Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: sqrt(-1) on September 08, 2021, 09:39:13 AM
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Hi,
the old bug, that the autofire loadout config for the flagship and fire mode (linked/alternating) for fleet ships is randomly ignored, even for the same battle after loading.
This happens to vanilla ships like the Aurora and Tempest and others too.
This is quite annoying, to be frank.
Thank for getting this fixed finally.
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I'm not sure I understand what the issue is. I suspect what at least part of this is that autofire *is not* a permanent setting, but just the setting for the starting state of the ship's weapon groups. So for example if you toggle autopilot on, it will turn autofire on and off as it sees fit. And for fully AI controlled ships, this setting has no impact, and isn't supposed to. It's only there to make it so that for your own ship, you don't have to set specific groups to autofire at the start of every battle.
The alternating/linked status, I'm not actually aware of any issues with this, so more info - including steps to reproduce, if possible - would be very helpful!
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That the autopilot changes this setting of fleet ships, is clearly wrong in my opinion because it renders the purpose of burst weapon loadouts and the ship's fire mode settings void.
If someone uses an illicit weapon group setting, then he should suffer the consequences, not someone who wants to enforce an ideal loadout that can only be utilized with a fire mode that is actually used and not randomly reset.
And that my flagship is randomly reconfigured by some autopilot that I never want to use, has caused quite some frustration for me, too many times.
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Autofire state is very much a tactical decision that flux levels - and many other dynamic things - heavily factor into and it would not be a good idea to have that be forced to a specific state for all of combat.
I can understand what you're asking for, it might be handy in some cases to be able to say "keep firing these guns no matter what" but autofire just isn't that setting. Restricting it to that would cause far more problems than it would solve.
Edit: the group mode (linked vs alternating) *is* on the other hand a "hard" setting that's not changed mid-combat. But - maybe this is the confusing point here? - it does not matter for autofire, since in an autofiring group, each weapon aims and fires individually, so the group's firing mode doesn't matter.
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If this would make sense, then you should remove the firemode settings, because a setting that is arbritrarily overridden only causes frustration and has no purpose.
The AI can avoid overloading solely by deciding if firing any weapons is viable or not. Overriding the firing mode setting for a specific group is not necessary for this.
My flagship's (or any other fleet ship's) autofire setting is randomly changed, even before any combat has happened. This just doesn't make any sense.
EDIT: I have observed several times that the linked/alternating setting is changed too.
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If this would make sense, then you should remove the firemode settings, because a setting that is arbritrarily overridden only causes frustration and has no purpose.
The AI can avoid overloading solely by deciding if firing the group is viable or not. Overriding the firing mode setting is not necessary for this.
And as I have already said, punishing good players for the sake of saving bad players is generally not a good idea at all.
I think you might be confused about something? There's nothing here about bad players vs good players. How the AI turns guns on/off if they think a group is bad to fire is through the autofire setting, or in the one group that it takes 'manual' control over. Exactly like how a player does it.
The setting is there so that we as players don't need to set our autofire groups every single fight - on a big ship thats not only tedious, but potentially disastrous if forgotten.
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My flagship's (or any other fleet ship's) autofire setting is randomly changed, even before any combat has happened. This just doesn't make any sense.
EDIT: I have observed several times that the linked/alternating setting is changed too.
This does definitely sound like a bug. I haven't ever had my weapon groups's autofire switch around just because or even change from linked to alternating or vice versa, not unless I changed them manually in refit screen or used autofit.
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I think you might be confused about something? There's nothing here about bad players vs good players. How the AI turns guns on/off if they think a group is bad to fire is through the autofire setting, or in the one group that it takes 'manual' control over. Exactly like how a player does it.
The setting is there so that we as players don't need to set our autofire groups every single fight - on a big ship thats not only tedious, but potentially disastrous if forgotten.
It is 3 separate issues:
- If the autofire setting wasn't randomly overridden for AI controlled fleet ships, I could optimize weapon group fire prioaritization to the AI. The AI could still decide to fire no weapons at all if flux levels don't permit it.
- If the linked/alternating wasn't randomly ignored for AI controlled fleet ships, I could optimize burst weapon efficiency.
- If the autofire setting wasn't randomly overridden for my flagship, I wouldn't need to hit my desk in frustration because I am not an AI that can manually fire 7 non-PD weapon groups and because I find it irritating to have to change the setting again depending on what the AI has randomly decided upon at the beginning of this battle.
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Are you updated to the latest version of the game? There was an issue in the initial release of .95 with a bug that scrambled weapon group settings, but points 2 and 3 haven't happened in my experience since it was hotfixed.
For 1, optimizing fire group prioritization is an entirely different feature than what autofire is, and a simple toggle would only be able to achieve 'always fire' or 'only manual fire'. I wouldn't mind having a feature like that either (it could really up the power of some builds!) but thats a feature request, not a bug.
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The alternating/linked status, I'm not actually aware of any issues with this, so more info - including steps to reproduce, if possible - would be very helpful!
I will try to isolate occurences when this happens for linked/alternating.
I guess this can be easily overlooked if one doesn't use linked low fire rate weapons like Phase Lances.
But I am not sure if you think that it is intentional that the flagship's autofire settings should be overridden randomly at the beginning of a battle and even during a battle.
I can reproduce this frequently and this is clearly terrible in my opinion.
Are you updated to the latest version of the game? There was an issue in the initial release of .95 with a bug that scrambled weapon group settings, but points 2 and 3 haven't happened in my experience since it was hotfixed.
I am running .95 RC15 and I observe these issues for years now.
For 1, optimizing fire group prioritization is an entirely different feature than what autofire is, and a simple toggle would only be able to achieve 'always fire' or 'only manual fire'. I wouldn't mind having a feature like that either (it could really up the power of some builds!) but thats a feature request, not a bug.
In my eyes that's the only conceivable functional purpose for this setting anyway. There is no difference between the intent for this setting for a player or AI controlled ship.
But yes, now that Alex's intent is clearl, at least this point is a feature request, even though I think it is a conceptual bug.
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I will try to isolate occurences when this happens for linked/alternating.
I guess this can be easily overlooked if one doesn't use linked low fire rate weapons like Phase Lances.
Thank you!
One possibility, btw - not for linked/alternating, but for autofire: if you right-click your flagship onto an objective, that will engage autopilot. That, in turn, will change autofire toggles to what it would normally set them to based on the current situation, almost as soon as the game is unpaused. Basically, you generally don't want to select your flagship and issue an order to it when you're giving orders to your other ships, unless you're not planning on personally piloting it. This might explain why this could feel "random", since this is easy to miss.
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One possibility, btw - not for linked/alternating, but for autofire: if you right-click your flagship onto an objective, that will engage autopilot. That, in turn, will change autofire toggles to what it would normally set them to based on the current situation, almost as soon as the game is unpaused. Basically, you generally don't want to select your flagship and issue an order to it when you're giving orders to your other ships, unless you're not planning on personally piloting it. This might explain why this could feel "random", since this is easy to miss.
I have tested this immediately, and that's exactly what is causing this. I think that this is a very inconsistent and convoluted behavior. And since I (and I suppose many others) frequently want to save time when giving orders with group selections, wiyhout tediously deselecting the flagship, this is something that is causing frustration often.
The whole thing could be avoided if autofire was seen conceptionally consistent. 'Autofire' already literally means: fire this group automatically unless it would overload the ship, the firing of manual groups is intended for more situational consideration. I don't see how this would break anything for the AI if this wasn't overridden. The only difference would be that poor loadouts would be punished more and better ones would be rewarded.
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One possibility, btw - not for linked/alternating, but for autofire: if you right-click your flagship onto an objective, that will engage autopilot.
Nice job, Alex. I don't think I would have thought to check for that - I would have assumed he had seen the "autopilot engaged" message and realised autopilot is taking over and messing with weapon groups, so it couldn't have been that.
