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[Serenitis]

A few things which have made me think why?

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When in hyperspace looking at a system, some jump points will display "no nearby bodies" in their tooltip.
Suggest all jump points display at least the nearest major body in the system preferably the nearest two or three, in order make understanding the dynamic system layouts a little easier.

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When flying around the campaign map, the music will sometimes swap to another track even though the current one has not finished.
It sometimes does this several times a minute and sounds quite.... Messy.
Is there any way to reduce the frequency of these swaps? Or better yet just pick a track and play it until it ends or is interrupted by market/fleet interaction.

(A mod thing?)

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NPC fleets seem to really like sitting in hostile "terrain", which runs down their CR to nothing and makes some fleets much easier to defeat than they should be.
Very noticable with bounty fleets who tend to sit and wait for a while.
Suggest NPC fleets try to avoid hostile terrain unless they are trying to escape from someone.

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Hostile terrain itself could use a little bit of taming as some of them are very trap-ish.

Hyperspace clouds are annoying. They have very fuzzy undefined bounds, appear out of nowhere, slow you to almost a standstill, and eat a horrible amount of supplies.
Suggest removing the CR degradation, but keep the suspended repairs/readiness so they are still nuisance speed traps which stop you repairing, but don't make you heamorage money into space for reasons you can't readily control.

Coronae are pretty. Except in Askonia where it is a pain, as the corona sometimes passes beyond Sindria and into the asteroid belt making probably the only decent source of fuel quite expensive to visit.
Suggest either reducing the radius of the Askonia corona, or toning down the CR loss.

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The squall MLRS is very underwhelming. It doesn't have enough range to be useful for bombardment, it doesn't have good enough tracking to be useful in a skirmish, and it doesn't hit hard enough to make up for the majority of missiles that miss their target.
Suggest looking at changing one of those.

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I can open the map with <Tab>, and then close the map with <Tab>.
I can open the intel with <e>, and then nothing.
Please could we make the key to open a screen also close that screen be a universal thing?

[Morbo513]

Agreed on all except the changes to hyperspace nebulae - Navigating them is pretty easy if you're not chasing or being chased - you'll often be through them by the time they storm up, and as long as you're not accelerating time you'll be able to react to them doing so before you hit them. There's usually a "warm-up" period where it begins to glow bright, but there's no storm. Flying through one during this period (Depending on how early you hit it and your burn speed) is a good way to lose a tailing fleet.
However as you said, AI pathfinding is an issue here. Not really sure how it works exactly, but a nebula cloud that's about to storm up should have a big "don't fly through here" sign for AI.

[Alex]

(A mod thing?)

Probably? Off the top of my head, I think so.

NPC fleets seem to really like sitting in hostile "terrain", which runs down their CR to nothing and makes some fleets much easier to defeat than they should be.
Very noticable with bounty fleets who tend to sit and wait for a while.
Suggest NPC fleets try to avoid hostile terrain unless they are trying to escape from someone.

Could you provide a bit more detail about that? It does try to avoid coronas, hyperstorm, etc, so it would be good to know where it fails.

One case where I know it does is when it ends up orbiting a planet with an Ion Storm - i.e. Aka Mainyu in Duzahk - but aside from that I haven't seen consistent issues w/ it.

The squall MLRS is very underwhelming. It doesn't have enough range to be useful for bombardment, it doesn't have good enough tracking to be useful in a skirmish, and it doesn't hit hard enough to make up for the majority of missiles that miss their target.
Suggest looking at changing one of those.

Yep. Meaning to do that, not happy with how that one turned out.

I can open the map with <Tab>, and then close the map with <Tab>.
I can open the intel with <e>, and then nothing.
Please could we make the key to open a screen also close that screen be a universal thing?

Did at one point but it was kind of annoying; led to many unintentional closings of other screens. For the map, for some reason, it just feels different.

[Serenitis]

...a nebula cloud that's about to storm up should have a big "don't fly through here" sign for AI.

That would be p. helpful in general. Folk say that you can see them flash before the storm starts, but I've never seen this and routinely get caught in them as I seldom have the fuel to take the "scenic" route. The only storms I can see are the ones which are active.
(yes, my eyes are pretty rubbish and slowly getting worse thanks )

Could you provide a bit more detail about that? It does try to avoid coronas, hyperstorm, etc, so it would be good to know where it fails.

