keep big allies between, or semi-between, you and big enemies. I think.... But I don't write AI, and coding gets complex fast, so I have no idea how viable that actually is.

The last point would probably get tricky but I think it is possible. There is a lot of opportunity cost evaluation to be done there.

I would say my philosophy on ship tactics and orders really clashes with the reality of the first point, though. What I mean is, when I want to eliminate a target, specifically something like a carrier, there is only one reason I would want to do so: That target becomes more detrimental to my chances of winning the battle the longer it stays alive. It really needs to die as soon as possible and I'm willing to make sacrifices for it. Time is the factor in this case, so anything that makes this order take more time is detrimental and counterproductive to my goals. That includes self preservation.

As an example, a carrier is all about force projection. It can strike far away targets with a lot of firepower. It is absolutely deadly to smaller ships that I need to provide control over the battlespace and provide distractions so my heavy hitting ships can do their job. The longer it is able to send its waves of fighters and bombers the more impact it has on the state of said battle.

That is why, when I give the eliminate command on said carrier, I want the ships given the command to literally not care about anything else but getting within full weapons range of the target and giving it hell with everything they've got. I want them to ignore fighters. I want them to ignore missiles. Let PD handle it. If it doesn't? Oh well orders are orders and the mission comes first. The behavior should resemble a phalanx of cavalry crashing into a line of heavy infantry. That is how I think it should feel.

Think of the assault on the Executor in Return of the Jedi. When Commander Calrissian questions Admiral Ackbar about the plan to get so close, Ackbar essentially just goes: Yup I mean't what I said no matter the danger. Losses are inevitable but if this enemy ship survives literally the whole fleet is doomed anyway... so what do we have to lose? That is an eliminate command.

At that point, if the player loses more ships than he/she is comfortable with that is his/her own fault.  The impetus is on the player and the outcome is far more predictable once you start to get a real feel of what different combinations of ships can take on.

The most frustrating element of Starsector combat for me at this time is when I give an eliminate command on a carrier and the AI gets so concerned with missiles or fighters or flanking frigates that the carrier has time to retreat behind a better protected screen.

I want eliminate to mean:

https://youtu.be/ZkZvyfLC-LU?t=191

1405

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Star-Wars-Inspired Combat/RPG (v1.3.4) Update 10/01

« on: October 23, 2019, 10:51:43 AM »

Notes for upcoming update/"hotfix."

Let me know if anything seems wonky. Hoping to have it out by the weekend.

Spoiler

Campaign Content Additions and Balance Changes
-------------

 --- Campaign Changes:
-------------
    - Advanced and rarer vessels are less accessible as a whole in markets, and should no longer be salvageable through post-battle recovery (Enemy-wise) though you can still find them as derelicts from warzones for now (changing that later).
    - Starting options contain less starting vessels than before with the exception of harder starts such as Pirate or Adamantine Consortium.
    - Increased minimum bounties active at a time.
    - Reduced amount of enemy raider bases active.
    - Increased payouts for bounties.
    - Removed use of autofit in NPC fleets.

 --- Faction Changes:
-------------
    - Further increased Luddic Church vessels' effectiveness.
    - Reduced most factions' use of dedicated carrier vessels (Improves large-scale campaign performance.)
    - Hegemony Condor now gains Targeting Feed ship system instead of Burn Drive. (Carrier changes make this necessary.)
    - Luddic Church Condor now gains Reserve Deployment ship system instead of Burn Drive. (Carrier changes make this necessary.)
    - Removed use of Retibution fighters, Thermal Pulsers and Thermal Cannons from Sci-Corps fleets (personal preference. It had too much of a Christmas kind of feel )
-----


Combat Balance Changes
-------------
 - Frigates: Added built in hullmod that lets frigates low-flux boost up to 35% max flux and increases damage dealt to fighters by 100% and incoming missiles by 50%.
 - Further increased hitpoints of Atropos torpedoes and Shockwave rockets.
 - Increased flux cost of Punisher Artillery System to be inefficient like other non-missile Fire Support weapons.
 - Slightly reduced hit damage of Devastator Cannon.
 - Reduced hit damage of Antimatter Blaster by 20%. (Was too good for being so flux efficient despite the short range.)
 - Increased flux per shot of Plasma Cannon. Almost inefficient.
 - Increased Peak Performance Time on many rare ships and all phase ships.
 - Increased armor penetration and burst damage of the Claw bomber's light tactical laser.
 - Reduced Heavy Thunderbolt Launcher's damage per second by 33% (Not its strike damage).
 - All dedicated carriers now have a large penalty to their low-flux speed bonus to better prevent kiting. (Carriers now absolutely require escorts to offset their combat range.)
 - Reduced Fighters per wing by a range of 33% - 50% in all cases but the highest tiered fighters.
 - Increased fighter bay amount in dedicated carriers and most combat carriers past the destroyer-sized hull size.
 - Increased supply per deployment gap between hull sizes.
 - Increased supply per deployment gap (slightly) between pure assault-class and fighter-carrying hulls.
 - Increased fighter replacement times substantially.
 - Increased the benefit of the built in carrier hullmod reducing fighter replacement times.
 - Changed Barrage Hammer launcher back to alternating fire behavior. (turns out linked fire makes it weaker to flak rather than stronger overall as I had hoped)
 - Further increased the range threshold of Safety Overrides. (continuing to improve Luddic Path combat strength)
 - Reduced the CR decay per second on dedicated carriers to allow them to more effectively retreat since their speed has been greatly reduced.