'Autofire' already literally means: fire this group automatically unless it would overload the ship, the firing of manual groups is intended for more situational consideration.
When piloting a capital ship, turning weapon groups on autofire or off is the situational consideration.
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When piloting a capital ship, turning weapon groups on autofire or off is the situational consideration.
Right, but the point of this is solely an extension of manual firing because players cannot trigger the individual firing of up to 7 groups. For AI, this isn't a practical concern.
The autofire override by AI only causes the now clarified problems and takes away from the possibilty to prioritize weapon group usage.
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When piloting a capital ship, turning weapon groups on autofire or off is the situational consideration.
Right, but the point of this is solely an extension of manual firing because players cannot trigger the individual firing of up to 7 groups. For AI, this isn't a practical concern.
The autofire override by AI only causes the now clarified problems and takes away from the possibilty to prioritize weapon group usage.
It actually is a concern for the AI. It controls its weapons exactly like the player: swapping weapons in and out of autofire, with a single 'manual' group that is aiming at some virtual mouse point and is fired on a virtual mouse click. (And, for alternating groups like missiles, it even advances the group's selection by 1 every time it decides to switch to that group! Which can screw up their usage of missiles by making them fire multiple times from a single missile when others of the same type have more ammo... but thats a different issue.) The AI will switch its 'manual' group around depending on the situation (including switching to missiles and leaving guns off sometimes, which can be annoying), and IIRC this is the only way it tries to optimize damage types being fired against the enemy.
It also has the same differences in behavior between the 'manual' control group and the autofire groups, which can sometimes cause weird issues that are a bit opaque. For example, if sometimes a linked group with weapons pointing in different directions (like a mix of hardpoints and turrets) fires correctly, only when enemies cross the firing arcs, its in autofire mode. If the whole group is firing at once even when the target is out of arc, its in 'manual' mode and the AI just clicked the mouse button.
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As a sidenote, I think I am a very good pilot who min/maxes with what most would consider impossible battles and even I almost never need to toggle autofire, particularly since I don't pilot (IMO extremely boring) battleships.
Thaago, I don't see the point you are trying to make. What matters is that the AI has no hard problem to decide, every frame, whether a manual group should be fired and can easily trigger its firing for every single projectile. Toggling autofiring is an edge case for a human player in a battleship, with a reason (pracitically unable to handle manual firing of all groups), which isn't a genuine one for the AI.
I also don't see the point with weapon line of sight & range. Yeah, a player should only put weapons in manual fire group where it makes sense. Safguarding against poor loadout decisions with convoluted and limiting behavior is not the right answer.
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Hmm. Basically, autofire is not the thing you're asking for, and it needs to be the way it is because while most of the time, you can get good enough results with "hold fire", sometimes you can't, and it would be bad if you didn't have the option for finer-grained control.
I think asking for what you're asking for in the guise of making autofire work that way muddies things. It's fundamentally different - what you want is a ship behavior control (it's almost in the ballpark of suggestions re:, say, being able to configure the ship AI with certain parameters - though not quite, because it'd also affect the player ship), and autofire is just a default state setting for a regular ship control. Conceptually, it's apples and oranges, and one isn't a replacement for the other.
(Though, something like another checkbox to make autofire state for a group "permanent" could be interesting, perhaps... but it'd also feel pretty weird, fundamentally not being able to shut off a specific group firing without shutting off everything else as well. Worth more thought, though.)
I don't think I would have thought to check for that
(... I've done it myself :( )
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Actual direct ship AI control needs to happen. "Don't mess with player-set autofire" is simply one piece of it. There are countless threads and videos showing just how much trickery you need to make ships do what you actually want them to do. And that's before getting into mods. Some level of control needs to be open to the player. The black box approach to AI will not cut it in a mature game, not when its main focus is on space battles.
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It would be cool to somehow set a ship to "autofire select group as much as possible until x flux level"
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Alex, I read everything again and took a breather on this to be sure.
What I/we are suggesting is not a new feature nor is this a 'mudding' concept, but exactly the contrary. All I want is that the AI is autofiring the group I have selected to do so rather than convoluted side effects by unclear overridings of what I have told the game to do.
If I want the AI to auomatically fire, except when it would immediately overload the ship, then the selection of autofire should be persistent and not be overriden.
If I want the AI to make further situational decisions for the weapon group, then I should deselect autofire.
The current implementation is clearly convoluted and contrary to the meaning of the word's definition, creating very frustrating side effects, as I have mentioned before.
If you still disagree, then I suggest to at least rename the loadout setting to "Autofire when piloted and if not occationally overriden by accidental AI activation" instead of labeling it "Autofire".
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Alex, I read everything again and took a breather on this to be sure.
I appreciate this, truly!
If you still disagree, then I suggest to at least rename the loadout setting to "Autofire when piloted and if not occationally overriden by accidental AI activation" instead of labeling it "Autofire".
To be fair, that is more or less how it's labelled :) "Autofire starts enabled" with a tooltip explaining the details.
https://i.imgur.com/edYqPXs.png
Actual direct ship AI control needs to happen. "Don't mess with player-set autofire" is simply one piece of it. There are countless threads and videos showing just how much trickery you need to make ships do what you actually want them to do. And that's before getting into mods. Some level of control needs to be open to the player. The black box approach to AI will not cut it in a mature game, not when its main focus is on space battles.
Ah, hard disagree on that, I'm afraid! IIRC I've gone into a bit more detail on this elsewhere, but basically: it's one of those things that sound great, but I think in practice it would mean players spending 10x more time trying to find the "right" set of AI toggles for their specific loadout, and then finding in practice that their testing didn't account for something that makes the ship perform horribly as a result. Basically, if you're thinking that "how much trickery is required to get AI ships to do what you want them to do" is a problem, then I think this would very likely do the opposite of helping with it.
(The deck would be stacked against the player, too, since trying to solve dynamic tactical problems with loadout-time settings... well, it's going to be difficult.)
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This would be more likely to change should someone present an actually documented case (video following a particular ship around might be good), where the human player at refit time unambiguously knows better whether or not the weapon group should be autofired (always/never!), than the AI during the actual combat.
(I'm not sure this would be common even for any particular moment, but bear in mind that the player setting needs to be more correct than the AI doing otherwise over the entire battle)
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One thing that irritates me about autofire groups is when the AI manually controls one! A "never manually control this group" setting might be useful.
I have also seen troublesome behavior where the AI turns off all autofire groups while at low/zero flux, even when there is a target in range.
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One thing that irritates me about autofire groups is when the AI manually controls one! A "never manually control this group" setting might be useful.
okay the OP's suggestions are uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh lacking context? (idk how else to put it politely) but this ^ is unironically second. i like to throw salamanders on everything i have & have noticed that having a pair of salamanders on a ship affects its AI -- a ship that will go in to knife someone in the simulator will get into sally range and then kite them to throw harmless lizards at them until CR runs out if I fill their missile slots. or at least that was my impression
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I'm still waiting for that perfect counter AI.
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Alex, I have noticed that the linked fire mode override by AI can be reproduced quite easily in simulation mode when sending a ship against other ones where at least one has fighter bays.
Even when just a single enemy fighter is in range and is within the weapon group's overlapping firing arc, it aims and fires linked non-PD guns individually instead of aiming and firing the entire group as intended. This causes the weapons to not only be out of loading sync when engaging ship targets (which generally are a priority), but also misaligned, which cascades into long lasting asynchrous firing during a continuous firing engagement, which ruins the intent/benefit of a burst loadout, dissolving the sole purpose of the linked fire mode setting.
At the very least, only PD weapons should ignore the linked firing mode when engaging fighters or missiles, even though I disagree with this because there is also a purpose of linking PD weapons with matching arcs against shielded fighters.
