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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Balance, skills and general musings  (Read 23974 times)

nomadic_leader

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #75 on: December 03, 2018, 06:48:22 AM »

Ammo limit isn't micro for the sake of it. It's micro because it affects gameplay and makes sense, given that that IS what a ship captain would have to take into account.

I agree.
CR is too abstracted; unfun and unintuitive. An overreaction to a few savant players like Megas obsessively kiting an onslaught with a tempest then posting a lot (thanks for CR, Megas  ;) ). Then, not addressing the smaller issues such as:

How come ships can shoot energy weapons endlessly without running out of power? Why don't ammo-unlimited energy weapons draw off a common battery?

Why aren't large weapons  even stronger / longer range than medium/small mounts to inhibit kiting? Otherwise, there wouldn't be big slow ships in the sector.

How come big ship doesn't retreat when it sees its being kited? Show the AI a graph of its own flux vs Megas' flux, see the same pattern repeating like a sine wave over 5 tedious minutes, and make it retreat.

How come, no matter how long you spend cheesing some big ship in combat, time in campaign doesn't increment, so you don't have to worry about anything else happening?

Why are big ships slower than small ones anyway? Even in the WWII navel combat which starsector is trying to recapture by way of Star Wars, bigger ships were faster than smaller ships (though not airplanes), because bigger ships have bigger engines.  They just have bad acceleration/turning than small ones.

Also, there are times when a smaller, better ship is just going to be better than a big ship. Maybe that's ok?

It doesn't make sense to put this abstracted, tabletop-style mechanic into a twitch component of the game. On campaign, the play is more abstracted so CR feels less wrong. But not in combat.

Oh well, it's done. I do like Starsector because it is good world building and fun overall still (and complaining about it on the forums is also fun), but if it has one systemic flaw it's "overthinking": increasingly convoluted mechanics in order to 'simplify' micromanagement, redesign of economy 4 times and counting, etc. Honestly I have no idea how fighters work still, because i gave up on reading those academic blog treatises.
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SCC

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #76 on: December 03, 2018, 06:50:25 AM »

Some weapons, like autopulse lasers still act that way, and I vastly prefer it as a way of adding an ammo management aspect to a weapon. It allows for tactical striking and and a soft limit on sustained firepower, while still being effectively usable by the AI.

I am *all* for this. They're fun weapons to shoot and maneuver with, without being overly punitive, and misses still have consequences.
While autopulse works similar, it's a different situation, since it's basically always short on ammunition and not only in prolonged engagements.

TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #77 on: December 03, 2018, 06:58:08 AM »

Not rewarding tedious, low risk behavior is a pretty universal game design guideline(and for good reason).
I have hundreds of hours in X3 and thousands in From the Depths, should matter a lot in a tedium-tolerance *** measuring contest :)

What?
What exactly is being rewarded here?


Quote
That restricts AI ship choices even more, anything using ballistics must be good in holding the line(so player doesn't cut them off and bumrush when ammo is out).
Let's assume there is a perfect AI that handles ammo well and recognizes being pushed, why is a different hard timer that only affects ballistics better?

Because it makes sense?
Because it even further gives different weapon weight and consequence?



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Why not just make every ship use supplies in combat, proportionally to their flux generation, for the ultimate resource management experience?

Eh? Combat doesn't last that long. Supplies are clothes, food, nuts and bolts, spare wires, toilet paper and other stuff. So things necessary to keep the ship and crew running long-term.

Now what could be used (after battle and for repairs) is metal - after all, you cannot replace melted/blown off armor with nothing.

Unless regular engines (not hyperspace ones) use fuel there's no need. Especially since generally the battles don't last long enough for it to be an issue. Ships usually have enough fuel for weeks and 15 minutes of manouvering is insignificant.



Quote
A bit too complex and also comes back to the AI: it's already hard to make decent decisions on an isolated strategic level.
Making that tie into tactical decisions is a nightmare, you might get an initial metric on how much a win is worth in any given battle
but really hard to avoid cutting off too early in winnable situations/committing too much in bad ones.

Even players would not make same deicisions, so why should the AI? If the AI retreats too soon - the captain/admiral was a coward or too cautious. If not, the admiral was agreesive/reckless.
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TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #78 on: December 03, 2018, 07:01:23 AM »

Two cases I can think of where the "retreat when on low ammo" approach fails, without trivial workarounds that were obvious to me:

1) High-tech convoy is caught by larger low-tech fleet. Could just retreat, but this exposes the civilian ships to danger.

