Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: SafariJohn on November 01, 2018, 07:48:58 AM
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I don't remember anyone ever running a poll on this, so here we go.
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I run at 500. I would use more than 500 if the in-game setting exceeded that. (Before anyone says anything, I know about the setting in the json file.)
I have considered running at minimum at times to cheese the AI. They cannot outnumber or swarm my ship(s) if they cannot deploy enough. I have not resorted to that as a regular tactic, although I tried it a couple times before I decided it was not worth it at the time.
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my machine chugs hard at higher battle sizes. Lower battle sizes also force me to constrain my choices away from an obvious one of (bring more battleships and carriers) and i enjoy that. Unfortunate side effect is that it can make it necessary to bring extra ships that don't expect to get flown due to dynamic battle sizes constraining the possibilities against large fleets.
I also find a very large battle size generally too easy because it negates the dynamic battle size effects except against the largest fleets.
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500. At 200, about midway through the game it became very noticeable that the enemy was allowed to deploy more and more ships, while and I was restricted to deploying fewer and fewer compared to 5-10 character levels ago.
I cranked it up.
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2000 because why not. Granted the bigger battles lags harder the more ships there are and it more or less renders frigates completely useless.
Hey dude whats your battle size?
I dunno, like 500 or so.
You are like little Tri-Tachyon corporate wage slave. Watch this.
"maxBattleSize":2000
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200 currently as i've only got a single 16 gb stick of ram and it runs fine. I plan on going to a 32GB 4 stick setup sometime next year. We'll see what it can do then.
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I run it at 1000. I dislike the dynamic battle size. I want to just deploy all my ships and have a big fight. That said i sometimes cheese the AI by constraining to 100 and just crushing them solo with a paragon (or karkinos). It is tediously long, but i don't have to have leadership as i'll never be able to deploy all 10 officers, and 4 is plenty.
Once for laughs i set it to 10K and spawned 2 giant fleets with console commands and then joined the fight. It was less than 1 frame per second, and would have taken literally all day to complete. I pushed back down to 1K after that.
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For vanilla, 500 seems to be enough to allow any reasonable-sized player fleet and the biggest SINGLE (or 2-3 medium-sized REDACTED) enemy fleets to deploy all of their combat ships. Also, my i7 5930K and 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM seem to be plenty to run large battles at or near 63 FPS, which apparently is the built-in FPS cap.
I haven't tried engaging multiple large faction fleets yet, mainly because I don't want all my ships blown up, but from what you guys are saying it sounds like it's possible to "break" even the 500 cap. What an odd system.
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I haven't tried engaging multiple large faction fleets yet, mainly because I don't want all my ships blown up, but from what you guys are saying it sounds like it's possible to "break" even the 500 cap. What an odd system.
Hmm - what do you mean by "break"? If I'm understanding you right, you mean "exceed", but the cap is precisely there to, in fact, be exceeded and force only part of fleets to deploy when battles get "too large". Since there's no actual limit whatsoever on the total number of ships on each side in the battle, any size cap could theoretically be exceeded. The cap is there to 1) keep performance at a reasonable level and 2) keep the battlefield from getting too crowded - which is a very real concern.
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In this context, yeah, I just mean "exceed." I'm not talking about bugs or odd behavior.
I find it an odd system for a few reasons. For one thing, it's inherently biased in favor of the enemy: When the cap is exceeded, they get to deploy more ships, while the player can deploy fewer. There can easily be 4-5 entire rows of enemy ships joining in. This is on top of the fact that in theory, two or three large enemy fleets could combine by proximity, whereas the player only has one fleet. Yet, the game is designed such that there are massive NPC fleets roaming around. Designing the game in such a way that players can run into situations that neither the game engine, the physical reality of the battlefield (wrecks everywhere!), nor most computers could properly handle is a bit strange.
Then again, it can be good to push the envelope. Personally, I love wreckage-strewn battlefields. They're annoying, but humorous.
If there must be a deployment limit, surely it should be divided between both sides equitably (say, 250 deployment for each side), or at least something approaching equitably, like 300:200. Barring that, why design the game around fleets so massive that the cap is necessary in order to prevent the game from grinding to a halt? Clearly though, you have your reasons, and know the game a lot better than I do. I just find it all a little odd, though vanilla 0.8.1a at the maximum battle size setting does seem to work fine in all but the most outlier situations.
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I find it an odd system for a few reasons. For one thing, it's inherently biased in favor of the enemy: When the cap is exceeded, they get to deploy more ships, while the player can deploy fewer. There can easily be 4-5 entire rows of enemy ships joining in. This is on top of the fact that in theory, two or three large enemy fleets could combine by proximity, whereas the player only has one fleet. Yet, the game is designed such that there are massive NPC fleets roaming around. Designing the game in such a way that players can run into situations that neither the game engine, the physical reality of the battlefield (wrecks everywhere!), nor most computers could properly handle is a bit strange.
It gives the larger side - which is often the enemy, but can be the player, especially if allied fleets join on their side - an in-combat advantage that roughly matches their overall advantage in fleet size, up to a point. That is, it keeps the battle "fair" in that the larger side roughly outnumbers their enemy by the correct amount, despite the presence of the cap.
If anything, the system effectively favors the player because it's at worst a 60-40 split, the player is often outnumbered, and they may get less of a disadvantage than they would if all the ships got deployed at once. For example if the player has 20 ships (let's just assume same kind of ship for the example), and the enemy has 100 ships, the fight will be 20 vs 30 ships all the way, instead of 20 vs 100.
If there must be a deployment limit, surely it should be divided between both sides equitably (say, 250 deployment for each side), or at least something approaching equitably, like 300:200.
300 to 200 is indeed exactly the worst-case scenario for the massively outnumbered side, so: yes! That's how it works.
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300 to 200 is indeed exactly the worst-case scenario for the massively outnumbered side, so: yes! That's how it works.
Ah I see, I must have made some wrong assumptions or observations when I first ran into the limit, at which point my battle size was still 200. That seems equitable enough then given the advantages the player has over AI in general, carry on everyone.
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*thumbs up*
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While this poll can't tell us whether people are using size 200 because of performance or because it's standard, I think it shows us the majority of users consider 200 too low.
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If I used 200, it would be due to the default or standard. I do not exceed 500 because I need to edit the json file for that. If in-game settings offered higher max than 500, I would use that instead of 500.
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I don't set more than 500, because by the point you have enough ships to fill your share, game is pretty much won.
Any more is just giving extra advantage to enemy. Well... a potential one, because it would force me to avoid battles with multiple enemy fleets.
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I thought that the option to keep it under 500 was just for performance reasons. Maxed it as a habit from M&B where below 200 engagements can take absurd amount of time.
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I don't set more than 500, because by the point you have enough ships to fill your share, game is pretty much won.
Any more is just giving extra advantage to enemy. Well... a potential one, because it would force me to avoid battles with multiple enemy fleets.
For me, that is when the game begins (again), because I enjoy endgame most.
It would be great if I can cram two full-sized endgame fleets (or more in case of extended battles), but that is not possible even with size 500. I probably would not exceed 1000 because 1) UI assumes three digits or less and 2) my old computer has trouble at 1000 if every ship has fighters.
However, there is a point where too big a size hurts the AI because they deploy everything and either player can stall one big ship to drain CR of dozens of ships and maybe see enemies kill themselves with collision damage. I do not know the exact size this becomes a real problem.
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I wouldn't put too much stock in this anyhow. It's pretty common to see people acting as if bigger numbers = more fun and doing silly things based on that assumption.
See: 32 Player Instant Respawn 24/7 Dustbowl player who hates the Demoman with the fury of a dying star.