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Author Topic: Balance, skills and general musings  (Read 23973 times)

TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #90 on: December 05, 2018, 01:32:33 AM »

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.

What?
It's exactly what I said, except you added ammo under "supplies", which I didn't, since ammo is handled and stored separately from general supplies.

In regards to metal use, you could have it so it's 1 metal for every 10% of hull repaired, or you could use the actual hull value repaired/100 or something. Either way it would make all that metal you gain from salvaging more useful.
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SCC

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #91 on: December 05, 2018, 01:42:29 AM »

since ammo is handled and stored separately from general supplies.
How so? I have never seen "ammunition" commodity, nor I had to use it to restore my ships to combat ready state.

TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #92 on: December 05, 2018, 02:09:36 AM »

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.

Bollocks. Any ship can become useless in combat in one way or another.
What are missile frigates/destroyers equipped with limited ammo missiles then?

The whole point of retreating IS the AI realizing the ship is becoming useless, so pull out and replace with a fresh ship. Fleet combat - other ships are there too.


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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.

There are no problems.
You think a ship retreating is a problem. You think the AI not making maximum use of a weapon is a problem - like ammo makes a critical difference in that. News flash - the AI cannot you with infinite ammo if you're good either.

Just like CR, ammo forces fleets/ship to break off. I don't see a problem.


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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.

You bring up FPS games and then complain that FPS games don't apply to SS?

I repeat - there are games with ammo, and the AI can handle that. The older SS had amo and the AI handled it. The AI doesn't have to be the greatest genius. And SS doesn't have chest-high walls to hide behind, neither the luxury to run any time he wants. It depends on the ship you would be flying (if it's slow you're going to have an easy time running and venting) and don't forget the AI can back away as well.

You keep brining up the scenario of an enemy ship that is out of ammo being easily destroyed - he would be a sitting duck. Yes, but you assume the following:
1) it has only ballistic weapons and no backups
2) it doesn't retreat (for some reason, even tough I stated pretty clearly it should start pulling back long before it's ammo depletes)
3) it doesn't have any friends
4) it just stay there and you can kill it easily
5) you still have ammo

Because if you just run around without shooting and wait for the enemy to run out of ammo..that means you're not supporting your other ships. Also, you can only control one weapon group, which means that unless every weapon group on your ship is turned off, they are going to auto-fire at ship in range - and if the enemy is in range to shoot you, then they are also in range of your guns.



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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?

I disagree.


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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.

So you're trying to frame this as me attacking the SS devs now? So classy.

There are many reasons why AI can be limited. Stop putting words in my mouth.
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StarGibbon

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #93 on: December 05, 2018, 03:23:27 AM »

@Trashman

I'm sorry. We appear to have fundamental communication problems. I recognize the words, but we're too frequently having different conversations.  Since I estimate there's very little chance of what you suggest happening at this point, I'm happy to move on.


Except for this:


So you're trying to frame this as me attacking the SS devs now? So classy.

There are many reasons why AI can be limited. Stop putting words in my mouth.

No...I was responding to this, which are your words:


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.


It's a foolish generalization, and smacks of someone who's never made a game talking out of their weight class.  If you'd like to show me a real time twitch combat game that you've made where both a human and and AI opponent have 6 bullets a piece, and that doesn't end up being a nearly insurmountable advantage to the player, I'll happily withdraw my statement. Remember, your conversation with me is specifically about the practical limitations of game AI in a real time combat game, not broader discussion about the merits of CR.

As far as you attacking the SS developer personally, I'm not aware of you having done so. I did disagree with you when you when you ragged on the game for not having complex AI:

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

 SS has a fantastic combat engine and theres a lot of stuff going on. The AI performs really, really well in certain regards. It's much better at managing the complex flux system than I am,  but I make up for it with superior target selection and decisive strikes. It would be a pity to cripple it by forcing it to play a game ("pick your shots carefully"), that no game AI is really well suited for. 

