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[PCCL]

Could the pursuing fleet be slower for a period of time instead? Since the harassing fleet has to regroup before moving out

[Uomoz]

Point taken.  It's not fun that when you find a fleet that is a little smaller and slower than you, you can simply harry them to 0%, then send in ships with no shields to kill them.  I found that the perfect "mop up force" is a fleet of 5-10 hounds for this, since they only eat 1 supply/day each, and at the maximum level you can have 100 logistics points.

Yeah, the "harry, rinse, repeat" is on the list of things to address in 0.6.1a. I think it should still be possible, but something like a speed boost to the harried fleet will make it take longer and be more difficult to pull off w/o interference.

Smart solution.

[rex]

Point taken.  It's not fun that when you find a fleet that is a little smaller and slower than you, you can simply harry them to 0%, then send in ships with no shields to kill them.  I found that the perfect "mop up force" is a fleet of 5-10 hounds for this, since they only eat 1 supply/day each, and at the maximum level you can have 100 logistics points.

Yeah, the "harry, rinse, repeat" is on the list of things to address in 0.6.1a. I think it should still be possible, but something like a speed boost to the harried fleet will make it take longer and be more difficult to pull off w/o interference.

Smart solution.

Yay. I was going to complain a bit about this destroying a fair amount of the challeng.

[Gibbatron]

There are a couple of things I don't like about the "Stand down" option. If you are running with a meduim sized and blanced fleet, say 4 or 5 frigates, a couple of destroyers, a crusier, a capital and a few freighters and/or tugs; and you get into a fight with a small pirate attack fleet (a couple of buffaloes, lashers etc), you only need to deploy maybe 3 frigates. Or just the crusier and a frigate. Or you could send in the capital with long range weapons and a frigate to spot and destroy everything in a matter of seconds. You have options.

Winning a fight like this nets fairly significant loot, and as more supplies=better it almost always makes the most sense to send out salvage teams to maximise the gains. The problem I have is that if you have excess ships, there is no way to stand down the ships that just fought and send in the ones that didnt fight to pick through the mess meaning you suffer a large CR hit to anything that fought even if the fight lasted 30 seconds.

This is the other problem I have with CR deployment values. If it must be applied as a flat rate deduction, why can it not be an increasing rate based on the size of the fleet you engage. If the above fleet runs into a solo buffalo for example, it will try to retreat. You could send in just the capital with some long range weaponry, snipe it from your starting position without ever raising shields or manouvering violently. It would be completely routine for the crew and the ship frame. Most of the crew could stay in bed. Yet it is still penalised 30-40% CR after you send out salvage teams, even though it would have just shut down and let the rest of the fleet do that kind of work.

[bbf]

Lets say you have a lone Paragon, and that you see 5 fleets coming towards you. Each one of them is just a single fighter wing, or a very small freighter.
If each one of them engages you, you loose your Paragon, because you won't have CR to fight them all.

Which is why you can "Stand Down" after a small fight to regain a lot of the CR. In the scenario you outline, you'd be unlikely to lose more than 20% or so after obliterating all 5 fleets.

Which is pretty much what Histidine was talking about 1 post up, but I suspect you didn't read it

Yet again this is the second time I made a post and was treated harshly by you Alex.

The stand down simply doesn't work for me. I have a Odyssey for example, and if I get attacked by 3-4 fighter wings and a carrier, which can barely scratch my shields, the combat takes a while because they keep flying away from the Odyssey. Even if you first attack the carrier, it'll still take time before you can wipe the fighters out.
And always when the battle ends, the "Stand down" option is disabled for me saying: "The previous engagement was too hard-fought for a stand-down..."
And there goes 34% of my CR on a very easy battle... So if there are 3-4 easy battles like that, I'll loose my Odyssey because of the way the CR is currently implemented.

[Alex]

Hmm. Was that harsh? Certainly didn't intend it to be, just pointing out that stand down takes care of the case you were outlining. My apologies.

But that's quite different than the scenario you're talking about now, isn't it? This isn't a sequence of 1-ship fights. A carrier + 3-4 fighter wings probably has about the same deployment cost as the Odyssey, and if you wipe all of them out, then, right, the stand down isn't going to be an option. That's very much "working as intended", though - you paid the full CR price for wiping out an even number of deployment points, which is what the game goes by for figuring out the relative strengths of things.

If it's a trivially easy fight, then perhaps deploying the Odyssey is overkill.

[PCCL]

I'm assuming he runs a solo oddy. I can see why that might be something

maybe stand down should be based on damage taken + flux accumulated + ammo spent on your own fleet? Or maybe based on percentage of your own fleet that's deployed (deploy a few ships: 100 recovery, deploy full fleet: 20-ish)?

point is, it should be our fleet's action that determines standing down CR, not the enemies

On one hand, one can say that's why you run frig escorts. On the other hand, it shouldn't be that exhausting to go "raise shield and wake up the newbies! More target practice!"

[Histidine]

I'd go with: CR recovery factor = (damage dealt to enemy armor and hull / x * constant_1) + y + constant_2

where x is the average of a certain stat of the deployed ships on the winning side (could be a new hidden number, but I'd just go with the ship's maximum OP). So a Lasher killing a Hammerhead counts as more hard-fought than a Conquest doing the same thing. y and constant_2 can be used such that, say, a Paragon killing 20 Hounds in 20 consecutive battles can receive no CR cost at all.

