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[Rune Wolf]

First, a shout out to Fractal Softworks for making a good game that runs on Ye Olde Laptop at 60FPS. AND doesn't slow and die on larger battles. OMG 

[Full Disclosure: got this game 3 days ago, decided to try out some missions before sinking my teeth in Campaign, scored 100% on Easy, Medium, died on Hard.]

Spare me your most-frequently made suggestions, (explosion mods, overpowered weapons, and unnecessary boarding actions,) because I'm starting to think the "nuts and bolts" of the Command System has... issues.

Flux, it's that important.
While I like the computer readout style, It's not so easy to "dance" my eyes back-and-forth hunting for what my ship is doing, my flux meter, and the enemy flux meter. A Flux Bar over each ship (E.G. the health bar in Zelda Breath of the Wild) would be helpful here. UI options (tick boxes) to turn it on/off for your ship, the currently targeted enemy, all friendlies, and all enemies, would be welcome. For maximum utility, I'd be inclined to color-code it 100%- Green, 50%- Yellow, 25%- Red, 10%-Flashing Alert

Avoid Means AVOID
I'm really not sure why the typical Wolf-Class Frigate assigned Escort duty with the Flagship will be found on the other side of the map, "hugging" the enemy dreadnought or battlecruiser marked Avoid! They tend to "dance with death" at maximum weapon's range until they get hit by the heavy weapons and die.

(Are multiple Avoid.Capture.Attack orders on the map confusing the poor little things?)

Escort means ESCORT
I've tried selecting either "Heavy Escort" or direct arrows to support the capital ships, but either one, the result is the same, Friendly ships hang back (even if twice as fast as the ship they are escorting) use the battleship as a shield, and then the battleship dies.

E.G.
             <HUGE ENEMY FLEET>
              \ \ ||| ///                                  *Everyone is shooting my Flagship
              (Battleship)
 
     (Heavy Cruiser)    (Heavy Cruiser)    *ALL these ships are assigned to Escort me and are content hang back and let me die

(Frigates)         (Carriers)             (Destroyers)        *WHYYYYYY

Ship Formations
Can we have a ship formation option that does something tactically not completely stupid like, say,  cruisers alongside the flagship and light ships on the flanks, like, THIS

                       <The Enemy>
                        VERSUS
                  ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ (Fighters)
(Frigates) (Heavy Cruiser)  (Battleship) (Heavy Cruiser) (Destroyers)
         
         (Carriers)                            (Carriers)

Can I Have Some of That Sweet Enemy AI?
The Icing on the cake is the Enemy AI has an opposing formation something like this ALL THE TIME

(Destroyers and Light Carriers)   (Heavy Cruisers) (GIANT DREADNOUGHT) (MOAR Heavy Cruisers) (MOAR Destroyers and Light Carriers)
                   +++++ (Bomber Wing)  (Frigate)   (Frigate)                     (Another Frigate)           (Frigate)  +++++ (Bomber Wing)
                                                                                   VERSUS
                                                                     (My Flagship)
                                             (My Cowardly Fleet that Won't Escort The Ship They Are Assigned To Escort)
(Some Crazy Wolf Frigate Captains Running Off On A Death-Wish)

...I'm tempted to run an experiment and just GIVE NO ORDERS to see if the Friendly AI = Enemy AI,
but my observation is Enemy AI >>> Friendly AI
with this nice effective battleline all the time
AND use their Giant Dreadnought to pick-off frigates and light cruisers one-by-one, each one obliging by "hugging" the ship marked Avoid.

Give Enemy AI Command Points
Ship vs Ship, I can overload on flux, they can overload on flux, that's fair.
Fleet vs Fleet, I can run out of Commands, they... don't?

I can see late-game campaign is gonna be... 

PLEASE tell me I'm wrong,
There's a mod for that,
Or I'm missing something here?

[Megas]

Yes.  The AI knows what you deploy at any given moment and deploys appropriately.  If you deploy nothing, they do not either.  If you deploy a single frigate, they deploy something but not their entire allowance of DP.  Meanwhile, player has no idea when AI deploys reinforcements, let alone the ships they deploy.

In early Starfarer versions, player would get messages with miniature ship icons when the enemy deployed something.  That needs to come back!  If AI can see what we deploy, we should see what the AI deploys too.

[Alex]

PLEASE tell me I'm wrong,

Hi, and welcome to the forum! You're ... mostly wrong (Thank you for your kind words, btw!)

IIRC the enemy admiral AI uses command points, although this is kind of a moot point (which is why I have a hard time remembering exactly); it tends to issue a full assault in fairly short order, before command points would become much of an issue, and in general this doesn't have much impact on the battle one way or another; even if it had infinite points and used them, I don't think it'd translate into much of a functional advantage.

The ship AI on the player and enemy side is the same.

As far as escort, it's currently better at defending the back of a ship it's assigned to than it is at helping out vs a primary target. I've got a todo item to look at that.