Since you already extend the number of firing groups, nasty convoluted side effects like this can be entirely avoided without any negative side effects by not overriding the player's intent. If I intent a group to be aimed and fired independently, then I should either disable linked fire or put them into separate groups. Again, the impact of good player decisions should not be rendered void by the intent to circumvent inferior player decisions.
Considering the comments of others, it seems as if the core argument about the autofire mode (same as the linked mode) is still not understood: There is clearly no need for adding another loadout setting because a strict execution of the existing firing modes is all what is needed for resolving the side effects while generally enabling all intents.
If I truly intent autofire and/or linked fire then my loadout setting should not be ignored. If I truly want the AI to decide then I disable autofire and/or linked fire. AI override renders those very loadout settings entirely pointless for AI controlled ships and causes frustrating side effects for the piloted ship, just for the sake that someone could have made a mistake when enabling autofire and/or linked fire.
Just truly do as what the names of the loadout settings mean instead of doing something else. There are only upsides and no downsides to this.
Again, the upcoming additon of more weapon groups is the perfect moment to get this cleaned up.
This would be more likely to change should someone present an actually documented case (video following a particular ship around might be good), where the human player at refit time unambiguously knows better whether or not the weapon group should be autofired (always/never!), than the AI during the actual combat.
To put it simple: Every single purpose for the very meaning of the firing modes is either deminished or even entirely ruined by the AI's overriding.
The sole purpose of autofire is to enable a higher, practical firing priority over other weapon groups. For example, that the AI overrides the autofire of Heavy Blasters in an Aurora, and instead prioritizes low projectile damage weapons to consume the last drops of flux capacity so that my Heavy Blasters never fire near flux limit, ruins my intent to take down armour effectively and ruins the chance of overloading an enemy ship with my guns in most critical situations.
Additionally, those groups I intent to be prioritized cannot feasibly be triggered by me while I intent to manually trigger other weapons when piloting a ship. That the AI overrides the autofiring of a group I cannot fire manually, because I have selected the piloted ship when giving tactical commands to a fleet group, is a most inconceivable and frustrating side effect.
If I truly intent to let the AI decide whether a group should be fired over another (beyond preventing direct overloading), then I should just disable autofire.
The sole purpose of linked fire is to enable burst damage. For example, that the AI overrides Linked Fire of Phase Lances in a Tempest just to take down a fighter ruins my intent to effectively overload enemy ships because the refire delay is out of sync and the guns are misaligned.
If I truly intent the AI to decide whether a group should be fired linked or alternating, then I should just disable linked firing.
Just take away firing mode overriding by the AI to make things cleaner while truly enabling its purpose.
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Again, the impact of good player decisions should not be rendered void by the intent to circumvent inferior player decisions.
It can't be made useless, if it wasn't a thing in the first place.
I would rather have some priority system for weapon groups instead of locking AI into autofire. I don't always autofire otherwise much used groups. And what if the flagship? A ship player may want to switch later on? You have to choose between convenience and performance.
Having the AI coordinate their long-cooldown weapons would be nice no matter what else happens, though.
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It can't be made useless, if it wasn't a thing in the first place.
I don't understand what you mean with that. Autofire is supposed to autofire. Letting the AI override this does exactly the same as having it disabled in the first place, so the firing modes are currently entirely pointless for AI ships and ship piloting with intended auto-/linked firing is plagued by terrible side effects because of the pointless decision to let the AI override it.
I would rather have some priority system for weapon groups instead of locking AI into autofire.
But that's the sole purpose of autofire in the first place! Why else would you enable autofire for a group if you didn't want its firing to be a priority?
I don't always autofire otherwise much used groups.
Well, then don't enable autofire for it, which makes exactly happen what you want. So why ruin autofire if you get what you want by disabling it anyway?
And what if the flagship? A ship player may want to switch later on? You have to choose between convenience and performance.
Having the AI coordinate their long-cooldown weapons would be nice no matter what else happens, though.
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
If you want to let the AI make situative decisions on weapon firing then disable autofiring.
If you want to toggle autofiring for groups then do so.
There is simply no need to make the firing modes entirely pointless for AI ships and cause nasty side effects for piloted ships by letting the AI override them.
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I don't understand what you mean with that. Autofire is supposed to autofire. Letting the AI override this does exactly the same as having it disabled in the first place
Auto-fire isn't an AI setting though, it's a player-assist setting.
It's like complaining that your saw is a terrible hammer: Of course it is, it's not supposed to be a hammer.
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Auto-fire isn't an AI setting though, it's a player-assist setting.
It's like complaining that your saw is a terrible hammer: Of course it is, it's not supposed to be a hammer.
If this was truly the case (which it of course isn't), why is the AI disabling my autofiring setting because my piloted ship was accidentally in the group I selected to give a tactical command to? And I thought to just have given plenty clear examples why the firing mode should not be overridden by the AI. Why ignore something useful?
A proper anecdote would be "It's like randomly overwriting the setting of a speedometer in a car with the 'explanation' that you can manually control the accelerator."
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Alex, I have noticed that the linked fire mode override by AI can be reproduced quite easily in simulation mode when sending a ship against other ones where at least one has fighter bays.
Even when just a single enemy fighter is in range and is within the weapon group's overlapping firing arc, it aims and fires linked non-PD guns individually instead of aiming and firing the entire group as intended. This causes the weapons to not only be out of loading sync when engaging ship targets (which generally are a priority), but also misaligned, which cascades into long lasting asynchrous firing during a continuous firing engagement, which ruins the intent/benefit of a burst loadout, dissolving the sole purpose of the linked fire mode setting.
Linked fire mode just means that all weapons that can fire at the selected point at the selected time will fire simultaneously. It sounds like some of your weapons did not fire because they had no target to fire at, but that is intended behavior. Linked fire mode is not intended to be a way of managing weapon cool downs. It just makes all the guns shoot at once.
I think you are vastly overestimating the complexity of the auto fire and linked fire behaviors. They are super simple rules (auto fire = always fire if something can be shot at, linked fire = fire everything that has the cursor in its arc at once). They are not systems that do anything complicated.
why is the AI disabling my autofiring setting because my piloted ship was accidentally in the group I selected to give a tactical command to? And I thought to just have given plenty clear examples why the firing mode should not be overridden by the AI. Why ignore something useful?
The AI turns auto fire on/off as its mechanism for making complicated decisions about flux levels. That is the only way it can manage weapon groups that are not the manual fire group. The AI is only allowed to manually fire one group at a time (same as the player), so in order to use more than one group at a time it manages other groups by turning auto-fire on and off. It needs to be able to toggle auto fire in order to use these groups in any way other than 'all guns always shoot'.
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Linked fire mode just means that all weapons that can fire at the selected point at the selected time will fire simultaneously. It sounds like some of your weapons did not fire because they had no target to fire at, but that is intended behavior. Linked fire mode is not intended to be a way of managing weapon cool downs. It just makes all the guns shoot at once.
I don't comprehend how you got the idea of writing this.
Of course is linked fire intended to fire simultanuously. As I have clearly explained, the AI is ignoring this even for non-PD weapons just when a single enemy fighters is nearby who is within the shared arc of the linked weapons. The consequence is that both guns are misaligned and out of reloading sync, which ruins the intent of linked fire for burst weapon ship loadouts like the mentioned Tempest with dual Phase Lances.
I think you are vastly overestimating the complexity of the auto fire and linked fire behaviors. They are super simple rules (auto fire = always fire if something can be shot at, linked fire = fire everything that has the cursor in its arc at once). They are not systems that do anything complicated.
The only reason why you could possibly think this is because you didn't bother with reading what I have said, multiple times, all the time.
Yes, exactly, the autofire and linked mode SHOULD be very simple and clear things! The problem is that it is not because the AI is totally pointlessly overriding the mode setting, which causes several frustrating side effects that even Alex had to check about.
