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[Zenos Ebeth]

This may be a rant-ish post, but I've been getting extremely frustrated with these two mechanics recently.

Stalling AI is a behaviour I don't really understand in and of itself, the game is already slow enough that you don't need to add chasing down infinitely kiting ships to the mix. Phase ships in particular are really infuriating to fight with the current AI behaviour, if you don't have a phase ship of your own to catch them when they decloak it seems like catching the smaller phase ships is essentially a matter of waiting for their CR to run out, because you'll never catch them otherwise. I suppose making the AI ships cautious is intended to increase the challenge, but honestly I feel that if they were much more aggressive and attempted to swarm the player rather than run away from him it would be equally if not more challenging and incredibly more fun to fight against.

Now where the stalling AI leaves the realm of annoyance and becomes truly unplayable is when you take into account the inexplicably harsh CR mechanic.

This is really something I don't understand, and if the Dev reads this I'd be grateful for an explanation, why on earth was the CR mechanic made this bad ?! Before it would somewhat cripple your ship by the end of a fight, which I thought was fine, but now it might as well be a count-down to the self-destruction of your fleet. Even if you have a better fleet composition than the opponent, that you slowly grind down all his stuff, as long as they possess a critical mass of bodies to throw at you they can simply wait until your fleet disintegrates on its own. Now, beyond all discussions of realism and whatnot, this is just unfun. Honestly I don't even see what problem it solves. Preventing players from solo-ing fleets with an OP build ? If someone has fun doing that then why needlessly limit them ? It's not like this is a multiplayer game where everything has to be balanced.

Yeah, I actually can't see any good reason for this mechanic to be as harsh as it is currently. I'm open to being corrected of course, but the game heavily discourages you from having too big a fleet by making supply/fuel exponentially annoying to manage as you acquire more ships, while the CR mechanic heavily encourages you to have a bigger fleet than what you fight so you don't get caught into a losing war of attrition. On top of that, bounty fleets, which are the main source of income/fighting in the end-game, are enormous in terms of numbers and very hard to match in that regard.

Anyway, that's how I see it, this frustrating situation imo is not down to any single mechanic but a result of overcautious AI, too harsh CR and some ship build that abuse it hard like wolfs, medusas, phase ships and the likes.

[Megas]

I feel your pain, and I have either ranted on this or mocked what I call "cowardly AI" or "Spathi" off-and-on for the past year, which came since 0.8 was released.  The easiest counter to that is to load your fleet full of carriers (and put Converted Hangar on everything else that can take it) and saturate the field with fighters - they cannot run from that.  Of course, you need to survive long enough to afford them in the first place.

As annoying CR is, the alternative of no CR may be worse if the enemy can kite indefinitely.  Of course, with unlimited CR, something like Hyperion can solo everything due to having unlimited time to kill everyone.  On the other hand, without CR, ballistics would probably get their ammo limits back.

Phase ships did not have time shift at first.  Without that, they could sometimes survive for a long time, with peak performance to spare.  Now with time shift, they will run out of peak performance sooner than other ships.

In case you do not know, later versions of 0.8 feature level scaling on named bounties, and it is quite possible for them to upgrade faster than you can despite the game thinking you are strong enough to handle them.

[Linnis]

0 CR should cause other problems than ships turning into a bomb. Fighters do take care of kiting frigate (when thier AI gets fixed) but phase ships are basically out of reach for anything other than a phase frigate.

Maybe something that cause phase to use more and more flux as the battle goes on? Thier lethality is great for mixing up the combat but the movement part of their lethality also make them impossible to kill. Waiting for them to hit 0 CR and then shooting at what is essentially a debris is not fun indeed.

[Philo_sophist]

Not to derail the thread, but is anyone aware of any mods that change the way Combat Readiness works, or even removes it entirely? I'd think there must be at least some CR tweak mods out there, but I did a few searches and couldn't find any...

[Cik]

best thing would be if phase ships would just retreat before becoming debris.

since killing them is no longer imperative (IIRC they are never required to complete bounties) there's no reason for them to suicide by waiting so long.

[Dri]

Everyone who wants CR removed just wants to be able to fly around forever in a single ship and slowly whittle down entire fleets solo. We all remember those ancient videos of guys in Tempests taking down entire Hegemony Defense Fleets...so, so broken.