Avoid, to my knowledge, works reliably, so if it isn't for you, I suspect it's very situation-specific and it would help if, say, you had an example I could look at to see what might be going on. (You're not assigning a ship to an "avoid" order by right-clicking it on the ship being avoided, are you? That'll cause the ship to try to eliminate it instead of avoiding it, iirc the tooltip mentions this.)

Just in general as far as order-obedience, sometimes a ship can be blocked off from going where it wants to if there are enemy ships "in the way" (which to the AI can be something that might not look like it to the player), but aside from that...

[Goumindong]

Avoid does mean avoid. Your frigate is avoiding the battleship by flying away from it. The AI isnt really ever going to be good enough to organically create a 2d path around a dynamic battlefield. And if it was then you could forget about 60 FPS on your laptop. The immediate order of “dont die and also avoid this ship” is overriding the escort order because the escort cannot be completed without putting the ship in undue risk. So rather than suiciding into the ship labeled “avoid” its backing off.

Re:escort.

Sooo escort behavior is a lot better now but still has issues. Before the latest version escort worked exactly as you suggested it should.

But it was a disaster. Smaller ships escorting bigger ships would fly in front of the bigger ship, preventing it from firing, and also getting shot up by the enemy. Which wouod result in two dead cruisers and then a dead battleship in your example.

So now smaller ships that escort tend to defend the rear of the ship from flanks. And this is SUPER valuable and waaaay better than things were. But what it means is that you cannot just “escort” your main ship and have things go well (and it also means that ships like the Monitor have a harder time doing their job).

Instead you want to give waypoint/defend orders to all three ships to place them where you want. If you put down all the orders within the same command window opening they will only cost 1 command point in total.

Here is an example of me using the system to properly defeat an enemy fleet in detail.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16559.msg262913#msg262913

[Mordodrukow]

I guess, the problem is: orders are counter-intuitive. I had same problems as TS.

If i mark the ship as "avoid", i want all ships in the fleet to avoid it.
If i mark it as "eliminate" - i want it dead.
If bots have more than one target to choose - they pick closest.
If some has "arrow orders" - arrow overrides everything else.
If there are two enemy ships close to each other, one with "avoid" and one with "eliminate" - i want "agressive/defensive behavior" switch, which works like full assault/full retreat, but doesnt turn off by other orders, and defines, which order will have bigger priority.

About escort... May be we just need more than one option.
Follow - escort follows the ship, taking into account motion vector of the target.
Defend - escort follows on the flank, but tries to stay between the target and enemy, closest to the target (or, may be, the biggest swarm), IF it (escort) has possibility to take hard flux (without dying) AND the target is almost overloaded (75%+). When the target doesnt need to be defended like that, escort stays at safe position and VENTS if it has more than 50% flux.
Defend at any cost - the same, but escort is ready to sacrifice itself.
Fire support - escort follows the target on the flanks and tries to engage the same enemy as target does.

And my favorite one:
Vent, you, idiot! - ship, which get this order stops any activity and immediately begins active venting.


And for now... I rarely use "eliminate/engage/avoid" group. Tried it in my first run, but didnt found it useful. Only use escort (just to have allies close enough), defencive retreat (personal), full assault and (sometimes) marks in the space (mostly "defend"). Retreat works well. I guess, its the only order, executed as you expect it to be. Other mentioned are... acceptable, but you need to count with officers personalities (which makes sense...)

[Goumindong]

But they are avoiding it.  The ship was avoiding it and the other ship was trying to kill the ship avoiding it.

[Rune Wolf]

My bad, The issue with the frigate hanging around the battleship labelled "avoid" was, not a Wolf-class, but the Vigilance-class in "The Last Hurrah" Mission. which was playing "pull the tail on the tiger" in the lower left corner one-on-one with the Onslaught-class battleship at maximum weapons range.

I was issuing "search and destroy" orders on every ship in my fleet not "escorting" the Flagship, and then individual "avoid" and "eliminate" orders. I liked the way "search and destroy" made ships seek out on their own initiative sensor buoys to capture and enemy ships - what I've observed now is that is a more aggressive version of what they'll do without orders anyway. So what's a frigate on "search and destroy" to do when encountering a ship marked "avoid"? Basically equivalent to "harass".

Interestingly, whatever I was doing was causing the enemy fleet to form that beautiful battle line in response. Left to its own devices, AI vs AI, it's a loose line that breaks up into a swirling brawl, and eventually the Flagship takes on the Battleship and Heavy Cruiser at the same time, game over. Somehow my actions were influencing the Enemy AI to play very, very, well, better than it can on its own. Huh.

... sometimes a ship can be blocked off from going where it wants to if there are enemy ships "in the way" ...

Yup, what I've observed since, is ships assigned to "capture" and hold specific sensor buoys will prompt the Enemy AI to send something heavier to push them off, and then they spend a lot of lost time "hanging around" that ship because it's indeed in the way of the sensor buoy. LOL

Sooo escort behavior is a lot better now but still has issues. Before the latest version escort worked exactly as you suggested it should.