The AI turns auto fire on/off as its mechanism for making complicated decisions about flux levels. That is the only way it can manage weapon groups that are not the manual fire group.
First of all, you just contradict to what you have claimed just a line before. And no, it is not about that! Manual and automatic firing both simply doesn't trigger when the firing would directly cause an overloading (perhaps with some additional threshhold). This is fine and is no excuse for the AI to override the firing mode.
If I want further flux level considerations to be made, then I should disable the group's automatic firing mode. So there is simply no reason to disable the autofiring mode that I have decided for.
The AI is only allowed to manually fire one group at a time (same as the player), so in order to use more than one group at a time it manages other groups by turning auto-fire on and off. It needs to be able to toggle auto fire in order to use these groups in any way other than 'all guns always shoot'.
How is the convoluted concept I am complaining about an excuse for itself?!
That even I, with my high-latency synaptic connections, can handle to switch between manual firing groups and trigger them, then so can a 5 GHz OoO CPU within a microsecond. The implementation is totally pointlessly convoluted, as I have explained exhaustingly.
Guys, I think I have been very patient here about quite a trivial and clear issue and the impression I get from most is that you don't even bother to fully read what I say, perhaps just because Alex initially indicated to disagree with what I was saying or perhaps some cannot deal with the thought that this was implemented badly for all those years.
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delete
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Auto-fire isn't an AI setting though, it's a player-assist setting.
It's like complaining that your saw is a terrible hammer: Of course it is, it's not supposed to be a hammer.
If this was truly the case (which it of course isn't), why is the AI disabling my autofiring setting because my piloted ship was accidentally in the group I selected to give a tactical command to? And I thought to just have given plenty clear examples why the firing mode should not be overridden by the AI. Why ignore something useful?
I'm going to agree with Yunru, it's a player assist at start of combat setting.
The reason for your weapon selection/autofire state changing is as soon as you give your ship a tactical order, you are no longer piloting it, the autopilot is. It's not your ship anymore in terms of commands, and thus acts like any other AI ship.
If you put the ship under AI control, why would you expect it to act different from any other AI controlled ship? I personally expect it to act like an AI ship, and my guess is that would be most player's expectations. I'll note, as soon as you do anything (like select a weapon group), it goes back to being under player control, so clearly weapon group selections and autofire status are considered important for the AI to function, and if it doesn't have full control of those, will hand everything back to the player.
So here is my stab at explaining what I see is the miscommunication. There are two very distinct features being discussed here in regards to the autofire toggle on the loadout screen, as opposed to in combat autofire status.
1) Convenience feature for the player reducing the number of shift-number button presses at the beginning of each and every fight.
2) Fine grained AI control determining when weapons fire.
I totally agree that the autofire toggle on the loadout screen does nothing for AI ships, but on the other hand, that is not its intent. It is purely a convenience for me, the player, to save on pointless repetitive motions. It means I don't have to stretch my left hand awkwardly to hit shift-7 every fight to turn my point defenses on my Onslaught or Paragon. I would object if that convenience feature was taken away by combining it with a fine grained AI control setting which has absolutely nothing to do with how I fly my flagship at the beginning of each fight.
If such a fine grained AI control were added, it should be a different toggle, as Alex suggested, or completely new screen intended for AI control stuff, and not remove features that are currently used by, I would guess, most players for flagships.
As for autofire in combat itself, it is intended to be an in combat toggle, for both the player and AI. Removing the option from the AI's pool of options seems like it could only hurt the general ship case, and breaks the symmetry between AI and player piloting, while perhaps helping some small parameter space of highly optimized loadouts. The game would likely be poorer for it (or harder, as all the default loadouts for the AI would need to be tweaked to take into account this new autofire behavior, and thus be much more optimized flux wise) and the parameter space of loadouts that are viable would shrink.
I think this feature request would need to be a new feature, and not interact with the current autofire logic and settings, but be its own new thing. It also feels like such an override of the basic AI should be hidden behind a tutorial explaining in detail what the general effects of each would have on the AI, and intended only for advanced players who understand what it's going to do to ship behavior. And not on the standard loadout screen.
In summary, changing logic to not touch autofire once set is likely easy for Alex. However, I fear there would be complicated repercussions for every single ship and combat, that would not be as easy to handle.
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Auto-fire isn't an AI setting though, it's a player-assist setting.
It's like complaining that your saw is a terrible hammer: Of course it is, it's not supposed to be a hammer.
If this was truly the case (which it of course isn't), why is the AI disabling my autofiring setting because my piloted ship was accidentally in the group I selected to give a tactical command to? And I thought to just have given plenty clear examples why the firing mode should not be overridden by the AI. Why ignore something useful?
1) Just because you want it to be something else, doesn't make it something else. No matter how much you whine that it's broken because it's not the thing you want it to be.
2) It turns off precisely because it's not AI controls and you just enabled the AI.
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games just arent gonna be exactly what you want them to be. you would like it if the AI respected the fire mode you set at ship build. so would I. that just wouldn't be good for the game tho. its the sort of thing that if it were to exist would need to be a mod, or a very deeply buried setting that defaults to "off" (which isnt gonna happen bc that bloats the game's QA budget unnecessarily). that just isn't the game that this is, and that's okay
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Linked fire mode just means that all weapons that can fire at the selected point at the selected time will fire simultaneously. It sounds like some of your weapons did not fire because they had no target to fire at, but that is intended behavior. Linked fire mode is not intended to be a way of managing weapon cool downs. It just makes all the guns shoot at once.
I don't comprehend how you got the idea of writing this.
Of course is linked fire intended to fire simultanuously. As I have clearly explained, the AI is ignoring this even for non-PD weapons just when a single enemy fighters is nearby. The consequence is that both guns are misaligned and out of reloading sync, which ruins the intent of linked fire for burst weapon ship loadouts like the mentioned Tempest with dual Phase Lances.
Yes, that is how linked fire works, but your idea of 'intent' is not correct. It is a tool for the player and works decently with some weapons like missiles for the AI. Using it for weapons with different arcs will not work.
What it sounds like you want is for the AI to do cool-down management to sync weapon firing, which is much more complicated and also situational. For instance, delaying firing to sync cool downs at the wrong moment can miss a window for dealing hull/armor damage, or even miss a kill, and more generally, you lose a lot of DPS by syncing firing sometimes. Also if weapons have different cool downs, it's not obvious what the desired behavior even should be... should the AI fire the faster firing weapon less often? or should the AI fire the faster firing weapon at max ROF and only fire the slower firing weapon on every second cycle? What happens if you havethree different cool-downs? It's not something that should be handled by a simple toggle, and it's not even something with an obvious solution.
If I want further flux level considerations to be made, then I should disable the group's automatic firing mode. So there is simply no reason to disable the autofiring mode that I have decided for.
That's not how the AI works. If you could lock one group on auto fire, and all the other groups not on auto fire with the current system, the AI would only ever be able to use one of the non-autofire groups at a time, which is obviously not desirable and much less effective than what we have now. It sounds like you want non-autofire groups to still fire at 'the right' times, but that is simply not how the AI works. The only times weapons can fire are 1. when they are auto fired and 2. when they are in the single group that is manually fired. In order to do anything beyond that, you have to fundamentally rework how the AI functions.
I think maybe this is what the disconnect in all these conversations is?
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Auto-fire isn't an AI setting though, it's a player-assist setting.
It's like complaining that your saw is a terrible hammer: Of course it is, it's not supposed to be a hammer.
If this was truly the case (which it of course isn't), why is the AI disabling my autofiring setting because my piloted ship was accidentally in the group I selected to give a tactical command to? And I thought to just have given plenty clear examples why the firing mode should not be overridden by the AI. Why ignore something useful?
A proper anecdote would be "It's like randomly overwriting the setting of a speedometer in a car with the 'explanation' that you can manually control the accelerator."