Aka Mainyu is the big offender, a bounty that spawns there is usually a fair bit easier.
The only other ones that come to mind are in mod systems.


I'll look out for it and make a note.

Did at one point but it was kind of annoying; led to many unintentional closings of other screens. For the map, for some reason, it just feels different.

I'm constantly opening up the intel screen to check a bounty pressing <e> again to close it, then sighing and double pressing <Tab> to get out of it.
Is the intel screen one of the unintentionally closable ones?

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[edit]

After a brief tour the I made a note of the following re: NPC fleets running their CR down in hazards.


Always present.

Duzahk - Aka Mainyu
The star's corona overlaps the planet at its fullest extent, and flares extend well beyond that.

Askonia
Patrol fleets regularly fly through the (huge) corona and often end up meeting an invader fleet and getting steamrolled.
I don't think the AI is terribly 'aware' of the effects a corona has and why it should be avoiding it. 
This happens in every system btw, but since most systems have a negligble area of corona it is not all that noticable. Askonia with its much larger coronal area really suffers from this. (Magec is also somewhat similar.)

Rare.

All these points share the same feature - they lie right on the extremity of a corona, and the usual variations might see them overlaped by it.
But they all get swamped by flares so any fleet spawned there stands a good chance of being degraded if their holding point is in the 'right' alignment.

Magec - Chaxiraxi
Yma - Huascar
Eos - Phaosphoros/Lucifer

[King Alfonzo]

I am aware that Rock Citadel in the Metellson system also has this.

[VuNut]

It does try to avoid coronas, hyperstorm, etc, so it would be good to know where it fails.

In general just watch fleets travelling through hyperspace. Sooner or later you'll see one utterly fail to avoid a brewing storm, and potentially get stuck flying in circles because they're smack in the middle of a bunch of them. Issue seems to be that they only avoid storms when they're already happening rather than when they're clearly imminent (clouds are glowing brighter).

Avoidance also doesn't seem to happen until the hazard is actually touched in some cases (watch a fleet trying to reach somewhere on the other side of a star; they're almost always skirting way too close and are in the corona as a result).

By the way, could hazard avoidance be used for the player fleet as well when flying to a set destination (such as when you've clicked a star on the map in hyperspace)?

[Serenitis]

re: Squall

I've changed some numbers around and made it feel a bit more useful, but it's still not 'right'.
The biggest problem I'm finding with it is that the missiles tend to like swerving around their target rather than hitting it.

Spoiler

Changed .proj
"turnAcc":200,
"turnRate":200,
It helps with the swerving issue a little by letting the missiles swing round for 'another go', but ends up with a janky looking whirlwind of little blue streaks orbiting a ship.
We don't want to make the tracking too good though otherwise we just end up with a 'press button to overload enemy' device.

Changed .csv
range: 3000
proj speed: 800
flight time: 6
burst delay: 0.3
Makes the weapon 'feel' a little more like something you'd use for bombardment. Also helps a little with the improved course correction.

[close]

[Midnight Kitsune]

re: Squall

I've changed some numbers around and made it feel a bit more useful, but it's still not 'right'.
The biggest problem I'm finding with it is that the missiles tend to like swerving around their target rather than hitting it.

Spoiler

Changed .proj
"turnAcc":200,
"turnRate":200,
It helps with the swerving issue a little by letting the missiles swing round for 'another go', but ends up with a janky looking whirlwind of little blue streaks orbiting a ship.
We don't want to make the tracking too good though otherwise we just end up with a 'press button to overload enemy' device.

Changed .csv
range: 3000
proj speed: 800
flight time: 6
burst delay: 0.3
Makes the weapon 'feel' a little more like something you'd use for bombardment. Also helps a little with the improved course correction.

[close]

Sadly the Missile AI, which causes the swerving, that they use isn't a good one. We need more AIs to use for different missiles as missiles aren't a one size fits all" kind of thing

[Serenitis]

Sadly the Missile AI, which causes the swerving, that they use isn't a good one. We need more AIs to use for different missiles as missiles aren't a one size fits all" kind of thing

Yes.
Which is something else that can be added to the list.
The swerving back and forth does make missiles look cool, but it degrades their ability to actually hit things. Sometimes to the point of making said missiles rather pointless eg; old Atropos.