HT combat ship plays "run enemy out of ammo". Low-tech ships all retreat. Convoy walks away with impunity as enemy has retreated.

2) High-tech vs. low tech 3v3. HT fleet runs an LT ship out of ammo, it retreats. HT fleet runs another LT ship out of ammo, it retreats. HT fleet swarms over last LT enemy and destroys it with impunity.

You could work around this by making the whole fleet retreat if average fleet ammo drops below X% or such, but how much fiddling are you going to do to get behavior that looks sensible, across the huge number of combinations of per-ship ammo levels possible? (And what works in one scenario may well be wholly broken in another).

1) that can only happen if low-tech fleet ignores the convoy craft and go for the escorts. And if HT ships don't get cornered.

2) Doesn't the AI take into account valid ships and general fleet strength already? If two ships start retreating, then it would be a 1 vs 3 scenario and the AI already retreats when outnumbered.
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SCC

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #79 on: December 03, 2018, 07:09:42 AM »

What?
What exactly is being rewarded here?
Waiting for low tech ships to run out of ammo, duh

Because it makes sense?
Realism shouldn't be taken into consideration when designing gameplay, unless realism is the point. If a realistic thing works, put it in. If it doesn't, too bad for reality.

Eh? Combat doesn't last that long. Supplies are clothes, food, nuts and bolts, spare wires, toilet paper and other stuff. So things necessary to keep the ship and crew running long-term.
Now what could be used (after battle and for repairs) is metal - after all, you cannot replace melted/blown off armor with nothing.
No, supplies are everything required to keep a ship running and firing. It's stuff for crew and life support, it's replacement parts, autofactory chips, "raw materials" for weapons or pre-made munitions, oils and coolants, spare fuel for reactors, many other things I forgot about. When a ships runs out of supplies, it starts failing apart. Metal, while it could be used for repairs (I personally don't have an issue with that), is the least complicated thing required for ships to continue operations.

nomadic_leader

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #80 on: December 03, 2018, 07:19:01 AM »

Because it makes sense?
Realism shouldn't be taken into consideration when designing gameplay, unless realism is the point. If a realistic thing works, put it in. If it doesn't, too bad for reality.

Realism and making sense aren't the same thing. Something can not be realistic and still make intuitive sense in the established context and rules of a fictional world.  CR doesn't make sense unless you've read a lot of blog posts and forced yourself to think so.
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Nimaniel

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #81 on: December 03, 2018, 07:20:37 AM »

In regards to skills, I find that levelling up 10 officers on each playthrough is the most tedious part of Starsector. For each officer, we have to make a choice between two skills, for each level beyond level 1.

That is up to 10x20 = 200 times I have to read BOTH skills to remind me exactly what my officer is getting at that level of the skill, and 95% of the time, the choice is obvious after reading the skills.

I wish there was a template with skill priorities that could be assigned to do this automatically. One template for carrier officers, and one for non-carrier officers.

Good/fun games are about _interesting_ decisions.
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StarGibbon

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #82 on: December 03, 2018, 07:42:41 AM »


True story. Too bad the AI doesnt have to fire fuel and supplies at a moving target.

Game AIs are great at micromanaging spreadsheets. Better than human. They are not great at predicting the almost infinite number of paths an opponent can travel from any fixed point with 360 degree of movement. Not on consumer grade hardware anyway.

It doesn't have to. This isn't rocket science, it's a game. Tracking ammo is basic math. I have X total ammo. Ha my ammo for my bg guns fallen below acceptable level? Yes? Then run.

If you want to talk about complex AI, starsector ship combat really isn't the place.


Again, you dont seem to grasp the apples and oranges you're arguing with here. Comparing numbers in columns is not the same thing as being able to shoot efficiently in a real time combat scenario.  The issue isn't with  an AI being able to determine whether its got any ammo left, it's being able to use that ammo efficiently enough that the ship doesn't become useless at some point during the combat.  The amount of limited ammo that might prove to be any kind of limiting factor for a human player would be crippling to the AI.

Wanting ammo limits enforced on yourself for a sense of challenge is understandable, but enforcing those same limits on AI ships creates more problems than it solves.