--- Faction Hullmod Changes:
-------------
 - Simple Core Systems now increase armor by 100 in addition to its usual effects.
 - Updated Core Systems now increases max flux by 20% in addition to its usual effects, and the shield damage reduction bonus has increased.
 - Luddic Church now has even more increased speed but reduced hull flexibility as far as weapon loadouts (Lower Ordinance Points) and variants have been adjusted accordingly.
    - ^(Similar to Luddic Path- but a less patched-together zealous feel because of the removal of both permanent weapon failures and low PPT associated with Pather hulls.)
    - ^(With these changes, I'm hoping to provide capitalization on strengths and minimalization of weaknesses from an AI standpoint.)
    - ^(To the player, the hulls will seem more balanced as far as player piloting is concerned since previously the hulls mostly provided benefits over drawbacks.)

--- Station Balance Changes:
-------------
 -
--- Ship System Changes:
-------------
 -

--- Ship Changes:
-------------
 - Increased Legion max flux and dissipation.
 - Added an additional Large Ballistic turret slot to Legion.
 - Added additional fighter bays to Legion, Executor, Astral, Megalith, Nightreaver, Epiphany, Odyssey and Pillager hulls.
 - Increased Havok armor.
 - Increased Shrike armor.
 - Aegis now designated a light cruiser. (Better fits its size and power)
 - Added an additional two Large Synergy turrets to the Executor in place of its former side-facing medium Synergy turrets.
 - ^(Adjusted variants accordingly.)
 - Increased Justicar, Revenant and Megalith max flux, and dissipation (reduced their potency a bit too much last update.)
 - Increased Revenant weapon count.
 - Increased Megalith and Revenant fighter bay count and ordinance points (Not as high as before).
 - Re-adjusted cruiser and destroyer speed.
 - Increased Malevolent and Astral max flux.
 - Reduced Malevolent armor and slightly increased Megalth armor.
 - Added additional fighter bay to Eagle to synergize wtih its standard ship system and soften the blow of the number per wing reduction to fighters.
-----


Bug Fixes
-------------
 - Fixed calculation of Simple Core System's shield damage increase in its description to match its actual effects.
 - Fixed calculation of Updated Core System's shield damage decrease in its description to match its actual effects.
 - Added rarity modifiers to all ship hulls (actually missed the very presence of that column in the ship.csv file, ugh)
 - Corrected Adamantine Consortium faction start to use correct ships instead of the Tri-Tachyon variant.
 - Removed chance for an error to occur during campaign start due to overrides within the settings portion of the mod.
 - Dedicated carriers should now act accordingly among all faction variants and attempt to avoid the front lines and remain behind combat vessels.
 - Hopefully fixed issue with some faction starts causing Galatia to not properly reconnect with the Core World's economy.
 - Jangala is now finally a Hegemony starfortress instead of a Persean League starfortress.
 - Xanathos now actually acts like a black hole instead of a standard star. It is now an extreme hazard. Some colonies are moved father away from the event horizon to prevent too many patrols from being caught in its grip.
-----


Misc
-------------
 - Polished Adamantine Consortium stations look to have better lighting at the edges.
 - Polished Condor (Ad) sprite to better match new theme for the Consortium.
 - Updated Antimatter Blaster sprite to match modern Starsector.
 - Increased battle size defaults (can still be lowered) due to better performance.
 - Hopefully increased performance in late campaign during max battles by 25%-40%.
 - Changed engine color of conversions that change tech to match the tech that the hull is being converted to.
 - Reduced fleet strength variance in Random Battle and Random Fleet Battle missions.
 - Changed Retribution sprite to better match a Hegemony-dominated production.
 - Increased the radius of orbit for several Archean Order entities to help prevent their patrols from crossing the event horizon of Xanathos.

[close]

1406

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 22, 2019, 07:55:49 PM »

Check star_gen_data.csv - iirc the solar wind there has a negative direction?

Also see: StarSystemGenerator.setBlackHoleIfBlackHole() - that adds the event horizon terrain.

Thanks! Worked like a charm. Xanathos just got a lot more dangerous. 

1407

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 21, 2019, 07:24:04 PM »

How do I make a black hole have the correct hazard rather than a corona?

1408

General Discussion / Re: Battle Tactics

« on: October 21, 2019, 10:52:11 AM »

@Serenitis

Oh wow I never thought of that one. That would indeed be brutal. Massed reinforcements like that can already steamroll battles at times without such dirty rotten tricks making it worse for the AI lol.