If only a single point I make sinks in, let it be this: Any ammo limit that is meaningful to the player, would be crippling to the AI, and any ammo limit that the AI can comfortably use without becoming useless, would be meaningless to a human player.  You would have to make them play by different rules, and no player would accept that if there were an alternative available.  I know this because there are already powerful, limited ammo main weapons available, and in general players do not give these to the AI.  I played SS when it had ammo limits on Low tech ship weapons. It's why I used high tech ships.  I enjoy having low tech ships available to play now as an option that isn't strictly inferior.


Respond as you will, but I'm moving on.  I'm sorry you're frustrated by not getting what you think you want.  I hope you manage to enjoy the game anyway.



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TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #94 on: December 05, 2018, 03:38:32 AM »

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It's a foolish generalization, and smacks of someone who's never made a game talking out of their weight class.  If you'd like to show me a real time twitch combat game that you've made where both a human and and AI opponent have 6 bullets a piece, and that doesn't end up being a nearly insurmountable advantage to the player, I'll happily withdraw my statement. Remember, your conversation with me is specifically about the practical limitations of game AI in a real time combat game, not broader discussion about the merits of CR.

You concocted a fine scenario. No, I won't show you such game because no one would carry only 6 bullets. Soldiers carry spare magazines for a reason.

And no, it wouldn't be an insourmauntable advantage to the player if the enemy could run away, get more ammo and return.


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As far as you attacking the SS developer personally, I'm not aware of you having done so. I did disagree with you when you when you ragged on the game for not having complex AI

Complex is relative in that context. While certainly not bad, indeed I might say the AI is beyond average, my definition of complex is harsher then yours.



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If only a single point I make sinks in, let it be this: Any ammo limit that is meaningful to the player, would be crippling to the AI, and any ammo limit that the AI can comfortably use without becoming useless, would be meaningless to a human player.
I played SS when it had ammo limits on Low tech ship weapons. It's why I used high tech ships.  I enjoy having low tech ships available to play now as an option that isn't strictly inferior.

I played SS too back then. And mods that had factions with limited ammo concepts. And it was good.
So I guess we fundamentally disagree.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #95 on: December 05, 2018, 04:27:54 PM »

Having ships retreat automatically is going to be complex because the map is large and takes time to traverse, and also because the AI is already not great at disengaging. The amount of ammo needed to safely retreat if you are the far side of the map might be more (because you may be pursued or harassed by flanking enemies). If you are right in your own deployment, you might be able to wait until you've run out before retreating without worrying.
The player could also probably abuse it by luring the AI too far from the retreat area so that it runs out of ammo before getting back to actually retreat, or the AI retreats with half its ammo left because it is afraid of the player trying to abuse this etc...

 Also, since retreating can mean you are down a ship for the better part of a minute, it may not even be a good decision to retreat if you ran out of ammo. An onslaught tanking and firing thermal pulse cannons is probably still more valuable than retreating and being down 40 DP for a minute +. That could easily lose you a battle if the onslaught decided it needed to retreat at the wrong moment.

Also how to deal with the case where some weapons have run out but others haven't, you probably want to retreat fi your pd runs or ammo out agains fighters but you wouldn't care vs normal ships etc...

The point being, it's not simple and it would probably take a lot of work to even make it moderately functional let alone good. Definitely not a worthy investment of dev time when it solves no problems other than 'feel' and there are so many juicy endgame mechanics to flush out.
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TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #96 on: December 06, 2018, 02:11:29 AM »

You have control of your ships, remember? So you can simply order it to hold even if low on ammo.

And if your Onslaught pulls out, so what? You do have reserves? If not, retreat and re-engage.


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Also how to deal with the case where some weapons have run out but others haven't, you probably want to retreat fi your pd runs or ammo out against fighters but you wouldn't care vs normal ships etc...


By counting ammo separately. So main weapons and PD would be looked at separately. You main weapons ammo averages at 50%, but your PD ammo is down to 10%? Does the enemy have many carriers in the field? Do you have friendly ships that can protect you?

No issue for the player since he can override any AI decision.


