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1

General Discussion / Re: Officers are a pain!

« on: July 17, 2023, 02:55:16 AM »

No way to change officers skills, leaving 99% of cryopod officers entirely useless, even the rare level 7's.

It's quite rare for a level 7 to have even 4 of the appropriate skills you want for a particular ship. It feels bad dismissing a level 7 in order to train up a level 6 that has 6 skills that you want.

I think it would be nice if you could at least send your level 7's into reserve so that they don't count against your officer limit, just in case you want to build a ship around them one day, as unlikely as it is.

2

General Discussion / Re: Frustrated with AI ignoring my orders in battle.

« on: June 11, 2021, 12:03:07 PM »

I've found the capturing AI frustrating, when I want something captured, I want a ship to park on it and die if it has to.  Most of the time what seems to happen is my frigates I send to capture a point end up chasing some low-value ship across the map and not achieving anything but either wasting time or getting picked off because they're without support.

I get the idea is these orders are more like strong suggestions, by design, but that doesn't make it less frustrating when you just need simple things done (like capture and hold a point vs inferior or equal forces).

I rely on the strong suggestion style of the capture objectives to spread the opposing fleet out as much as possible without exposing my own ships to too much risk. I think in this form it better fits battles where you always need a high DP value to bring on reinforcements during the battle.

I wonder if there is room to add some sort of commitment modifier to an order. Where by default they are 'do your best', but then you could switch the tone of the order to 'if you can't do it I'll find a officer who can!'

3

General Discussion / Re: Exploring how to command the AI

« on: June 10, 2021, 05:22:34 AM »

I've been playing a bit against the Remnant in my more recent play, and using the avoid order on Radiants, escort orders on the player ship, and some eliminate orders here and there, and have observed a few aspects of their behavior.

Escorting ships don't seem to care about avoid orders, at least not to any degree that I've been able to observe. When an avoid targeted Radiant starts charging into engage the player ship, the friendly escorts will be quite happy to move closer to the avoid target rather than pull back behind the player ship. I'm not sure if they attempt to satisfy both orders where possible, i.e. they will pull back far enough to stay out of avoid range, and stay within escort range. It may be possible that Radiant closes the distance so quickly that the escorts are quickly left in a situation where there is no place within escort range of the escort target that isn't also fully within avoid range of the avoid target, in which case they have to completely ignore the avoid target in order to comply with their escort orders.

I'm not sure what behavior I would expect in the situation above. Perhaps the escorting ships can try to be no closer to the avoid target than the ship they are escorting, but otherwise not give it any special consideration. At least with this behavior they will try to show some respect of the avoid order while not also totally hiding behind the player.

Another thing I've noticed is that ships given an eliminate order on a ship will still try to fully comply with avoid orders. I had a case where I ordered a significant force of my ships to eliminate a Radiant that was moderately close to a second Radiant that had an avoid order on it. The friendly ships were fast enough to gather at a point where the eliminate targeted Radiant was between them and the avoid targeted Radiant, but they wouldn't cross that avoid boundary to get within weapon range of the eliminate target.

This behavior meant that in order to allow the ships to engage the eliminate target I need to remove the avoid order. The problem with this is that I still want the rest of my fleet to avoid the second Radiant, and in order to allow the eliminate order to be followed I've opened up the possibility that some careless unassigned ship will now wander into threat range of the second Radiant unnecessarily.

Again I'm not sure what the behavior should ideally be in this case. It does feel slightly inconsistent that ships given a direct order will seemingly prioritize a general non-direct order. I like that they take the avoid order into consideration, but I feel that once they've mostly navigated around the avoid ship to start vectoring in on the eliminate target, that they should be allowed to close the distance.

These cases serve to highlight the main difficulty in interpreting the players intent in a system like this. There are rules and priorities at play that the player needs to learn in order to use the system effectively, but there isn't an easy way to teach the player the underlying rules. The player needs to observe a lot of scenarios play out in order to develop a mental model of how the system actually works. During this learning period the player forms assumptions about what the eliminate, escort, and avoid orders do based on their current need. The players then become prone to frustration when they discover that these orders play by their own rules. Rules which make a lot of sense in a lot of situations, but need to be hacked a bit to work in the current situation.

