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[Richyread]

Thought I would add some strange game play feedback I've seen now I've spent some time with this great big new build.

>>> Carrier heavy fleets <<<<

I have only been engaging mining fleets in the main so far so can't confirm if this is all carriers or only from the specific races I've encountered thus far (Indepents/Hegomany/Eixge)

- The engagements start as expected - lights engage at fast speed followed by a smattering of fighters. Once this initial '1st wave' has been seen off, then there is rarely any followup/additional fighters etc.

- Once cleared I will be left with perhaps a 75% full green gauge on the screen, so still some enemy remaining.

- The Carriers are always present (when I engage a fleet etc) along the very top edge of the tactical map and/or far right corner. I've witnessed this in the last 5 engagements.

- When you eventually reach the carriers, they are not in a defensive/reationary stance, but appear to be locked into full retreat mode. I.e. they graphically are all positioned forward facing off the screen, with their engines on full burn.(I.e. showing larger jet graphic)

- When you attack the carriers, they make no real effort to reply/turn/adjust shields or fire main weapons - further supporting the 'full retreat theory'.

- In all the engagements I've entered I can't remember a signal one where the enemy have retreated due to casualties/individual ships pull out due to severe damage etc. I.e. everything seems to have a do or die attitude!


>>>Nav Points<<<

- In an engagement vs a 'merchant fleet' (i.e. one that didn't appear to have any carriers) I saw the AI perform some unusual behavior in that any ship assigned a 'combat order; - specifically [capture nav point x] etc. - would perform this task above all else and irrelevant of the state of the game.

When again I had fended off this '1st wave' i realized I still had over 50% of the enemy to deal with. However, it turned out to be a very similar situation to the Carriers listed above, except that instead of clinging for desperation to the edge of the board, they were in fact glued to the nav points instead. I've  a couple of screen shots showing what I mean:

Spoiler

[close]

Appreciate that they need to capture points and should it be appropriate sometimes you see the AI group up around a single Nav Point to defend, but in these instances, it was either a solo-ship or a fighter wing that were flying full burst at the nav point continuously orbiting it and ignoring everything else.

************

With the Carrier fleets it feels as though they are engaging a 'full retreat' order immediately upon spawning into combat as in one engagement I had 5 wings of mining fighters and 5 carriers - they should have been churning these out like rabbits? except I cleaned them all up in about 30secs and they never seemed to respawn/returned to carrier etc.

Being forced to pilot my big whale of a ship around the entire edges and every Nav Point of each map is tiresome and adds a good 10mins or so onto a match which kind of goes against the great 'Arcade style' fast run'n'gun theme you have going with this mod.

Please note that this is intended as constructive feedback only to improve on an already fantastic piece of work...something which is keeping me up to the very (very) small hours of the morning playing!

Hope this helps,

Richy.

[LazyWizard]

Yeah, and without spending time looking at a diff, I have no idea what was changed by whom and when.  I'll ask LazyWizard when I get a chance, probably it's something pretty simple.

Yeah, fairly simple. It's these two commits, and the latter is a single-line change. There's also two new entries in the radar settings json: an "onlyShowVisibleContacts" boolean that filters out enemies that aren't within fog of war, and a "showMissileLockIcon" boolean that doesn't do anything yet (but is still required).

[xenoargh]

Thought I would add some strange game play feedback I've seen now I've spent some time with this great big new build...

On the carriers (and civilian ships, for that matter) it's a bit of a quandary; I'm trying to avoid them always attempting to escape from players, but they need to be somewhere fairly safe, so that they don't get taken out right away.  The "back of the map" approach is a pretty artificial way to get it done, though, I agree, especially on the bigger maps.

One thought is to make the AI retreat if that and fighters are all they have left in their inventories, and re-write the conditions when an Escape battle is triggered for the AI; on the other hand, Escape battles almost always go worse for the AI than simply fighting it out.  I'll test it a bit and see what I want to do with this, though; I agree that the current solution's pretty much a kludge but I didn't get to spend much time on that feature

On the capturing of points... essentially, the AI's going to try and follow orders even if it gets killed doing it, which, personally, I prefer; I think the real issue is that it's abusable, because the Admiral AI isn't focusing force well; the player can capture a point, let it go, then re-capture the point, and the AI will come back and try to cap it again even if that's not very smart.  That's a tricky thing to fix, frankly; probably the best solution is to have the AI select just one location to attempt to re-capture at a time and focus its attention on it, but I've had some fairly serious problems getting orders to do specific things work, so right now it's just using the automated system.  I want to spend some time looking at this issue this weekend if I can scrape up the time.