Also, it might be useful in the future if a missile AI could be made to fly a 'lead pursuit' course toward it's target - ie, fly to where the target will be rather than where it is now.
Just flying at a target is fine for bombarding things, but not really useful for hitting anything which can move out of the way.

Not really super important, but it would be nice to have a dedicated interceptor missile at some point.

[e]

Another thing I've been thinking about.
Why do some civilian ships require a commission to buy?
Surely, by virtue of them being civilian they should be available pretty freely.

eg; It is possible to have two Atlas frieghters on a planet's market, one on the open market and another on the faction military market.
The one in the faction market requires a commission to buy while the other does not. For the same ship, with zero faction or military mods. I might be tilting at windmills here, but that just seems weird to me.

Suggestion: Any ship which has the 'civilian hull' mod should not require a commission. (Conversely, any ship with the 'militarised' mod should require one.)

[MesoTroniK]

This AI with the mirving component removed would suit the Squall perfectly.

[Midnight Kitsune]

This AI with the mirving component removed would suit the Squall perfectly.

Yup, agreed. That's actually what I had in mind as an example of another good missile AI

[MesoTroniK]

Also, it might be useful in the future if a missile AI could be made to fly a 'lead pursuit' course toward it's target - ie, fly to where the target will be rather than where it is now.
Just flying at a target is fine for bombarding things, but not really useful for hitting anything which can move out of the way.

Missed this earlier, vanilla missile AI does lead the target, but it is not a perfect lead (intentionally) and improves with the ECCM hullmod somewhat. But the swerving behavior can make the leading harder to notice and also causes "intentional misses" sometimes as it does not taper that behavior off very much as it gets closer to the target

[Serenitis]

Missed this earlier, vanilla missile AI does lead the target, but it is not a perfect lead (intentionally) and improves with the ECCM hullmod somewhat. But the swerving behavior can make the leading harder to notice and also causes "intentional misses" sometimes as it does not taper that behavior off very much as it gets closer to the target

Cool. Had no idea this was a thing.
But no kidding the swerving makes it harder to notice - even harpoons with eccm 'look' like they're just following (and missing) the target.

Wait. Is that gif showing muscle launchers? I've never actually seen those in the game as they appear to be 'hens teeth' rare, but that AI looks like something that should be the default for missiles with only the long range bombardment/supression and short range saturation stuff being a cheap knockoff of robotech.

[MesoTroniK]

Cool. Had no idea this was a thing.
But no kidding the swerving makes it harder to notice - even harpoons with eccm 'look' like they're just following (and missing) the target.

Wait. Is that gif showing muscle launchers? I've never actually seen those in the game as they appear to be 'hens teeth' rare, but that AI looks like something that should be the default for missiles with only the long range bombardment/supression and short range saturation stuff being a cheap knockoff of robotech.

Well, maybe starting to derail this thread slightly but whatever still related somewhat.

Yes it is a gif of that weapon, it should be fairly common without Dynasector as a fair few THI ship variants use it. With Dynasector (seriously who plays without it???) it should be slightly more common on THI ships and other factions will sometimes use it as well especially lower tech ones.

Anyways, as far as you comment saying that an AI that works like that should be the default for most missiles? It most assuredly should not, since you have not yet tried the weapon it seems I will explain in detail exactly how that rather specialized custom AI works.

Fire
Drift on inertia with the engine off and face to the lead intercept point of its target (with a bit of random innacuracy added)
Accelerate and it can no longer adjust its course at all literally becoming a rocket
Mirvs on any hostiles it passes near using a 360 degree radius check

Anyways, if the MIRV stage was removed I would basically consider the Muscle LRM the Squall done right. Like Midnight Kitsune said... Ideally vanilla would have more missile AI types than exist now.

[Serenitis]

Me in continuing to be wrong shocker.

When starting a new game it would be nice to be able to directly choose which ship you start with.
OR
If this is not possible/desirable, have the outcomes of the various choices displayed to the player before they are selected.
So if I mouseover the smuggler start I am shown that I'll be given a Hound, the trader start a Cerberus etc.
(Having the mouse click on an option highlight it and display the outcome and an 'OK' button instead of having tooltips would also be cool.)