It really is the case. It even says so in the tooltip. The AI is changing the autofire settings when you set your flagship to AI control because thats how it controls its non-manual weapons, exactly how the player does. There is nothing "random" going on at all. If you don't want the AI to take control of the weapon groups... don't set your flagship to AI control. Its annoying when it happens sure, but its not a 'wrong' behavior or a bug, its just a consequence of a misclick. The same way that hitting eburn by mistake is an annoying thing to happen, but not a bug, just user error.
Re: linked weapons getting desynchronized because a target is only in one arc: Linked weapons have two different behaviors depending on if they are in "manual" control or autofire control. In "manual" control they all fire when clicked. In autofire control they fire at targets of opportunity independently. Its always been that way and its not a bug, or the AI doing something weird: the same thing is true on the player ship. Thats just how linked works. There's no overriding or anything going on.
... Guys, I think I have been very patient here about quite a trivial and clear issue and the impression I get from most is that you don't even bother to fully read what I say, perhaps just because Alex initially indicated to disagree with what I was saying or perhaps some cannot deal with the thought that this was implemented badly for all those years.
Its more that you have ideas about how weapon groups and settings work that are just incorrect. People keep telling you how things actually work and then you dismiss them and insist that you are correct. Like:
Of course is linked fire intended to fire simultanuously.
Autofire is supposed to autofire.
Neither of these things are true - the first depends on manual vs autofire control and its very much intentional because otherwise how would groups with disparate arcs work, and the second has never been true. I'm not saying that they are inherently bad ideas, but they just aren't what the terms mean in the game as it currently is.
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I'm going to second agree with Yunru, it's a player assist at start of combat setting.
The reason for your weapon selection/autofire state changing is as soon as you give your ship a tactical order, you are no longer piloting it, the autopilot is. It's not your ship anymore in terms of commands, and thus acts like any other AI ship.
If you put the ship under AI control, why would you expect it to act different from any other AI controlled ship? I personally expect it to act like an AI ship, and my guess is that would be most player's expectations. I'll note, as soon as you do anything (like select a weapon group), it goes back to being under player control, so clearly weapon group selections and autofire status are considered important for the AI to function, and if it doesn't have full control of those, will hand everything back to the player.
I have responded multiple times:
- You don't need to explain to me what the behavior is that I am complaining about.
- You cannot excuse a bad implementation with the bad implementation itself.
- The firing mode settings should not be overridden by the AI because the purpose and consequences of them are identical to the one for manual piloting. There is just zero reason to override them!
- Frustrating side effects, which even Alex has to check for, like the changed autofiring mode when getting manual control back from common, unintended AI triggering (which is a clearly bad implementation too), is obviously unacceptable
So here is my stab at explaining what I see is the miscommunication. There are two very distinct features being discussed here in regards to the autofire toggle on the loadout screen, as opposed to in combat autofire status.
1) Convenience feature for the player reducing the number of shift-number button presses at the beginning of each and every fight.
That's a very convoluted way of describing the player's intent to define what what weapons should fire automatically, which is identical to what I want the AI to not ignore.
2) Fine grained AI control determining when weapons fire.
No! As I have explicitely stated multiple times, it's exactly the same 'feature'! I solely want the AI to automatically fire certain weapons!
That the fundamental motivation for enabling autofiring of certain group is a an intent/reflection of prioritization, is the same for both manual piloting and AI control.
I totally agree that the autofire toggle on the loadout screen does nothing for AI ships, but on the other hand, that is not its intent. It is purely a convenience for me, the player, to save on pointless repetitive motions. It means I don't have to stretch my left hand awkwardly to hit shift-7 every fight to turn my point defenses on my Onslaught or Paragon. I would object if that convenience feature was taken away by combining it with a fine grained AI control setting which has absolutely nothing to do with how I fly my flagship at the beginning of each fight.
You don't understand the reasons of your own actions then or you are an awful pilot.
If you truly would only care about an automatic trigger, then you would put all weapons into autofire mode. Any half-decent pilot knows that a ship build, particularly those who intent to exploit speed and burst damage, can only be fully exploited by manually firing certain kinds of weapons depending on the circumstances.
As I have explained multiple times, there is ZERO reason to let the AI ruin the ability to reflect intentions with firing modes, which are generally identical between manual piloting and AI control!
If such a fine grained AI control were added, it should be a different toggle, as Alex suggested, or completely new screen intended for AI control stuff, and not remove features that are currently used by, I would guess, most players for flagships.
Where are you even getting the idea from that I allgedly intent a more "fine grained AI control"?!
As for autofire in combat itself, it is intended to be an in combat toggle, for both the player and AI.
As I have explained before, as someone who takes down more than tenfold larger enemy fleets by piloting vanilla ships with all kinds of loadouts, toggling autofire during combat is an edge case for lame flux battles with lame capital ships by lame pilots who cannot cope with switching between weapon groups.
Since the motivation for this (lame reactions) are no practical reason for the AI, is only emphasizing how void even this irrelevant edge point of poor pilots is.
Removing the option from the AI's pool of options seems like it could only hurt the general ship case, and breaks the symmetry between AI and player piloting, while perhaps helping some small parameter space of highly optimized loadouts. The game would likely be poorer for it (or harder, as all the default loadouts for the AI would need to be tweaked to take into account this new autofire behavior, and thus be much more optimized flux wise)
That's just vague assumptions without any reasoning.
If I want the AI to consider beyond avoiding directly causing an overload, I should simply disable autofiring. It's that simple and so perfectly identical with manual piloting.
and the parameter space of loadouts that are viable would shrink.
What?! Allowing the AI to override the sole way of effectively defining the intent of a burst damage ship build is shrinking the variability of loadouts?!
I think this feature request would need to be a new feature, and not interact with the current autofire logic and settings, but be its own new thing. It also feels like such an override of the basic AI should be hidden behind a tutorial explaining in detail what the general effects of each would have on the AI, and intended only for advanced players who understand what it's going to do to ship behavior. And not on the standard loadout screen.
In summary, changing logic to not touch autofire once set is likely easy for Alex. However, I fear there would be complicated repercussions for every single ship and combat, that would not be as easy to handle.
As explained above and in multiple replies before, the idea that what I intend requires the addition of another firing mode setting, is entirely to the contrary of what I was saying.
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1) Just because you want it to be something else, doesn't make it something else. No matter how much you whine that it's broken because it's not the thing you want it to be.
I have explained why the AI overriding is pointless, ruining the ability to enable a more proper use of certain ship builds for AI piloting and is causing several awful side effects that even Alex has to check.
2) It turns off precisely because it's not AI controls and you just enabled the AI.
Are you seriously pretending that it is fine that someone has his 30 minute battle ruined because of the absurd implementation that AI control is activated just because some group commands were issued and thus my autofire settings were overridden without my explicit command?!!
No one here, even Alex, even had an idea for two days what could have caused the issue and now everyone pretends as if this is dandy! RIDICULOUS!
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1) Just because you want it to be something else, doesn't make it something else. No matter how much you whine that it's broken because it's not the thing you want it to be.
I have explained why the AI overriding is pointless, ruining the ability to enable a more proper use of certain ship builds for AI piloting and is causing several awful side effects that even Alex has to check.
Yes, you have. Because you refuse to accept that it's not a feature for the A.
2) It turns off precisely because it's not AI controls and you just enabled the AI.
Are you seriously pretending that it is fine that someone has his 30 minute battle ruined because of the absurd implementation that AI control is activated just because some group commands were issued and thus my autofire settings were overridden without my explicit command?!!
No, it definitely isn't okay. You should get your situational awareness checked, it could be a serious condition.
No one here, even Alex, even had an idea for two days what could have caused the issue and now everyone pretends as if this is dandy! RIDICULOUS!
Everyone could of told you it was because you somehow gave ship command to the AI. I know for myself personally, you were just too toxic for me to care to help.