4

General Discussion / Re: 0.95 Small ships performance comparison

« on: June 06, 2021, 03:34:48 PM »

No Brawler redemption arc? Unfortunate.
And damn, you love your single sabots.

I found twin HVD or HVD + Mauler brawlers to be a little disappointing, or more specifically inconsistent. Sometimes they'd put out solid damage, sometimes they would strafe and forget to aim and miss every shot for extended periods.

I switched to Heavy Needler + Mauler + optional unstable injector to make them get in close. They still aren't great at hunting down other frigates, and they can get in each others way sometimes when going after larger targets. But the needler puts out a much higher and more efficient flux pressure than a single HVD, and it is bursty enough to complicate a targets shield usage, and brawlers in needler range are going to land more Mauler hits.

Primarily I'm using brawlers to endure while contributing, so the fact that they don't win quickly isn't an issue for me, as they are there to never lose.

5

General Discussion / Re: i dont think OP ships should be nerfed

« on: June 06, 2021, 02:13:11 PM »

And to your question as to why nerf=bad, well it's because there are obviously people enjoying the stuff that you're asking it to be nerfed. You are telling people what to do or not to do, what to like and not to like. Imagine campaigning to ban cigarettes countrywide, do you really expect people to not speak up about it? You're asking to nerf the fun out of people's lives, to put it more dramatically.
Next reason is because what DuckFlux said, every nerf has to potential to be terrible, it's like playing russian roulette. People don't enjoy that either.

But you can't live in fear of the developer breaking something, especially for a game in development. There are going to be further patches and further ship balances to make in order to better tie in new and existing systems. There is no guarantee that not nerfing a ship now will leave it free of changes down the road.

Why should significantly over performing ships be nerfed? well that's entirely down to the developers design philosophy, as you say, there is no absolute truth or universal measure against which we could judge the goodness of a game. It may be that the developers want the player to be excited to find and use the obviously strong ships and ditch the rest as soon as possible. It may be the developers intent that you love each of there creations equally, as much as they do.

Whenever we discuss the mechanics of a game, we 'should' be discussing them in the context of what the game is, relative to what we think the developers want the game to be. So there are two levels here, either we agree with the developers intent, but disagree with how the developers are achieving that intent, or we just fundamentally disagree with their intent.

People expressing their opinion on how they think the game should be balanced is just that, their opinion. I don't think it is fair to say that they are telling you what to like or do any more than you are telling them what to like or do. It may be that the consequence of anyone being persuaded by their opinion results in a game that you personally won't like as much, but that door swings both ways, has a double edge, and revolves. Just because the game is the way you like it at this moment doesn't give your opinion any more weight than the opinion of someone who would like the game to be changed.

6

General Discussion / Re: i dont think OP ships should be nerfed

« on: June 06, 2021, 06:46:50 AM »

What's with the fallacy that nerf=bad because it's a negative term?

I think its easy to form a perception of developers where they are paradoxically both capable of pushing the boundaries of traditional game design and creating a really well balanced game, while at the same time they also totally beholden to the pleas of forum goers and incapable of even minor tweaks without irreversibly destroying the game.

With this perception, buffing under-performing ships isn't a problem because we don't play those, however modifying the ships we do play in any way (the OP ones) leaves us vulnerable to the incompetent developer, so we need to appeal to the competent developer to not hurt us through incompetency.

It's just human nature.

7

General Discussion / Re: I Spent 6 Months Visiting 45 Colonies to Recruit 8 Mercenaries

« on: May 31, 2021, 01:08:05 PM »

I've never seen two officers leave at once. I'm not sure I've seen two leave in the same month either.

I was half expecting a second officer to hop off at the second station visited when I first got back to the core worlds, especially since they had all been in the roster for at least a year at the time. But it took them quite a while to before they eventually trickled out of the roster.
I can't remember very well how long it took, or how many stations needed to be visited before they all eventually left.