Also, it already did work well enough in older versions.
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #97 on: December 06, 2018, 05:22:39 AM »

Having ships retreat automatically is going to be complex because the map is large and takes time to travers

 ??? But ships already retreat automatically when their CR / Hull strength gets really low.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #98 on: December 06, 2018, 10:38:39 AM »

Having ships retreat automatically is going to be complex because the map is large and takes time to travers

 ??? But ships already retreat automatically when their CR / Hull strength gets really low.
I'm almost certain they don't retreat on low CR, I'm not 100% sure about low hull but I don't remember seeing that happen. Hull is very different from ammo because you will almost always want an AI ship to retreat on low hull since it is one shot away from dying, which is not the case for ammo. It also would happen much less frequently so its less of a cp drain. CR is also the same since ships are literally useless on low CR. With low ammo, a ship may be entirely functional, or virtually useless, and that is entirely situational and very complicated to determine.


And if your Onslaught pulls out, so what? You do have reserves? If not, retreat and re-engage.
You may have reserves, but it will take a minute+ for the onslaught to retreat and your reserves to arrive if you are on the far side of the map. I that case you will be down 40 dp for a whole minute, and you might lose the entire fight before those reserves arrive. If the battle was even when your onslaught was present, then it will be heavily skewed against you without 40 dp for a significant amount of time. If you are on your own side of the map however, the time it takes for reinforcements to arrive may be small enough that you do want the onslaught to retreat. Now you have to consider the size of the ship in question and its relative importance to the fleet, the location of all the ships in the fleet, and the number of ships currently low on ammo that may need to retreat soon and their relative locations. And compare all that to enemy positions and relative strengths. That's incredibly complicated for an AI to consider.


By counting ammo separately. So main weapons and PD would be looked at separately. You main weapons ammo averages at 50%, but your PD ammo is down to 10%? Does the enemy have many carriers in the field? Do you have friendly ships that can protect you?
So now the AI has to analyze the enemy fleet composition and load outs , and its own weapon load out as well as its current position relative to friendlies and to the map boundaries, to make an assumption of how effective it will be given its current ammo levels to ultimately determine if it should retreat or not. That's very complicated, and the AI will not make those decision well without tons of work and tons more tuning. The dev has much better things to work on.


You have control of your ships, remember? So you can simply order it to hold even if low on ammo.
That costs CP, which is a limited resource, and if the AI is bad at making the decisions, it becomes micro management very quickly,  which Alex has said he is trying to avoid as much as possible.

Also, what about the UI concerns? Now the player needs to know the ammo level of every weapon type on every ship in his fleet in order to asses if the AI is properly managing ammo. How will that be displayed? How much time will the player have to spend looking through lists of numbers to figure out if his ships need to retreat? This is a UI nightmare.

« Last Edit: December 06, 2018, 10:50:21 AM by intrinsic_parity »
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #99 on: December 06, 2018, 10:50:30 AM »

Having ships retreat automatically is going to be complex because the map is large and takes time to travers

 ??? But ships already retreat automatically when their CR / Hull strength gets really low.
I'm almost certain they don't retreat on low CR, I'm not 100% sure about low hull but I don't remember seeing that happen.

Absolutely they retreat when their hull is low and they're near death. Play the random mission a few times, at the end you can see that a bunch of them retreat from battle if you don't bother to chase them down.

Getting them to retreat from battle is a nothing thing. Its trivial to setup some preference for having them retreat or not on low ammo.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #100 on: December 06, 2018, 10:55:28 AM »

If the AI retreats on low hull that fine. You're always going to want a low hull ship to retreat (as I said) so its a binary decision, which is not the same as ammo as outlined extensively.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2018, 10:59:41 AM by intrinsic_parity »
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Rounin

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #101 on: December 06, 2018, 12:21:07 PM »