I notice this happening when a battle is roughly even but ships have split up in their own skirmishes across the battlefield. If you save your reinforcement points to deploy a bunch of ships at once they can isolate and pick off the entire AI force piecemeal if they are fast enough.

I would say the AI probably needs some kind of tactical retreat setting to regroup with its own reinforcements based on the evolving battlefield. Essentially it would set a defend order in the top half of the map and perform a fighting retreat with all of their forces until they are sufficiently regrouped and can tackle a concentrated force.

Not gonna lie, that wouldn't be easy to implement. Unfortunately, its probably necessary nevertheless.

1409

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 20, 2019, 09:09:39 PM »

Ahh, hmm, yeah, I wasn't thinking about that, you're right. I suppose you *could* probably clear out the "recoverable" salvage special on nearby derelicts as needed with a script, even if that's a bit of an inelegant approach.

Could I make the hullmod do the inverse and set the recovery rate average for the player only and check for things that make that number 100? (might be more things than I think and would likely be update volatile, though)

Then add the UNBOARDABLE tag?

1410

General Discussion / Re: Battle Tactics

« on: October 20, 2019, 03:41:59 PM »

It's single player. If you want to camp the map edge knock yourself out. If it bothers you then stop. The same way you choose to save scum or not, or to edit your save file to give yourself 20 paragons or not. It's up to you to manage your game experience as you see fit.

I never tried edge camping so I may be wrong but to me it already sounds like it has sufficient tradeoffs. Yes you can't be flanked but you also can't kite back to vent or to maneuver so it can be very bad if you are pressed by a strong enemy. I've had some battles when I ended up pressing the AI against the map edge and it went very badly for him. Well obviously it was going badly as it is but after they got pressed against the map they all ended up clumped together, bumping into each other. Also unless you camp the corner you can in fact be flanked at the edges of your formation where the enemy can mass locally superior forces, where as in a center of the map deployment your formation can shift around to respond to enemy movement.

Ultimately I suppose the viability of this strategy is mainly a matter of fleet style. If you like to roll around with Onslaughts and Dominators then it's probably very strong as you say. I usually prefer lighter faster fleets that need to move around to win. Especially my flagship will almost always be an overgunned cruiser or capital with a mobility system that relies on hit and runs and venting. Something like a DME Kormoran or a Blackrock Nevermore.

You are partly correct, but to me it's mostly an AI limitation. Enemy fleet AI doesn't really understand that the tactic is being used and wants the surround if it has and needs more ships (in its estimation) to beat the fleet in front of it. Because it doesn't realize that's impossible or at least detrimental to attempt, many ships hold off attacking and trickle in to die when they try and flank. This is compounded on by the fact that the player is very aware of what they are doing. Especially while piloting a mobile ship, they can just wait for that opportunity over and over again. Its the equivalent of camping in a room with a single door holding a shotgun in FPS games. Without grenades, no experienced player enters that room if they can help it. Its suicide. The AI can't make that decision and just jumps into the meat grinder.

And that's not even getting into how carriers can capitalize on this strategy even more efficiently.

I'm not saying there are easy ways to solve the AI's problem with this, but I would definitely classify it as an unintended exploit.

Just stop doing it?

Right, single player game and all, but still kind of a bad argument for not fixing an exploit. That's a little like saying "just ignore colonies because they give you so much credits and it makes the game easy, we don't really need an endgame to balance that out." Sure, you can do that, but the second you find yourself truly in a challenging situation that has long term financial consequences (like the game intends) you will likely be sorely tempted to give in. Why is that different than something like imbalanced mods or console commands? I'll try to explain:

Many players can compartmentalize the difference between what the game intends and makes available vs what mods or cheats (console commands) can offer. Its two different categories of content and so, psychologically, you as the player kind of "bought into the imbalance" of the second category.

When a player is playing for the first time (golden experience) they expect something a little different. The bar is higher for balance because its "cannon" design and so exploits in that arena are harder to ignore because they can sometimes feel intentional (since the dev didn't feel the need is the assumption as to why it wasn't fixed rather than they just didn't catch it which is likely more often the case). That's why even in single player games exploits (or obviously overwhelmingly efficient play styles) are often patched out later in the modern gaming era.

Back in the days when you couldn't do that as easily (cartridges, etc) the games with bad or numerous exploits were often just considered sub-par to those without them. It seems easy to just ignore them, but when your reward in learning is so often tied to achieving better prowess at the game, knowing you are ignoring "supposedly intended" (again the assumption the new player often makes not my personal opinion) and far more optimal strategies- just for what they would consider a better balance to the experience- is almost always off-putting.

EDIT: Oh almost forgot:

I think as @bobucles said that a heightened ppt drain around the corners would be pretty easy to implement and make the tactic less efficient. Like the shotgun in a room example, if you can you starve them out. It also gives a tangible effect to track in the combat layer that could actually be hooked into the AI.

Player ship in this zone? Don't follow them (put an Ignore order) and only assign fighter strikes, etc. That would be a lot easier than trying to get the AI to be tactically aware of a tactic like that.