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Yes, that is how linked fire works, but your idea of 'intent' is not correct. It is a tool for the player and works decently with some weapons like missiles for the AI. Using it for weapons with different arcs will not work.
Of should weapons with opposite fire arcs not be put into the same weapon group. This has nothing to do with the subject of intent of different firing modes for different groups!
Do you have a guess why one e.g. would enable autofire for a kinetic weapon group and disable autofire for a HE weapon group?! When you have found the answer (which I am tired of repeating again and again) ask yourself why you believe that the motive for this is allegedly different for a manually and AI piloted ship!
What it sounds like you want is for the AI to do cool-down management to sync weapon firing, which is much more complicated and also situational. For instance, delaying firing to sync cool downs at the wrong moment can miss a window for dealing hull/armor damage, or even miss a kill, and more generally, you lose a lot of DPS by syncing firing sometimes. Also if weapons have different cool downs, it's not obvious what the desired behavior even should be... should the AI fire the faster firing weapon less often? or should the AI fire the faster firing weapon at max ROF and only fire the slower firing weapon on every second cycle? What happens if you havethree different cool-downs? It's not something that should be handled by a simple toggle, and it's not even something with an obvious solution.
You clearly got lost in a total misunderstanding of what I am talking about, again.
All I simply want is that the AI does not override the linked/automatic firing mode, just because a lone fighter is wizzing in front of my ship, which ruins the entire purpose of the ship's intended role!
That's not how the AI works. If you could lock one group on auto fire, and all the other groups not on auto fire with the current system, the AI would only ever be able to use one of the non-autofire groups at a time, which is obviously not desirable and much less effective than what we have now. It sounds like you want non-autofire groups to still fire at 'the right' times, but that is simply not how the AI works. The only times weapons can fire are 1. when they are auto fired and 2. when they are in the single group that is manually fired. In order to do anything beyond that, you have to fundamentally rework how the AI functions.
I think maybe this is what the disconnect in all these conversations is?
That you start this nonsense again of explaining how some aspects of the pointless autofiring mode override, that I entirely want to eliminate, works, right after I have just explained to you why this is absurd, only shows that you too entirely lack a genuine intent to even try to understand what I am saying.
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It really is the case.
Please stop this ridiculous pretentiousness! You just as Alex had no idea what could cause my initial complaint, you even sent out your admiration to Alex that he was able to figure this out.
A harder proof for making clear that this is a convoluted mess of side effects can't be made!
It even says so in the tooltip.
WOW! Next you are going to tell me that this can be deducted from the API documentation.
The AI is changing the autofire settings when you set your flagship to AI control because thats how it controls its non-manual weapons, exactly how the player does. There is nothing "random" going on at all.
I have responded to this multiple times and unless you or someone else respond to my arguments, I will keep calling you out for having zero intent to truly understand what I am saying.
If you don't want the AI to take control of the weapon groups... don't set your flagship to AI control.
As I have said multiple times, I have never set my controlled ship to AI control. Obviously AI control should only be activated if I explicitely say so, not implicitely because my ship was selected when issuing a command.
Its annoying when it happens sure, but its not a 'wrong' behavior or a bug, its just a consequence of a misclick. The same way that hitting eburn by mistake is an annoying thing to happen, but not a bug, just user error.
No, it is clearly poor design causing side effects proven by the fact that you and even Alex don't realize the causation of something so fundamental/important not immediately.
Re: linked weapons getting desynchronized because a target is only in one arc: Linked weapons have two different behaviors depending on if they are in "manual" control or autofire control. In "manual" control they all fire when clicked. In autofire control they fire at targets of opportunity independently. Its always been that way and its not a bug, or the AI doing something weird: the same thing is true on the player ship. Thats just how linked works. There's no overriding or anything going on.
Why do you repeatedly not bother to read what I have said?
The linked mode is ignored even when a lone fighter is within the overlapping firing arc of linked weapons!
I have stated multiple arguments why this is a poor design, so why do you respond to me with the repeated made up claim that I insist that this a bug, only by finishing off with brash command again that I should just accept it "because that's the way it has been since beginning"!?
I am disappointed, Thaggo.
Neither of these things are true - the first depends on manual vs autofire control and its very much intentional because otherwise how would groups with disparate arcs work
Again, that non-overlapping firing arcs should be put into separate firing groups has nothing to do with the intent of different firing modes for different kind of weapons. How do you even get the idea to bring this up?
, and the second has never been true.
That some trigger doesn't do as it name suggests, is quite the epiphany of bad design, don't you agree?
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Yes, you have. Because you refuse to accept that it's not a feature for the A.
I refuse to accept that the AI is pointlessly overriding the firing modes? ;D
Everyone could of told you it was because you somehow gave ship command to the AI. I know for myself personally, you were just too toxic for me to care to help.
Yeah, you certainly just didn't bother to share your wisdom, even with a pondering Alex, because my prosaic issue report clearly contained just unbearable toxicity. Haha!
Heck, all those noobs paying for the game should just figure out that clicking a command to go to place B will disable the autofiring of some weapon group. OF COURSE! After all, allegedly tooltip #5901 says that commands can cause AI control, and this OBVIOUSLY explains that I should expect that some autofire mode is overridden! What a fantastically sporty spirit to discuss issues and suggestions here folks!
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Yes, you have. Because you refuse to accept that it's not a feature for the A.
I refuse to accept that the AI is pointlessly overriding the firing modes? ;D
Because you refuse to accept that you're wrong about it doing so "pointlessly".
Everyone could of told you it was because you somehow gave ship command to the AI. I know for myself personally, you were just too toxic for me to care to help.
Yeah, you certainly just didn't bother to share your wisdom, even with a pondering Alex, because my prosaic issue report clearly contained just unbearable toxicity. Haha!
Heck, all those noobs paying for the game should just figure out that clicking a command to take go to place B will disable the autofiring of some weapon group. OF COURSE! After all, allegedly tooltip #5901 says that commands can cause AI control, and this OBVIOUSLY explains that I should expect that some autofire mode is overridden! What a fantastically sporty spirit to discuss issues and suggestions here folks!
Yeah, it's almost like they should put a big pop-up notification somewhere on the screen that the AI is now in control- Oh wait!
As for talking sporty spirit, try and go and reread your posts throughout this entire thread with a neutral disposition. Hells, you start the thread with disingenuous intent, poorly posing your unjust complaints as suggestions.
EDIT: I'm clearly getting too wound up about this. I'm going to take a step back and just report like I should have.
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Because you refuse to accept that you're wrong about it doing so "pointlessly".
If there is one thing I refuse to accept here, then it is that you have ever written down a single argument.
The very first thing you told me is that what I ask for isn't a feature (what fruitful sharing of wisdom) which you have simply spammed repeatedly ever since, followed in the same first post with an intend to ridicule all my arguments with a comparison that I allegedly expect a saw to do the same as a hammer. And then you seriously dare to accuse me of being the toxic one here!
Yeah, it's almost like they should put a big pop-up notification somewhere on the screen that the AI is now in control- Oh wait!
Yeah, one line in a fast stream of text that virtually everyone is ignoring because of its totalitarian verbosity of dullest state changes which should be clarified graphically and persistently by the UI instead (as in virtually any other game), about that an autopilot has been activated, TOTALLY makes clear that those damn paying noobs should expect that some autofiring setting will be disabled when issuing a command to go to point B!
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That you start this nonsense again of explaining how some aspects of the pointless autofiring mode override, that I entirely want to eliminate, works, right after I have just explained to you why this is absurd, only shows that you too entirely lack a genuine intent to even try to understand what I am saying.
I'm trying to explain that you can't just do away with the auto fire toggle. It's fundamental to how the AI is designed and if you simply lock auto fire settings without changing anything else, the AI no longer works in a reasonable way. The reason it's designed that way is to give the AI the same level of control that the player has so the AI doesn't have an unfair advantage controlling all weapons manually. In order to change that, you need to fundamentally rework the AI. If you think it's such a simple change then make a mod and do it yourself.