And for the record, I think Alex has created a fantastic combat engine--especially impressive given it's basically a solo project on that end.  There's plenty of complex stuff going on. It's just not the stuff you think you want.



Define "plenty". Because pretty much every shooter I've ever played features players sometimes having to carefully monitor their ammo while their opponents can shoot all day.

That's a case of dev lazyness, not some impossible hurdle.


I see the good ship Dunning-Kruger has now fully unfurled its sails.



It's a limitation designed to create a challenge for a *human* player, which is fine when the game is completely human vs AI. This game though, I have to rely on the AI on my side as well, and I dont want them running out of ammo in the middle of a fight and running away to leave me fighting the enemy alone. The fact you think this would in any way make for a better game is baffling.

Challenge? If anyone plays by the same rules, the challenge is there.

Running away? Why not grab ammo from an enemy corpse? Why not switch to a secondary? Why not ask for a mag?
And yes, it would make for a better game because you could do the same to the enemy.

Which game are we talking about again? None of those things apply to SS, and in the case of a single player shooter it's because any human is going to rapidly learn the firing patterns of an ai enemy and run out the clock on their limited ammo. Enemies are given unlimited ammo because they wouldn't pose much of a challenge otherwise. Because the path to creating an ai foe that can really anticipate a players movement and provide an actual challenge on equal footing is probably impossible on current consumer gaming hardware, but definitely far longer and difficult than solving the problem another way. And since development costs time and money, they exercise their human ability to make smart use of finite resources.


No, I just have realistic expectations for the AI. They can be useful with spray and pray missile types, forcing the opposing fleet to at least react to them. But they'll never be able to act as decisively with them as a human player. This is fine because missles are usually supplemental support weapons. But I need to be able to rely on the AI using their main weapons consistently, and doing damage. The AI cannot be expected to learn how to strike as opportunistically as a player can with finite ammo.

Guns would have enough ammo that you don't need to *** every single shell. And again, the AI will never be as good as the player at anything. It just has to be good enough.

As I said in my original post, "good enough" in this instance, is simply not good enough. You're arguing for ships and weapons than no player would choose to give to the ai if there was an alternative.  It doesnt matter if ballistic weapons were much more powerful in return. It would be a terrible decision to give them to the AI you're relying on.

And if the ammo limits arent going to be meaningful, what would be the point?



Look, you're pretty much arguing with the entire thread on this from what I can see. So this appears to be a waste of time.  Anyone who so convinced that AI is limited because developers are simply too lazy, isn't likely to be persuaded by anyone here no matter how reasonable their argument.
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Recklessimpulse

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #83 on: December 03, 2018, 07:54:50 AM »

I think ammo worked originally despite what the complaints that were held against it, but that it would need massive re-jigging or is no longer viable in light of the some times massive battles we now get in 0.9.
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Megas

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #84 on: December 03, 2018, 07:57:05 AM »

The reason ammo was dropped was probably because peak performance made ammo limits for most weapons redundant.  Clips were tried, but that just turned all ballistics into autopulse and it was effectively half DPS in prolonged shoot-outs.  Clips also gave trade-off between ballistics and energy instead of energy simply being generally inferior to ballistics.  Short range and high DPS versus long range and flux efficiency, that was a tradeoff.
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Draba

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #85 on: December 03, 2018, 08:07:18 AM »

CR is too abstracted; unfun and unintuitive. An overreaction to a few savant players like Megas obsessively kiting an onslaught with a tempest then posting a lot (thanks for CR, Megas  ;) ).

I didn't even know he did that until now, just played the old versions and in some missions/fights stalling was the way to win.
Think it's a reasonable assumption that Alex evaluated ammo himself and thought it doesn't add enough to justify its keep.

The issue isn't with  an AI being able to determine whether its got any ammo left, it's being able to use that ammo efficiently enough that the ship doesn't become useless at some point during the combat.  The amount of limited ammo that might prove to be any kind of limiting factor for a human player would be crippling to the AI.

And making sure it maintains a position from which retreating is possible without getting murdered.
Given how hard skimmer/phasing/plasma burn/burn drive can push the lines in the direction the player wants that's a non-trivial challenge.
Of course the answer to that is devs should stop being friggin lazy :)

CR doesn't make sense unless you've read a lot of blog posts and forced yourself to think so.

