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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: Tuning levers  (Read 2398 times)

Thaago

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #15 on: January 23, 2020, 04:28:34 PM »

Yeah exactly! More ships really doesn't equal better, either for the AI's behavior or total power level. Hull regen Onslaught was fun to fly around while cackling madly, especially with multiple speed boosters and all those offense skills... just crazy good. :D
Full skilled Onslaught during 0.7a was so powerful it could kill everything without taking hull damage.  (All damage was absorbed by armor.)  Yes, it was fun.

Haha it was so powerful that most of the time I'd just stop paying attention to incoming ordinance, trusting to the hull regen to keep me topped off. It was fun for a while, but I'm happy we've moved away from it to be honest.
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Morbo513

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #16 on: January 23, 2020, 08:20:56 PM »

I agree with the notion of the OP, but think capping fleet size by number of ships alone is pants-on-head, and should rather be worked out by supplies/mo or DP.
That out the way, I like to draw comparisons between SS and Mount & Blade - in which your army's size is limited by your renown (general reputation) as well as leadership skills, and another factor I think. Right now your fleet size in Starsector is only limited by how fast you can acquire new ships, an arbitrary number of 30, and your ability to maintain enough supplies to keep them all running.
I'd love to see a system that has the player progress in the total combined value of ships they can command.
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Lucky33

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #17 on: January 23, 2020, 09:34:56 PM »

Command&Control was supposed to do that. But you dont have to command any spam fleet. It became mostly as a some kind of hindrance to the players who actually want to put an effort into tactical layer of the game.
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TaLaR

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #18 on: January 23, 2020, 09:38:47 PM »

30 ship limit is arbitrary and bad, but you hit 10 officer limit long before that. Aside from maybe Drover spam, you are always better spending your DP on 10 largest officer ships + player ship that fit deployment limit.

1 ship with lvl20 officer is worth 2-3 times it's DP in officer-less ships, so fodder spam is never a good option.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2020, 09:42:07 PM by TaLaR »
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Lucky33

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #19 on: January 23, 2020, 10:09:25 PM »

The sad fact is that there are only two enemy factions with "officerQuality":5 settings in their doctrines: Hegemony and Remnants. Everyone else cant have any noticable amount of skilled officers in their fleets. However, even Heg. and Rmnt. are limited by the RNG generation of skills. It goes like:

Probability of having at least a single officer with the skill that could somehow counter your skill build - about 2/3.
Probability of having at least a single officer with the several skills that could synergize to ruin your day - about 1/3.
Probability of having a tactical abomination on the level with your hand picked officer - its above zero thats for sure but you can do several campaigns without ever meeting it.

Rmnts are further limited by the number of capitals per Ordo.

Other factions? Well... As I said somethere else its just a sim level cannon fodder or worse.

10 lvl 20 officers is an overkill for the most of the times. And its not just 2-3 times more stats. Its a problem of ai fleet falling apart because that stat difference converts into lost ships. Quantity becoming quality.
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xenoargh

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #20 on: January 24, 2020, 09:29:37 AM »

I've always thought that the ship cap should be a reasonable soft-cap (and no, "one ship over some limit = astronomical cost" isn't a reasonable soft-cap; a good system should be a gentle curve starting at one ship).

I think it's interesting seeing the "too many ships is bad" argument, though.  That hasn't been my experience, playing my mod.

I think the issues here are several:

On the performance end:

1.  The AI can't handle what's going on and the CPU load is high.  That's pretty difficult to avoid without multithreading the AIs, but it's certainly not impossible.

2.  There is a lot of additional overhead on the graphics side that can also be multithreaded, and using more texture atlases would help a lot.  That's also been done, to some extent (although I did not implement such systems for ship drawing, etc. because it didn't seem like it would help, given how the core works).

3.  Wrecks shouldn't just stick around forever, eating up precious CPU on collision tests.

4.  Friendly fire largely is a negative aspect of gameplay.  Unlike ship-ship collisions, which largely prevent stacking without FF, friendly fire largely just creates opportunities for players to make mistakes and for AIs to very occasionally wreck friendlies.  It also costs a lot of CPU per frame to prevent (more than normal auto-aim).  I'm not sure that the benefits have ever outweighed the costs.  It also has made it extremely difficult to give AIs access to weapons that can deal a lot of damage but aren't hitscan (Reapers, for example, which the AI hardly uses).



On the gameplay / UI end:

1.  The lack of formations makes it artificially hard to use larger numbers of ships in an organized way.

2.  The Command Interface is difficult to read and use, and doesn't convey all the information it should.  For example, we can click on a ship and get some basic information about it, but not its facing, and facings aren't displayed in the main UI.  Fighters and missiles don't give useful information about their facings or velocity, etc.

3.  The AI isn't organized around formational tactics and has no sense of role.  Merely having Variant roles like "flanker", "support", "sniper", "assault", etc. would be helpful, but we don't have these things, so there's nowhere to go, in terms of developing AI that responds a little better.  We've had a couple of mods add Hull Mods that sort-of do this, and I think that's useful.
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Daynen

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #21 on: January 25, 2020, 01:28:36 PM »

Oh god what I wouldn't give for some semblance of formation orders...

"YOU!  Yes you!  With the twin Gauss Cannons!  Look at me!  Listen to me because I'm going to say this ONCE before I autodestruct your boneheaded ass!  STAY!  BEHIND!  THE!  UNBREAKABLE!  TANKS!  NOT IN FRONT OF THEM YOU LUDD-BASHED EXCUSE FOR A FAULTY AI CORE!!"

"What?  You're aggressive?  I DIDN'T ASK, YOU FUEL-SNIFFING WOMBAT!  STAY!  AT!  RANGE!"

...So...yeah.  I may have had an...outburst or two.
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