The reason that linked fire doesn't work the way you want is because what you want is really complicated. Managing weapon cool-downs to sync bursts is super non-trivial to generalize across any possible combination of weapons that could be put in the same group. Again, if you want it, make a mod and do it yourself.
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I'm trying to explain that you can't just do away with the auto fire toggle. It's fundamental to how the AI is designed and if you simply lock auto fire settings without changing anything else, the AI no longer works in a reasonable way. The reason it's designed that way is to give the AI the same level of control that the player has so the AI doesn't have an unfair advantage controlling all weapons manually. In order to change that, you need to fundamentally rework the AI.
The AI is performing the switching and toggling within milliseconds, which you can easily observe directly.
Complaining that too many manual firing groups would allegedly destroy an AI's handicap, when I suggest to not disable autofiring, is just absurd. Autofiring should obviously work identical for the human player and AI.
Multiple manual firing groups could obvisouly be handicapped just as well as a single one, if that was truly intended. But again, this has nothing to do with what I am suggesting anyway because my intent is solely that the AI should not disable the autofiring & linked mode that the player has defined.
If you think it's such a simple change then make a mod and do it yourself.
I am overwhelmed by the degree of constructiveness, care to make the game better and overal expression of good intent with your 'suggestion'.
The reason that linked fire doesn't work the way you want is because what you want is really complicated. Managing weapon cool-downs to sync bursts is super non-trivial to generalize across any possible combination of weapons that could be put in the same group. Again, if you want it, make a mod and do it yourself.
That the AI shouldn't ignore a linked fire mode setting is complicated?
It is bizarre how you still insist on your misunderstanding that I want some new, complicated management of anything!
All I suggest is that the AI should stop overriding the firing mode and no one has presented even the slightest valid point why this would cause any negative side effects and do anything other than making everything related much simpler, easier to understand and more controllable.
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I've just explained to you multiple times how making the auto fire toggle locked in its initial condition would make the AI perform much much worse without any other changes to the AI. You need to rework the AI for the change you're suggesting to even do something like want you want.
I'm trying to tell you that what you're suggesting won't work the way you want it to, and it would be a ton of work to do what you want without even any guarantee that there would be improvement, and also the downside of a significant increase in the amount of decisions the player has to make (and the number of mistakes a new player can make) in setting all these toggles that have a huge impact on AI performance where they currently are mostly just decisions for convince on the player ship and the AI will do just fine regardless.
I've also been trying to explain that in order to get the behavior that you want from the linked fire toggle (weapons always firing at the same time), you need a much more complicated system that manages weapon cool downs, otherwise the weapon group will inevitably be fired at moment when the weapon arcs aren't lined up or the weapon cool downs aren't all ready and the weapons will end up out of sync. Once again, the change you suggest won't result in the behavior you want.
That's why I say 'do it yourself', it doesn't seem like you will accept these things that everyone is saying, unless you find out for yourself how things work, and no one has the time to make all these changes just to prove to you that what you're suggesting won't work the way you want it to.
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Since the proximate cause of the weapon group overrides is the AI (briefly) taking control of the player ship when the player ship is given orders on the TAB map, it would have been far more efficient to suggest that the player ship not receive TAB map commands in the first place, except when already on autopilot.
The sole purpose of autofire is to enable a higher, practical firing priority over other weapon groups. For example, that the AI overrides the autofire of Heavy Blasters in an Aurora, and instead prioritizes low projectile damage weapons to consume the last drops of flux capacity so that my Heavy Blasters never fire near flux limit, ruins my intent to take down armour effectively and ruins the chance of overloading an enemy ship with my guns in most critical situations.
If the ship is fluxed enough that firing small guns interferes with its ability to fire Heavy Blasters, and your expectation is that it continue to fire the Heavy Blasters regardless of any other consideration, then all I can say is the AI ship understands this better than you do and directly improves its own chances of survival by disregarding your intent. (Not that it should continue firing the small weapons either, arguably). At best, it's going to be forced to drop its shield, and at worst, it risks an overload from any hit on the shield.
Do you have a guess why one e.g. would enable autofire for a kinetic weapon group and disable autofire for a HE weapon group?! When you have found the answer (which I am tired of repeating again and again) ask yourself why you believe that the motive for this is allegedly different for a manually and AI piloted ship!
This is exactly what I do when I fly my ships, albeit mainly because I can't easily control the firing of two weapon groups at once. I let the kinetics autofire because they're good against the more common target (shields) and also decent against broken armor, while HE needs manual control for opportunity shots when shields aren't in the way.
At the very least, only PD weapons should ignore the linked firing mode when engaging fighters or missiles, even though I disagree with this because there is also a purpose of linking PD weapons with matching arcs against shielded fighters.
What I'm reading here if you got what you wanted (PD weapons also have the proposed behavior where LINKED mode requires all guns to bear before firing), I would have to divide my PD net into different groups for every quadrant, otherwise none of the weapons would ever fire because some of the other weapons in the group can never reach the target.
Or, if implemented in a less stupid way: they could all be in the same group, but no PD weapon would ever fire till all the weapons that could bear on the target have done so. Which is totally optimal and desired behavior when I have a Harpoon swarm incoming and every microsecond of DPS counts. Also wide mount arcs could become actively detrimental for PD weapons because they add someone else to wait for before opening fire.
Actually, that gives me a thought. Let's consider this with a picture:
(https://i.imgur.com/aqfpr1J.png)
Suppose the Legion's Mk.IXs are on linked mode with autofire on. In this situation, what should autofire do?
a) Fire the right gun, don't fire the left gun
b) Don't fire the right gun (because left gun is not on target)
c) Do A in this situation, but do B if the Sunder had been in front of us where the arcs overlap
d) Something else
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Gotta post fast, before the thread is nuked for shot flinging.
I don't understand what you mean with that.
That your preconceptions about purpose and function of autofire and fire modes is nothing but a product of your imagination.
If you want to let the AI make situative decisions on weapon firing then disable autofiring.
If you want to toggle autofiring for groups then do so.
After some thinking I agree it isn't such a huge concern, though it would still require making different weapon groups for AI and for the player. This isn't that different from some loadouts already, though.
Frustrating side effects, which even Alex has to check for, like the changed autofiring mode when getting manual control back from common, unintended AI triggering (which is a clearly bad implementation too), is obviously unacceptable
Those aren't side effects. Control over weapon groups' autofire is how AI manages its weapons. Selecting the flagship and giving it an order is meant to turn autopilot on. You could argue well your flagship shouldn't be selected when mass-selecting ships, but you would best create a new thread about it.
As I have explained before, as someone who takes down more than tenfold larger enemy fleets by piloting vanilla ships with all kinds of loadouts, toggling autofire during combat is an edge case for lame flux battles with lame capital ships by lame pilots who cannot cope with switching between weapon groups.
Woo, I get to play "I'm a better Starsector player" card! So, as someone who has played this game since 2012, every version, vanilla or modded, fleet admiral or ace pilot style, with enough efficiency to fight random fleets just because and profit from it, destroying fleets and stations with a single ship... To me, it sounds like you would rather have the game changed to suit your playstyle more, than put the effort yourself, learn how the game actually plays and become a better player.
No one here, even Alex, even had an idea for two days what could have caused the issue and now everyone pretends as if this is dandy!
Indeed. I, for example, thought "it could be he switched autopilot on by accident - but surely he must have noticed the ship moving on its own and the 'autopilot enabled' text in the upper left corner. It must be something else, something not so obvious".
Autofiring should obviously work identical for the human player and AI.
And it does. It ignores fire modes for both player and the AI, it can be freely toggled in combat for both the player and the AI, linked fire mode fires only weapons that have the target in their arcs for both the player and the AI and autofire ignores fire modes for both the player and the AI.