8

General Discussion / I Spent 6 Months Visiting 45 Colonies to Recruit 8 Mercenaries

« on: May 22, 2021, 11:07:20 AM »

Casual Mercenary Experience

My knee jerk reaction to mercenaries with a play through of RC12 was that they cost a lot, and a year long contract isn't very long.

I did hire one mercenary to get a better feel for the cost-benefit tradeoff during the mid part of the game. In that time with the mercenary I did a scanning mission, surveyed a couple of systems and did a story quest to the edge of the sector. The year long contract expired in what felt like no time at all, since surveying systems can take several weeks each depending on how thoroughly you explore, and the travel times to the edge of the sector add up really quickly.

In the time with the mercenary I engaged in one story battle, and just a few pirate battles. I didn't feel that having a mercenary is worth it as a part of normal game play, as you aren't likely to get into enough fights to earn back the XP worth of SP spent to hire the mercenary, including bonus XP. Also just a few mercenaries aren't likely to impact the DP ratio of a battle very much. However it is nice to have a few more ships in the fleet boosted by an officer.

Mass Recruiting

Towards the end of a play through of RC12 I was having trouble with optimizing a fleet for the end game threats such as Remnants, primarily due to not deploying enough fast cruisers, destroyers and frigates to spread the battle out to avoid getting surrounded, and with the unfavorable DP ratio due to lower officer counts, which I had trouble addressing during the battle due to the lack of fast ships to contest and reclaim points.

I decided to try to tackle the DP disparity by hiring as many mercenaries as possible.

As per the title. I visited almost all of the colonies in the core sector, avoiding colonies that are hostile. I hired every mercenary encountered that wasn't cautious or timid. I got a little side tracked in the middle of this to do a main story mission in one of the core sectors. But it took 6 in game months, visiting a total of 45 colonies, to collect 8 mercenaries.

There were four level 4 mercenaries, one level 5 mercenary, and two level 6 mercenaries.

Campaigning

With the mercenaries hired, I tried to cram in as many battles as possible to see how much of the investment could be recouped, and how the higher officer count affects the battles.

It took just over 12 months from the time that the last mercenary was hired, before the first hired mercenary left the fleet. This 365 day contract ended up lasting roughly 18 months. I believe that mercenaries will only leave the fleet when visiting a non-pirate non-LP colony. For much of the campaign I was resupplying by raiding pirate and LP bases, so there wasn't an opportunity for the mercenary to leave the fleet in that time.

In those 16 months I engaged in 16 battles and earned just over 9,000,000 experience inclusive of bonus XP (enough XP to get 9 story points back at level 15). I did waste some of this time getting distracted and exploring a system for a Buffalo(TT) blueprint that some pirate told me about.

Of these battles there were:

• 8 named deserter bounties, ranging from 9-12 officers (vs my 16), which gave me 60 - 58% of initial DP.
• 1 named pirate bounty with 10 officers, giving 60% initial DP.
• 2LP and 1 pirate base. 60% DP of course.
• 1 pirate armada of 4 fleets, with 56 ships and 22 officers, giving me 50% of initial DP.
• 3 remnant battles with officer counts between 9 and 14, giving me 60 - 54% of initial DP.

A high officer count made most of the bounty missions trivial. The high initial DP ratio meant that the opposing fleets couldn't hold more than one point at a time, and only briefly, and the individual effectiveness of each of the player ships coupled with the DP induced force strength advantage meant that the opposing fleet almost always gets bottled up near their reinforcement entry point. As a player in these battles I didn't care about contesting the points, nor did I need to issue orders.

The battle against the pirate armada was arguably the most fun. The pirate fleet was able to contest points and spread around the map. Since they weren't bottled up in one corner, and could constantly replace losses up to a reasonable level of constant force strength, the battle felt engaging up until the last of their reinforcements were spent. It was still a relatively easy battle given that there was a lower density of officers spread across their ships, and pirate ships are generally weaker per DP than reasonably optimized player ships. However despite being easy, it 'looked' relatively balanced at each stage of the battle and didn't collapse into an obvious rout. Contesting points still seemed important, and care needed to be taken when piloting.