But it was a disaster. Smaller ships escorting bigger ships would fly in front of the bigger ship, preventing it from firing, and also getting shot up by the enemy. Which wouod result in two dead cruisers and then a dead battleship in your example.

So now smaller ships that escort tend to defend the rear of the ship from flanks. And this is SUPER valuable and waaaay better than things were. But what it means is that you cannot just “escort” your main ship and have things go well (and it also means that ships like the Monitor have a harder time doing their job).

Good to know!

Instead you want to give waypoint/defend orders to all three ships to place them where you want. If you put down all the orders within the same command window opening they will only cost 1 command point in total.

Here is an example of me using the system to properly defeat an enemy fleet in detail.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16559.msg262913#msg262913

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted to do but didn't know how!

And my favorite one:
Vent, you, idiot! - ship, which get this order stops any activity and immediately begins active venting.

IMHO the AI does a very good job managing flux. It tries to stay at 0% but will play the "high side" 80-90% flux if it will drive an enemy to vent or overload and defeat them. This is necessary to win. While it's tempting to have an AI that never overloads, choosing to energency vent instead, I wouldn't want it! You'd never get an enemy ship to overload and lose the satisfaction of defeating them spectacularly. So I can live with an AI that sometimes doesn't vent.

(Personally I like the "humanness" of an AI that makes mistakes a human player might 10% of the time, like not always having the reflexes to vent at the last second, IMHO too many games have unnaturally "perfect" behavior.)

[Goumindong]

So what's a frigate on "search and destroy" to do when encountering a ship marked "avoid"? Basically equivalent to "harass".

Maybe. But more likely it was just an unfortunate AI loop. The AI has to be simple in terms of pathing in order to keep CPU costs down. As a result pathing is mainly just “go here” and then other simple AI routines can activate relative to one ship at a time.

So the ship is trying to s&d or escort or whatever, but there is a battleship in the way that its supposed to avoid. So its backing away from the battleship and this is canceling its ability to path through that ship in order to search. If the ship ever got out of a position where the battleship was between it and its search parameters it would then fly away. But the other ship is effectively preventing it from doing that.

This is more or less unfixable. And just something you will have to deal with via specific waypoints/orders.

[Alex]

(It does try to "go around" avoid-tagged enemies, btw - not super efficiently, admittedly - but once there are multiple things to try to get around, that's when it really gets into trouble.)

[intrinsic_parity]

On a not very related note, I've had issues with ships having trouble flying around things, particularly small ships flying around big ships at the beginning of a battle. I've on multiple occasions seen omens fly into the side of a bigger ship repeatedly until they die when trying to follow an escort order. It seems like they aren't accounting for the ship moving forward or something. I remember watching my omen fly into my paragon so it definitely was fast enough to get around, but instead it literally suicided.

[Alex]

I want to say I've tweaked some things regarding that in the dev build, but maybe it's just on my list of things to look at. Either way, though, it will/has already gotten some attention.

[intrinsic_parity]

Good to hear thanks for all your hard work!

[Phoenixheart]

I'm not sure if this would still be included in the OP for this topic, buuuut I have one massive grip about the AI, and if it weren't for that everything would actually be pretty great.

I really, really wish that my fast, small ships wouldn't rush ahead of the fleet at the beginning of a battle, which results in them getting focus targeted by the entire enemy fleet and vaporized before the rest of my own fleet gets into range.

Especially when this ship is a carrier.

Most of the time it does work out ok, the smaller ship can usually retreat back out of range before it suffers fatal damage, but not always, and it feels like such a pointless avoidable ship loss.

For this reason, I always deploy my slow ships as the first group, and then once they're on the field I re-open the reinforcement window and deploy the faster ships and carriers so that they stay behind the slow ships (I rely on the AI's poor pathfinding to keep them from sneaking between the bigger ships and racing out in front, works surprisingly well lol)

I've sometimes used the escort function to do this, but it results in a wasted command point just to ensure the entire fleet enters the battle at the same time, and sometimes results in armor damage due to collisions as the ships try to re-orient themselves behind the flagship. Hilarious, but a bit annoying.

Is there a way to add a combat command that just keeps all of the ships in their starting formation? Ooorrrr is there a way to let us pick which ships go where in the deployment zone during fleet deployment? Being able to ensure that the ships I want in the back actually do spawn in the back of the formation would be super helpful.

[TJJ]

I was recently thinking how GSB's (gratuitous space battles) approach to formations and orders could work in SS.

e.g. You define standing formations and orders ahead of time, in some kind of fleet management screen.

Though given we've got the rather important option of partial deployments, there would need to be multiple sets of formations, for small, medium & total deployments.

I'm not sure if it'd save time or not, but it'd certainly cut down on the rote deployment and battle order process we have atm.

Sword of the Stars did something similar too.

[Cik]

pre-battle formations are definitely necessary.

I don't want to have to give the same escort orders every battle, just give me a way to set up squadrons of ships as a general rule and give them a basic missionset (frigate squadron 1 always is on capture of objective X) and be done with it honestly.