[dmaiski]

cant you add a component to the ship AI to map the local threat level
(nothing complex, just get locations of neary ships (in angles), check class, cheack who they belong to, +1 if your team -1 if enemy)

+1 for frig
+2 for dest
+4 for cruiser
ect...

then use this map to determine ship movment, ie a "bravery" threshold, so if the map indicates that theres -31 points in direction 0deg and +40 in direction -55deg, even if [target objective] is in direction 0deg, ship will travel in direction [(0 + -55)/2 = deg]

basicaly forcing ships to bunch up at the ship AI level

ofcource have tresholds for ignoring the map, or fuge factors if ship class>map level


also you could add another similar function to make unassigned ships automaticaly guard/support ships with definite asignments

[xenoargh]

Well, basically, I'd like to implement a simple threat map approach, but I've had issues getting Admiral AI --> Ship AI working properly.  I still need to explore those issues and figure out what's been causing the issues first; I have a working theory that I'm going to test out tonight... if that works, then I can proceed with doing a threat-map approach, where the battlefields are divided up into a number of zones, and the AI would generally not attempt to Capture points that are "hot", but would attempt to attack in force if it detects your Carriers, would try to move Carriers / Civilian ships where it's "cold", etc.  Baby steps, though; I need to figure out the core issues first.

[xenoargh]

Good news:  I can get the Admiral AI to do what I need it to.  I.E., give real, real specific "go here and kill this thing" orders and whatnot.  So yay, I can make it "smarter"

Bad news:  it'll take a little bit longer than I'd like, because of how I need to do it. 

But not too bad, really; I just need to set up a hashmap and a couple of other things that are fresh concepts after building the ShipThreatPlugin code, I think.

[Richyread]

If there's anything I can do to help...

play-test something...virtual cup of tea...encouraging picture of a baby...

Spoiler

[close]

Then let me know 

Richy

[xenoargh]

Ahhhh, no, not the baby!  Anything but that, lol.

Got the basics of the "go here and kill this thing / do this thing" set up; works correctly for the AI thus far.  Haven't had any free time this weekend to mess with it further, but maybe tonight I'll get a bit further with it, if I don't distract myself working on the boss ship thing

[xenoargh]

OK, Admiral AI can now declare a target ship for a given ship to assassinate, follow, or whatever (what it does being entirely contextual), or a fixed destination.  So, other than it not being "smart", it works.  Now I just need to make it "smarter", which is probably doable.  Anyhow, I haven't gotten done converting all of the AIs over to the new code yet, so it'll probably be another day or two before another build comes out to provide some feedback / bug hunts.  I think the concept's basically solid, though.

[xenoargh]

Stuff made with a neato Open Source tool (credits to Skorpio for the base sprites, me for pixel-art stuff):



But first, must finish Admiral AI and then... the Boss (dun dun dun).  But I just had to make some art this evening.

[xenoargh]

The Punk Junkers get a new ship, the Ballista, to go along with the Slinger missile frigate.  The ship it's based on, above, will probably go Hegemony... unless some better idea strikes my fancy.

As usual, much thanks to Thule for letting me abuse his original concepts

Tri-Tachyon gets the Stormcrow, a high-tech heavy destroyer / light cruiser that will have some nasty system to make up for its largely built-in weaponry, to go with the Undine heavy frigate:


So I'm thinking at least one more Pirate, simply because I like pirates... or... huh... I could finally finish the Gaians.  After the Admiral AI and the Boss, but before adding these guys in.  It really is past time for them to be a working Thing.

[dmaiski]

i have just had a weird game... 3 warthogs have just sucsessfully tanked the entire ammo suply of a conquest with vanilla gun setups


also bugs!

this battle:

Spoiler

[close]

ends exactly 1 second after it starts
(with no the killing/capturing of the noobs!!!)

[xenoargh]

Yeah, the Warthog gets kind of ridiculous when it has enough armor. 

That, and the stock Conquest is highly ammo-dependent; it's great until the Needlers stop, and then, well, it's dead.  I've buffed the ammo counts on the Needlers many times now, and it's never enough, lol. 

I keep wanting to mess with its weapons to make it nastier and then I'm like, "no, that might make the Independents really nasty", since Conquests are a genuine threat if they're set up correctly.  I'll think about it for the next build though

On the bug... yeah, that's a fleet where everybody is Mothballed; they shouldn't want to attack, but only flee.  I'll look into that; probably a straightforward bug to fix.

Also, got most of the issues with building a working Admiral AI that can give individual orders and suchlike worked out.  Found a bug in the Sniper AI that I need to kill; they're corner-hugging to a ridiculous extent atm.

Also need to take a long, hard look at the groups players face when trying to Tech Mine; the difficulty is all over the place, lol.

[dmaiski]

no they are fleeing verry sucsessfully (im attacking)

too sucsessfully imo... since my ships just manage to warp in right as they all sucsessfully retreat (1 sec into the battle)

[xenoargh]

They're not even deploying. 

The message you posted said exactly what the bug was. 

In the FleetInteractionDialogPlugin code, I was testing for whether the player's fleet was significantly bigger, in FP, than the AI fleet; if yes, then the AI attempts to flee an engagement it will surely lose.

Only problem is, I wasn't testing whether the AI fleet members were Mothballed or otherwise un-deployable except for Escape scenarios (where they can be deployed regardless of their condition).  So, basically, that fleet thought it was "bigger" than your fleet, and tried to "attack"... that didn't work out, so it tried to deploy stuff... that didn't work, because there was nothing to deploy... so combat ended, as a player victory.  It's just a silly edge-case thing I should have caught by now, frankly; I don't test vs. the Merchant Fleets very often, as they're pretty rare, and that's the only fleet type where this can happen at all.

Anyhow, that was easy to find / fix, but I need to finish up work on the Admiral AI for the Escape scenario before it's going to work well.