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intrinsic_parity: Continuously and entirely ignoring the arguments I have repeatedly replied to your eversame repetitions of irrelevant and false claims, and then pretending to be the one trying constructive discussion, while blaming me, is amusing at best.
Since the proximate cause of the weapon group overrides is the AI (briefly) taking control of the player ship when the player ship is given orders on the TAB map, it would have been far more efficient to suggest that the player ship not receive TAB map commands in the first place, except when already on autopilot.
Yeah, I have suggest the same too. The AI should never take control implicitely.
However, this is just resolving one nasty side effect. The AI should still never override the firing modes because it pointlessly ruins control.
If the ship is fluxed enough that firing small guns interferes with its ability to fire Heavy Blasters, and your expectation is that it continue to fire the Heavy Blasters regardless of any other consideration, then all I can say is the AI ship understands this better than you do and directly improves its own chances of survival by disregarding your intent. (Not that it should continue firing the small weapons either, arguably). At best, it's going to be forced to drop its shield, and at worst, it risks an overload from any hit on the shield.
That the AI overrides my autofire setting (right away by the way, even at 0 flux) and primarily consumes the flux threshold with the firing of smaller weapons when near the flux limit, is exactly contrary to the intent of burst builds with high mobility.
Autofiring alread does consider that it should not directly cause overloading. Things like shield management are not related to autofiring.
This is exactly what I do when I fly my ships, albeit mainly because I can't easily control the firing of two weapon groups at once. I let the kinetics autofire because they're good against the more common target (shields) and also decent against broken armor, while HE needs manual control for opportunity shots when shields aren't in the way.
Right!
That the AI disables my loadout setting to autofire (which is nothing else than an intent to prioritize) and disables my loadout setting of linked fire even against single ship targets, e.g. the linked firing of two Heavy Needlers and instead fires Light Assault Gun's or just single Needler bursts near flux limit, deminishes or even ruins the effective utilization of this for AI ships.
What I'm reading here if you got what you wanted (PD weapons also have the proposed behavior where LINKED mode requires all guns to bear before firing), I would have to divide my PD net into different groups for every quadrant, otherwise none of the weapons would ever fire because some of the other weapons in the group can never reach the target.
Or, if implemented in a less stupid way: they could all be in the same group, but no PD weapon would ever fire till all the weapons that could bear on the target have done so. Which is totally optimal and desired behavior when I have a Harpoon swarm incoming and every microsecond of DPS counts.
Right. Firing in linked mode should only be executed if a target can be reached by all guns in the group. Particularly with the upcoming increased group count, a much more effective PD could be fine tuned if the linked fire wasn't ignored.
Also wide mount arcs could become actively detrimental for PD weapons because they add someone else to wait for before opening fire.
It is a matter of balancing disadvantages and advantages when deciding whether a certain groups should be linked or not.
For anyone who isn't into such fine tuning or is worried to cause too many disadvantage for a certain ship's loadout should simply refrain from enabling the firing mode.
Actually, that gives me a thought. Let's consider this with a picture:
(https://i.imgur.com/aqfpr1J.png)
Suppose the Legion's Mk.IXs are on linked mode with autofire on. In this situation, what should autofire do?
a) Fire the right gun, don't fire the left gun
b) Don't fire the right gun (because left gun is not on target)
c) Do A in this situation, but do B if the Sunder had been in front of us where the arcs overlap
d) Something else
b
- Alternating autofire should fire the gun (with priority of non-autofire groups) that has a target in sight. Any gun in this group that can't reach the selected target should try to aim at and shoot another target in its arc, and it should not fire but try to aim as good as possible at the selected target if no other target exist in any gun's arc.
- Linked autofire should continuously try to aim both guns at the target but wait with firing until the ship has managed to line up which then causes the target to be in the arc of both guns so the guns are fired - with a higher priority over non-autofire groups.
Since the Heavy Autocannon only has a minor burst property and because the Legion is turning so slowly, I would not enable linked mode for them, but I would enable autofiring because I always want to prioritize HE pressure against enemy ships.
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That your preconceptions about purpose and function of autofire and fire modes is nothing but a product of your imagination.
That's still not an argument but just a blunt accuasation.
After some thinking I agree it isn't such a huge concern, though it would still require making different weapon groups for AI and for the player. This isn't that different from some loadouts already, though.
Why do you believe that a distinct weapon grouping for AI and player control would be required?
Those aren't side effects. Control over weapon groups' autofire is how AI manages its weapons. Selecting the flagship and giving it an order is meant to turn autopilot on. You could argue well your flagship shouldn't be selected when mass-selecting ships, but you would best create a new thread about it.
No, that I get a ship back into control with an alternated loadout because I have asked a group to go to point B is a laughably absurd mess of side-effects that is perfectly eliminated by not letting the AI override my loadout settings.
It is similarly unacceptable that my firing mode settings are overwritten when I explicitely activated AI control.
That the autopilot shouldn't be activated implicitly in the first place doesn't change this.
Woo, I get to play "I'm a better Starsector player" card!
No, I am saying that the human behavior of bad pilots shouldn't be seen as reason that the AI should override the firing modes.
Your instinctive negative interpretation of what I have said perfectly exposes your and the others outright hostile attitude and systematic dismissal against the vast majority of suggestions express by countless people here for changes of long standing implementations, because you just can't cope with the possibility that what you have enjoyed for so long was in fact not optimal and can be improved.
So, as someone who has played this game since 2012, every version, vanilla or modded, fleet admiral or ace pilot style, with enough efficiency to fight random fleets just because and profit from it, destroying fleets and stations with a single ship... To me, it sounds like you would rather have the game changed to suit your playstyle more, than put the effort yourself, learn how the game actually plays and become a better player.
Then go ahead and come up with a specific describing what playstyle my suggestion allegedly would deminish!
Indeed. I, for example, thought "it could be he switched autopilot on by accident - but surely he must have noticed the ship moving on its own and the 'autopilot enabled' text in the upper left corner. It must be something else, something not so obvious".
Yeah, one line in a fast stream of text that virtually everyone is ignoring because of its totalitarian verbosity of dullest state changes which should be clarified graphically and persistently by the UI instead (as in virtually any other game), about that an autopilot has been activated, TOTALLY makes clear that those damn paying noobs should expect that some autofiring setting will be disabled when issuing a command to go to point B! ;D
And it does. It ignores fire modes for both player and the AI, it can be freely toggled in combat for both the player and the AI, linked fire mode fires only weapons that have the target in their arcs for both the player and the AI and autofire ignores fire modes for both the player and the AI.
Repeating this total dismissal of arguments with pretentiousness again, which I have answered to countless times, only further exposes your hostile attitude and total disregard of intent for a constructive discussion.
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All I suggest is that the AI should stop overriding the firing mode and no one has presented even the slightest valid point why this would cause any negative side effects and do anything other than making everything related much simpler, easier to understand and more controllable.
bc the AI is designed to make those calls itself, and disabling that portion of the AI would do more harm to the game's quality than good. ur asking for the ability to lobotomize the AI; there are situations in which that would be a desirable outcome but those are so far & few between that they shouldn't be the focus of the fire mode's design
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bc the AI is designed to make those calls itself, and disabling that portion of the AI would do more harm to the game's quality than good. ur asking for the ability to lobotomize the AI; there are situations in which that would be a desirable outcome but those are so far & few between that they shouldn't be the focus of the fire mode's design
You could have condensed this simply into "ur wrong bc that's just the way it is."
Verdicts and accusations are something entirely different than arguments, my friend.
Everything you have said was debunked by me multiple time with specific arguments. You should at least bother to read what I have already said and counter my arguments.
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The weather outside sure is pretty good today.
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The weather outside sure is pretty good today.
That's not what I'm saying! How dare you say I'm wrong!