[Megas]

Everyone who wants CR removed just wants to be able to fly around forever in a single ship and slowly whittle down entire fleets solo. We all remember those ancient videos of guys in Tempests taking down entire Hegemony Defense Fleets...so, so broken.

It is not just no CR, it is also unskilled enemy ships too.  Even with peak performance, it was still possible for skilled Tempest or Afflictor to solo the completely unskilled Hegemony Defense Fleet in early 0.6 era (pre-0.6.5), barely finished before CR decays too much.  Of course, it was better to use Medusa instead, which had unlimited peak performance back then.  Only frigates (except Brawler) and Buffalo 2 has peak performance during those days.  Then, all ships got peak performance around 0.6.5, which is when classic three Onslaught Hegemony System Defense Fleet disappeared, and named bounties with killer flagship with Combat 10 took over HSDF's place as top fleet.

If I want CR removed, it would be to chain-battle one-after another just like in the Starfarer or pre-0.6 days.  CR is like a second hit point bar, with hull being the first.  CR in some earlier versions used to be very brutal, where ships would be ready to malfunction after one fight, then supplies would be consumed at an extremely fast rate.  It was really bad in the first 0.6 release.

[Zenos Ebeth]

Everyone who wants CR removed just wants to be able to fly around forever in a single ship and slowly whittle down entire fleets solo. We all remember those ancient videos of guys in Tempests taking down entire Hegemony Defense Fleets...so, so broken.

I never advocated for CR to be removed in my post, as you have surely noticed. But I do think it's too harsh right now, it should cripple your ship's performance in the long run, not make it completely unusable. As it is right now any battle where you run out of CR before the enemy might as well auto-resolve into a loss. It's boring because there's zero skill involved in the whole thing, literally the only way you can control your CR bleed is to stay as far away from enemy ships as possible lol.

And even then it's not like the CR mechanic is preventing OP builds, sure I guess instead of solo'ing fleets with one super ship I just watch endless hordes of bomber tear apart anything in their path, but's what the difference ? Starsector is very, very far from being a balanced game and it doesn't need to be since it's exclusively single player.

[Dri]

Oof, you brought the whole "It's single player so who cares about balance" can of worms up, eh?

A fleet of carriers with bombers is a much better form of balance than a single super ship going to town on an entire enemy armada—it'd cost you far more credits to form and far more supplies to field. In the end though, CR exists to prevent certain "cheese" tactics (such as the aforementioned speedy ship hit-and-running an entire fleet) and to also punish you for bad play on the strategic map (getting yourself surrounded by enemy fleets and forced to fight multiple battles in quick succession). Playing poorly on the battle map gets your ships destroyed—if you play poorly on the star map then there should also be consequences for that, don't you think?

I know full well that CR isn't popular and I'm certain that when the game finally launches for real and goes up for sale on Steam or whatever, there'll be a huge flood of "I HATE CR" posts, but removing it at this point seems pretty impossible! I wish Alex the best of luck on any future tweaks of the system he may choose to implement...

[Alex]

I'll just say, real quick, that I definitely acknowledge the passivity of enemy AI ships in some circumstances; in 0.9a there are some AI changes to help address this. There are also multiple means to force an engagement by most enemy ships - carriers, Salamanders, ships with Safety Overrides. So, yeah, it *can* be a problem but generally speaking the game gives you several means of handling it.

In addition, some ships that are more annoying to fight in low numbers - such as phase ships - don't spawn in small fleets. (If they do, it's either a bug or a more rare case of a larger fleet getting pared down by combat... come to think of it, I don't actually know if mods do things the same way, since how this works out depends on how it's configured; that's an interesting question.) The idea being that by the time you get to "cleaning up" those, their CR is running down already, so it's not half as bad as having to wait them out from the start.

(As far as CR and peak time - the main means at your disposal of not running out of it is taking out your enemies more quickly Which, alright, maybe that's a bit facetious, but it is very much something that's encouraged by the presence of peak time, and I think that's a positive. Ships with Safety Overrides take that up a couple of notches.)