Tying it to damage done means there's no way to cheese it (since the only way to not lose your CR recovery is to not do the thing you're supposed to do in a battle, namely hurt and kill the enemy), and doesn't provide an incentive for penny-pinching behavior (if it was based on flux used, micromanage your shields to keep them down whenever at all possible; basing it on ammo consumption means you only fire when you're certain to hit, etc.).

Factoring in damage received is probably unnecessary, since that has its own form of "CR" penalty: holes in the hull/armor that need to be patched up at the cost of supplies, and into which enemies in future engagements could fire things like needlers into.

[Alex]

maybe stand down should be based on damage taken + flux accumulated + ammo spent on your own fleet? Or maybe based on percentage of your own fleet that's deployed (deploy a few ships: 100 recovery, deploy full fleet: 20-ish)?

In my experience, diving into it like that only creates really weird edge cases and opportunities for exploitation. A lesson learned from the prior autoresolve implementation

point is, it should be our fleet's action that determines standing down CR, not the enemies

That makes sense, and conceptually that's what it is, anyway. The amount of damage you dealt to the enemy is a pretty good metric for your fleet's actions.

(@Histidine: right, that's basically how it works, except it just adds up the deployment points of the ships/fighter wings you've taken out, relative to the total deployment points you've put on the field. Incidentally, for fighters, it'll also keep track of how many fighters you destroyed - taking out 2 fighters in a 2-fighter wing counts its full deployment point value, regardless of whether there are carriers on the field etc.)

[Andy H.K.]

This got me thinking.... is there one point where it's actually more cost-effective to stand down than to deploy salvage team due to what you saved is more than what you could get otherwise?

[Alex]

Only if it's, say, standing down an Onslaught vs salvaging a Hound, and even then I suspect it might be close. The idea is that "salvage crews" is the economic option, "harry" is the aggressive option, and "stand down" is the careful/emergency option.

[PCCL]

also I'm guessing when you have to fight multiple battles in a row (pirate stacks upon you)

basically going "OK guys, rest up, we need to be ready when they come again"

I imagine this to be quite useful when we're say defending our civilians against relentless trytach raiders that just keep coming, kinda like that episode in BSG where people are desperate to get some sleep every time the cylons are driven away

[bbf]

But what exactly is a CR. How does one spend it? Image you have a ship, and when it goes to combat, it needs time to reload for another battle.
Okay, that makes some sense. But my Odyssey doesn't have any missiles mounted on it. So there's no ammo to reload. It has only energy weapons.
As far as I see it, you could keep firing a energy weapon for ever as long as you have sufficient flex venting... in battle or not.
I don't see why a fully automated warship needs time to prepare for another battle as long as it's not doing anything that would change it's stats between the 2 encounters.

Maybe CR could be deducted based on ammo reloading, armor repairs, hull repairs... The Odyssey example I showed... overkill or not, I could simply just keep navigating forward and just defend my self and it would just be target practice for a fully automated ship. Loosing CR in that fight is like saying you stressed the ship because you had to change your course to avoid hitting an asteroid.

I think the main problem that most people who are complaining right now is that they can't play with a lone strong ship anymore. In 0.54a I would dedicate all my efforts to a single ship.
With an Odyssey (20 pts) I could pretty much defeat fleets from 4 to 100+ points. And I could do it with extreme ease, purely based on my skill. With the new CR system your are forcing people to have multiple ships... people can't rely on their skill anymore to survive... they have to own multiple ships. And with owning multiples ship, the ships must be weaker because of the fleet points limit.

Now I did find it unbalanced in 0.54a that when you had a series of encounters, on each one of them you would spawn with full ammo. And it would be realistic to make CR affect details like that. But simply adding a non optional feature, to enforce a new game play style, and completely limit a way some players played, is certainly gonna make older players like me loose interest in the game. The type of fun I had on 0.54a, and I have on SPAZ is gone now from 0.6a.

[Flare]

A lot more needs to be done to make a fighting vehicle ready for combat again than simple repairsbto the hull and restocking of ammunition.

Parts for weapons needs to be changed like lenses and capacitators etc. for energy weapons, barrels for kinetics, engines probably need to be retuned after all those break neck turns, feedback sensors and arrays probably need to be realigned as well due to the evasive maneuvers, people need rest after fighting a battle, the communications systems probably need some reboot of some kind in preperations for another fight the list can probably go one for much longer, who knows how much maintenance a star faring ship needs, nevermind one that needs to engage in combat.

[Uomoz]

Don't you see there's a gamebreaking issue when one solo can destroy fleets 5+ times stronger alone? Not diminishing your skill (that will soon be facing NPC skillpoints aswell), but what you did previously was similar to going lvl 1 against Diablo and make it a good fight.

It's not limiting the gameplay when it was broken to begin with, like tempests owning solo the SDF. If Alex thinks that's not a balanced type of gameplay, he's totally right adding systems to prevent that, exactly like reducing the power of a skill, or a ship.