The Remnant battles were certainly a lot easier. Individual Remnant ships are still strong, and they have a high officer density. So even with the DP ratio in the players advantage the battles are still interesting. Definitely a lot less stressful than when the player starts with 40% DP.

Thoughts On Hiring These Mercenaries

I do like the feeling of having mercenaries in the fleet. It is fun to build a ship to match the particular set of skills and disposition of a mercenary, and the fact that you will have to replace them in time means that you have a reason to reconfigure your fleet to work around their replacements. Any reason to try new fleet compositions is good for the game in my opinion. I think that it is good that you don't have the full freedom to pick and choose when it comes to mercenaries. The mercenary officers have more personality than my own officers since they come prepackaged, and I have to work around them.

Officers have a large impact on the effectiveness of a ship. For completeness sake it is nice to have most of your combat ships officered, and it is also nice to be able to put officers in ships other than the most impactful ones. Normally I would struggle to find a reason to put an officer in destroyers when they are otherwise so needed in carriers, capitals, missile support, frigates, etc. Limited officer counts have the effect of devaluing some classes of ship.

However I think it takes too much work to make mercenary officers work in vanilla. It takes a lot of time and drudgery to travel around and recruit a sufficiently impactful number of mercenaries. Even if you keep the number of mercenaries in your fleet small, the feeling of how quickly their contract runs out compared to normal gameplay activity makes finding replacement mercenaries feel not really worth the effort.

In this example I only earned enough XP to cover the SP costs of hiring the mercenaries, and so in this case one of the primary benefits of fighting battles is consumed in its entirety by those mercenaries. Depending on how many battles you fight per year, and the difficulty of those battles you may only be able to sustain 2-3 mercenaries in your fleet.

Testing Different Settings

I've recently tweaked my settings so that mercenary contracts last for 3 years instead of 1, and very slightly increased the mercenary spawn rate such that they spawn as often as non-mercenary officers.

I have found that it is possible to maintain 8 or so mercenaries this time, where the frequency of having to find replacements seems fairly reasonable, and the amount of time it takes to find a replacement mercenary isn't so onerous. It feels like I have to visit 4-5 colonies now to find a usable mercenary, and I think that is a reasonable amount of effort. Three years may sound like a long time for a contract, but in practice it still seems like I'm having to replace a mercenary after every couple of expeditions.

These values feel really good to me as far as fleet building is concerned, as I can have officers in backup cruisers, and most of my destroyers, and most of my frigates. And it is nice to have it balanced such that I can engage with the mercenaries feature and it feel like it is worth the time investment.

My gut tells me that the break even point for contract terms where mercenaries are worth the investment would be around 2 years.

However with these values giving the ability to sustain having 8 or more mercenaries over long periods of time, I think the impact on the balance of the game is far too great against many of the opponents. While it is very advantageous to have officers in the majority of deployed ships, starting with a 60% DP advantage against the opposing fleet causes a huge impact on the ability of the opposing fleet to provide an interesting challenge. A DP disadvantage for the AI ends up trivializing the game, and mechanics such as capturing deployment points degenerate, since the DP disadvantage means that the AI can't reasonably participate. However one exception to this is against large Remnant fleets, where even having 16 -18 officers in your own fleet you are still outmatched by their 20-22 officers. In this case a high mercenary count offsets the DP disadvantage and leads to less stressful and more fulfilling battles.

Final Thoughts

In my experience with the game so far I've had the most fun when the initial DP ratio has been close to 50:50, as it seems like objective points are always relevant as a means of getting ahead, but where it is still reasonably possible to fight back after loosing all of the points. Though I also want to be able to have multiple mercenary officers in my fleet. Given the choice I think I would much prefer the game if we had more ready access to mercenaries, and if neither officer count or fleet size impacted the initial DP available to each side. And that once each fleet is over a certain size threshold, say 200 DP then their initial DP caps out at 150 or so for a 300 battle size.

9

General Discussion / Re: Quick question about the Gryphon and missile skills

« on: May 14, 2021, 02:04:18 PM »

I can confirm that the AI Gryphons will use the missile autoforge.

I transferred command to one near the end of a long battle and it's autoforge charges were at zero.