[Cyan Leader]

It's boring because there's zero skill involved in the whole thing

That's not true. CR is essentially making the whole battle timed and if you are able to finish enemies quickly you get rewarded for it. (though If you can't, the option to chain deploy is always there)

There are also multiple means to force an engagement by most enemy ships - carriers, Salamanders, ships with Safety Overrides. So, yeah, it *can* be a problem but generally speaking the game gives you several means of handling it.

I strongly agree with this. An SO'd Aurora, for example, can catch pretty much 99% of the ships in the game. There are many options available to deal with these problems which require different playstyles. I understand that players like Megas take enjoyment in 100% optimizing the game which leads to dull options but that is by far not the only way to play.

[Schwartz]

(As far as CR and peak time - the main means at your disposal of not running out of it is taking out your enemies more quickly Which, alright, maybe that's a bit facetious, but it is very much something that's encouraged by the presence of peak time, and I think that's a positive. Ships with Safety Overrides take that up a couple of notches.)

The catch here is that the AI is under the same pressure to finish a fight quickly. Yet they kite a lot too. The presence of CR (and commanders knowing that their ships are gonna fall apart within minutes of combat) should make pre-combat maneuvering and quick, hard strikes the strategy of choice. I don't like this idea too much. So on the one hand we have the CR mechanic that tries to curb the cheese to a minimum, and on the other hand we have the AI on both sides pretending it doesn't exist. Or at least underplaying its significance.

It's weird, I do like CR. I like it everywhere but in combat. If combat just took a fixed percentage off the top, that would be fine with me. But of course there's the player cheese. I wonder if there aren't other ways to discourage soloing and kiting. Prolonged 'mexican standoffs' with maneuvering and sieges have their own kind of charm and currently we can't really have these.

With the introduction of 'swarm bonuses' for navigation & shot range compounding against solo efforts, couldn't we take the boot off CR timers a bit?

[Megas]

I forgot to mention your AI ships are cowards too, not just the enemy.  Unfortunately, Eliminate is not the solution (if your side does not have the advantage) because the enemy will cower and deathball more, then surround and pick off your ships.

Like Schwartz says, AI ignores or does not care about CR.  It will happily kite and deathball indefinitely if allowed.  If they hit zero CR, you have to kill them before your fleet decays to zero CR next.  Few times, I saw AI vs. AI fleets run out of CR then drift helplessly through space like Trumbles in Oolite.  Neither side could do anything.

It makes sense for Remnants to kite because they have more peak performance than most ships of their class.

Re: Aurora
It is not exactly a common ship, and some of the weapons it needs or wants are rare.  Also, it is a bit expensive to throw around as a one-shot hunter-killer.  SO Aurora is not that great if it needs to deal with a deathball.

With the introduction of 'swarm bonuses' for navigation & shot range compounding against solo efforts, couldn't we take the boot off CR timers a bit?

I do not think that is a justification because by endgame, both sides (should) have 'swarm bonuses', and you are back to square one.  If the enemy does not have it, they are probably fodder and dead.  If you do not have them (due to not knowing any better), you are at a permanent handicap, and you will probably restart the game and take those must-have skills as you rebuild your character.

However, I think smaller ships do not have enough peak performance for endgame fights, and I do not use them for that purpose.  For big endgame fights, cruisers are often used in roles frigates were used for in during early game.

[Morbo513]

The only issue I have with CR is, as others have pointed out, how AI play into it. They seemed much more aggressive in 0.72.
Other than that, it serves its purpose; A soft time-limit on combat, emulating combat fatigue and logistical strain, and most importantly, interlinking the meta-game with combat.

[Megas]

The only issue I have with CR is, as others have pointed out, how AI play into it. They seemed much more aggressive in 0.72.

It was more fun back then too.

Three to four minutes frigates have is a bit short but workable back then before 0.8.  Today, with cowardly AI, it is far too short later in the game.  Even destroyers do not have quite enough peak performance to last in endgame fights.  It is a reason why cruisers (aside from Drovers) are the smallest ships I use for endgame battles.  Of course, it helps that Falcon is effectively a high-end destroyer with cruiser-class shot range and peak performance, and Falcons are common.

It would be nice if there was another light cruiser or destroyer-in-a-cruiser-chassis aside from Falcon.