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[Morrokain]

*Omnious laughter*
 
I've been working on something these past 6 months to just fill that spot ^^ (now if I could just manage to finish Scy quickly and concentrate on this)
Granted the suggestion was made for Vanilla, but mods are better than nothing, right?

Oh yeah! Most of my suggestions are pointed towards opening the game up further to modders! They just usually are surrounded by features that I think would also greatly help vanilla. 

[EI]

Space station battles... O-O

*shamelessly posts a figure of the actual fight with an uber-large spaceship*

Spoiler

[close]

This one... I wanna see boss fights like this. @w@

[nomadic_leader]

Cheesing the AI can be fun, sometimes figuring out how to cheese it is a fun puzzle-- but only if it's for a one-off quests. If it's something you repeat endlessly, then yes it's awful.

So if there were ONE quest where you have to survive by continually circling behind a giant asteroid from an onslaught or something like that, it would be interesting.

That said, why can't their be nebula on the campaign map, and having combat in/near them means more nebula on the battlefield, as in the case of asteroid belts? The AI doesn't get TOO cheesed by nebula as it is, and campaign combat really needs some more variety and differentiation.

[Midnight Kitsune]

That said, why can't their be nebula on the campaign map, and having combat in/near them means more nebula on the battlefield, as in the case of asteroid belts? The AI doesn't get TOO cheesed by nebula as it is, and campaign combat really needs some more variety and differentiation.

SS+ does something similar. The closer you are to gas giants and stars? the more nebula you have on the field

[Morrokain]

Cheesing the AI can be fun, sometimes figuring out how to cheese it is a fun puzzle-- but only if it's for a one-off quests. If it's something you repeat endlessly, then yes it's awful.

So if there were ONE quest where you have to survive by continually circling behind a giant asteroid from an onslaught or something like that, it would be interesting.

That said, why can't their be nebula on the campaign map, and having combat in/near them means more nebula on the battlefield, as in the case of asteroid belts? The AI doesn't get TOO cheesed by nebula as it is, and campaign combat really needs some more variety and differentiation.

See I don't see this as cheese so much as strategy and tactics. Cheese is using an unintended mechanic to cheat the intended difficulty of the game. At best it forces a tedious play style to be effective and at worst it breaks the game.

Environmental battles won't have this effect if they are properly implemented at the campaign level. They dont have to be limited to a single instance but they should never be universally effectiv e either or tactics become cheese.

I'll use the nebulae example because it is the most commonly mentioned. My own use of this scenario would be something similar to the campaign mission the coral nebula. Carrier fleets with fast response units excel in nebulae while slow powerful ships are weakened. So if you are being chased by a fleet with that composition it would be a good idea to fly into a nebula.

If the campaign fleet ai always actually chased you into one it would be cheese. If the campaign ai broke off the chase once you entered because it becomes a bad fight for the ai then it is strategy.

However to keep things interesting there are times that the ai WILL pursue; such as overwhelming advantage in numbers or if the faction is desperate for some reason.

A really great use of this would have the ai adapt to your strategy. So if you are a pirate group darting in and out ofnebulae to avoid authorities they will catch on and send an overwhelming force to sweep the nebulae if they have the resources or even move operations away from large nubulae clusters.

This wouldn't be hard to do at the campaign level and would make tons of things possible as far as strategy/composition effecting the way the game is played

[nomadic_leader]

I think I see what you mean. However right now supposedly the AI doesn't understand or recognize nebula.

Since the focus in SS is so much on combat, there is developer/community trepidation about anything putting AI and human on an (even more) unequal footing. In some ways this is too bad, since it really limits the play variety. Everything has to be a padded cel so the AI doesn't bang its head on it.

If more non-combat features & gameplay make it into the game it would be ok to introduce more situations that introduce variety at the cost of disadvantaging the AI. It could be balanced by trying to make sure the AI has more/bigger ships in this kind of situation, or through some other means.

Also if the game continues to discourage the human player from using only one ship to solo an entire enemy fleet (peak performance timers etc), this would also help since the human side would also be reliant on AI ships with the same susceptibility.

[Midnight Kitsune]

I think I see what you mean. However right now supposedly the AI doesn't understand or recognize nebula.

Since the focus in SS is so much on combat, there is developer/community trepidation about anything putting AI and human on an (even more) unequal footing. In some ways this is too bad, since it really limits the play variety. Everything has to be a padded cel so the AI doesn't bang its head on it.

If more non-combat features & gameplay make it into the game it would be ok to introduce more situations that introduce variety at the cost of disadvantaging the AI. It could be balanced by trying to make sure the AI has more/bigger ships in this kind of situation, or through some other means.

Also if the game continues to discourage the human player from using only one ship to solo an entire enemy fleet (peak performance timers etc), this would also help since the human side would also be reliant on AI ships with the same susceptibility.

Well another problem is that the ally AI freaking SUCKS sometimes... It seems to only work real well in large numbers IMHO

[Morrokain]

Hmm you guys are still thinking in terms of the battle ai. I would completely agree that battle ai is not equipped to handle so many different scenarios in the preciseness it would need to in order to make it work well. That's why these types of engagements would be a huge advantage for the player in the first place. But I am not suggesting a better battle ai. I am suggesting a better equipped campaign ai before the battle even starts.

Just accept the fact that the ai will be gimped in these scenarios and balance it by making the ai not engage there unless forced to or in certain situations. The only real challenge there is making sure the situations where the ai will engage in a battle there aren't themselves exploitable.

My earlier suggestion to avoid the later problem was an actual ai response (sweeping nebulae field with overwhelming force was the example i used) since campaign ai is a lot simpler than battle ai and so this would be easier to implement.