IMO it makes sense and is a very good abstraction of the situations you see in movies/shows("I'm giving her all she's got, Captain!").
Do think the timer and the degradation are a bit too punitive, especially on smaller things.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2018, 08:20:57 AM by Draba »
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #86 on: December 03, 2018, 08:49:47 AM »


IMO it makes sense and is a very good abstraction of the situations you see in movies/shows("I'm giving her all she's got, Captain!").
Do think the timer and the degradation are a bit too punitive, especially on smaller things.

But if you make timers less punitive, then it basically doesn't matter and there may as not well be CR in combat. So you also are on our side. :)

And sometimes in battle, a better smaller ship kiting a bigger older one is a legitimate outcome. Oh no, a B2 Spirit Destroyed a WWII vintage battleship, we have to introduce a really complicated mechanic to prevent this! Because only one kind of combat is allowed (battle of jutland every time for the win)

CR is basically just a way to give small ships/energy-ships ammo limits in a really confusing way. The way the timers sometimes decrement, sometimes don't, depending on what ships are nearby is a total facepalm. Consider the solutions made in my earlier post about how to remedy the kiting problem if it is a problem.

But of course, the game is never going to be finished if the actual developer redos all these now core mechanics. We're just hashing it out here for the amusement of doing so.
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StarGibbon

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #87 on: December 03, 2018, 09:06:13 AM »

Another nitpick on the idea of ships withdrawing from combat when they run out of ammo.

The only thing more useless than a ship that has run out of ammo, is a ship that isn't even there. Even otherwise useless ships still provide damage mitigation to the ships that are still contributing by absorbing fire and keeping the remaining ships from being focused on. For the purpose of winning the battle, those ships that ran out of ammo may as well have been destroyed.

Unless Low tech ships get unlimited deployment points now, and arent subject to the same fleet limits, allowing you to keep cycling in new bodies until they too become useless.  
« Last Edit: December 03, 2018, 09:58:24 AM by StarGibbon »
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Megas

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #88 on: December 03, 2018, 09:08:50 AM »

I started in early 0.53, or the last version before skills came into the game.  I was not here since the beginning like some others are, when tachyon lance was gloriously overpowered and ships did not have systems.

If gameplay remained the way it did in 0.54, I would build the auto-resolve character.  Max Leadership and Technology, cram enough ships to auto-resolve Hegemony Defense Fleet successfully, then auto-resolve everything else until the next fleet appears.  Much faster XP gain that way.  If I played battles, then I would deploy two Hyperion, then everything else when enemy could not deploy more than 40 or so DP worth of ships, then advanced toward their spawn point and kill ships trickling in before they fully enter the arena.  (They did not burn in quickly like they do in later versions).  There was no level cap until 0.8.

I soloed more during 0.6 and 0.7, due to various game mechanics, then largely abandoned soloing and went more toward clunkers starting at 0.8.  During those earlier times, combat was always profitable if you can solo anything, and with overpowered skills and most ships without them, people could solo.  I just happened to be vocal about it.

0.6 is when CR first appeared.  Ballistics became ammoless by later 0.65.
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Draba

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #89 on: December 03, 2018, 09:35:41 AM »

But if you make timers less punitive, then it basically doesn't matter and there may as not well be CR in combat. So you also are on our side. :)

And sometimes in battle, a better smaller ship kiting a bigger older one is a legitimate outcome. Oh no, a B2 Spirit Destroyed a WWII vintage battleship, we have to introduce a really complicated mechanic to prevent this! Because only one kind of combat is allowed (battle of jutland every time for the win)

CR is basically just a way to give small ships/energy-ships ammo limits in a really confusing way. The way the timers sometimes decrement, sometimes don't, depending on what ships are nearby is a total facepalm. Consider the solutions made in my earlier post about how to remedy the kiting problem if it is a problem.

But of course, the game is never going to be finished if the actual developer redos all these now core mechanics. We're just hashing it out here for the amusement of doing so.

There is some leeway between Afflictor/Wolf 180 second and CR not mattering at all :)

My complaint is how fast some things go from "losing supplies, better hurry up" to "dead in the water" (even things without delicate machinery).
I turned the battlesize up to 300 then 500, frigates can possibly run out halfway against some types of enemies in a "standard" battle.
Using them is already finnicky as you can't get officers for every single one and they are much more prone to dying anyway.

In general CR ticking down is already an incentive for hightech to push the action, could stretch that period out and make the occasional failure longer.
Just my preference, not very important.
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