Hell, the AI doesn't even have to be on low health to retreat, they do that even if you just simply murdered most of their comrades. Quite rude to be honest. So yeah, having the AI retreat is not an issue. balancing at which point do they decide so (ammo state vs own and enemy fleet's situation) is the tricky part, unless you want to abstract it and have a simple percentage as the trigger.
Of course there's the option of having them retreat but be deployable again after resupplying off-screen, for increased supply cost for the battle and a timer based on hull size (now that'd need some extra work to be sure).
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Torch

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #102 on: December 06, 2018, 01:00:38 PM »

I really don't see the point in limited ammo when CR already accomplishes nearly the exact same thing - giving ships a limited window before combat effectiveness degrades. Making all ballistic weapons be able to run out of ammo couldn't possibly improve the game in any way.
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TrashMan

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #103 on: December 07, 2018, 02:27:11 AM »

So now the AI has to analyze the enemy fleet composition and load outs , and its own weapon load out as well as its current position relative to friendlies and to the map boundaries, to make an assumption of how effective it will be given its current ammo levels to ultimately determine if it should retreat or not. That's very complicated, and the AI will not make those decision well without tons of work and tons more tuning.

You're making it sound like checking how many carriers the enemy has is difficult.

If you're low on PD ammo, check if friendly ships have enough and stick close.

Positioning is not an issue if ships keep tight formations, and there are 4 boundries one can (or should be able to) retreat.


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The dev has much better things to work on.

That can be said about every feature one doesn't like.

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You have control of your ships, remember? So you can simply order it to hold even if low on ammo.
That costs CP, which is a limited resource, and if the AI is bad at making the decisions, it becomes micro management very quickly,  which Alex has said he is trying to avoid as much as possible.

The entire concept of CP points is trash. All that high tech and spaceships, but simple communication and captains following your orders is a "resource".


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Also, what about the UI concerns? Now the player needs to know the ammo level of every weapon type on every ship in his fleet in order to asses if the AI is properly managing ammo. How will that be displayed? How much time will the player have to spend looking through lists of numbers to figure out if his ships need to retreat? This is a UI nightmare.

In older versions ammo was displayed right next to the weapons/bank. There were no issues.
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Balance, skills and general musings
« Reply #104 on: December 07, 2018, 02:54:42 AM »

Quote
That costs CP, which is a limited resource, and if the AI is bad at making the decisions, it becomes micro management very quickly,  which Alex has said he is trying to avoid as much as possible.

The entire concept of CP points is trash. All that high tech and spaceships, but simple communication and captains following your orders is a "resource".

Mostly I agree with you in this thread, and appreciate you digging up (nevermind where from) the discussions in the OP since they're more outside the box than you usually see on this forum.

However, I disagree on the CP point. The concept of CP is not trash; the implementation is sub-optimal. 

One of the dumbest things about RTS games is that you can micromanage everything as the king/admiral, and give orders to a distant spaceship, soldier, zerg, or whatever like every second, as though you were  dragging them around on an invisible leash, without any regard to communication difficulties, attentiveness, etc.

There is no way a spaceship crew can function if their admiral is changing and belaying his own orders every second ("go here... no, go here... no, go here"). Carrying out an order/objective on a big ship involves a long chain of command and tens/hundreds of people from the admiral to the captain to the mates to the NCOs down to the guys carrying ammo back and forth etc. It just isn't possible to rapidly and continually change orders that much and not confuse everyone in the ship.

Also, it's really boring and stupid from a gameplay perspective. When you give an order in real life, you say "go and do this" and you leave it to the subordinate as to the specifics because they are trained for what they do. In RTS games though, you've got to micromanage for best results, basically stepping into the unit/ships body to get it done, by clicking a million times. You're basically just flipping between shoddy 1st person control of a bunch of units, rather than actual commander level decisions.

So I like that the developer tries to address this issue with CP. However using it as a pooled resource is  a little problematic. It would make more sense if each individual ship had a sort of timer on how fast you could give it new orders, with little ones being more responsive and big ones being less. Your own flagship's  capacity to distribute orders throughout the fleet (number of communications officers, etc) could also still effect things as well.
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