In another game I ordered a cripple Gryphon to retreat near the end of another battle, and when retreating past an enemy while having a comfortable amount of flux reserves for shielding, it used the auto forge which almost maxed out its flux. I thought I'd lose the silly thing, but I guess it was reloading to get some sabot's, as they popped the encroaching enemy. 1000 IQ AI plays.

10

General Discussion / Re: Post Your End-Game Capable Fleets! (Spoilers obviously)

« on: May 10, 2021, 03:33:42 PM »

This is my mostly end game fleet of a second vanilla play through.

Spoiler

[close]

I tried to avoid high tech on this play through. In my last run I leaned pretty heavily on tempests, and had to use a distraction Paragon and nuisance Doom on some of the story fights. So for this run I wanted to try to keep it mostly mid and low tech. Just pretend that you don't see that one high tech brawler slotted in amongst the rest.

I like the XIV Onslaughts and Eagles to a fault, and had to build a fleet around them.

This fleet can take on medium sized Ordos of around 300 DP made up of mostly Alphas with fairly minimal losses of a frigate or two, an usually a destroyer or cruiser. It can also 'handle' 400 DP sized Ordos with 'acceptable' losses of about 50% percent.

My general plan is: Two Eagles and two Gryphons escort the Onslaught, while four Brawlers Falcon (P) and a Hammerhead go around capping points and spreading the enemies out. Sometimes more hammerheads, sometimes more brawlers.

Most ships apart from the Onslaught get unstable injectors for the added speed. I found that range doesn't matter much against Remnants or the Doritos, and its more important that the ships are fast enough to cycle out and share the shield tanking load. Honestly though it barely does the trick for cruisers, they'll often get pinned against each other with the opposing ship using the victim as a shield from the rest.

The Eagles are pretty gimped when in the escort role, they tend not to face targets all the time and are often out of position, but when facing Remnants they are too slow free roam, and the Onslaught can't effectively retreat when pushed, so the Eagles are slaved to the Onslaught. The Gryphons provide much needed long range finishing capability.

This approach is pretty hit and miss against Remnants. You have to try to stay away from Radiants for as long as possible and destroy the stragglers, but it's not optimal to have 124 DP worth of heavy ships fail to make themselves felt. It's also easy to misjudge where the Radiants are headed and accidentally get caught in a head to head slugging match with the main core of the enemy. It is manageable, but its also up to chance whether a slowish cruiser gets pinned and destroyed in a few seconds. It is however, the right kind of difficult and doable for me that I don't need to make anything more optimal

The Onslaught is a very solid damage dealer, generally doing 40 - 50 % of the damage in a given battle when player piloted. The thermal pulse cannons are very flux efficient, and if you set them to auto fire and select a different weapon group then each gun will individually fire when it (has a chance) of hitting the target. You can point the ship either side of the target and send two long pulses from each gun mostly independently. It ends up being pretty effective at sniping destroyers frigates and even fighters. The four HVDs add some solid additional flux pressure.
I was running four Annihilator rocket pods, which are pretty effective at finishing off ships getting in close, and they do a reasonable job of distracting Ziggurat motes or other incoming ordinance. However for taking on Remnants I found that the sabots were more effective at getting them fluxed out which is pretty key to surviving their aggressive pushes.
The Onslaught can fairly comfortably solo a Radiant so long as their isn't too much pressure from other redacted ships. You mostly have to use the burn drive to keep up with it and keep it maxed on flux. The alternative is to let it vent and come back in for another pass or two, but there is the risk that it will pop a destroyer or light cruiser on its way back in.

The Eagles are, okay like this.
Otherwise, when facing more conventional mid and low tech enemies and equipped with 2 HVDs and 1 Heavy Mauler and whatever else, they are phenomenal. I'll let 2-3 of them free roam. If you have enough map control from frigates and other fast ships then the Eagles ability to efficiently trade flux at long range will allow them to corral the AI into a ball at the edge of the map and prod them until they run out of reinforcements.
Such built Eagles fail hard however, when faced with aggressive, relatively high flux output opponents like Brilliants which push in close and win the damage race pretty convincingly.
I tried SO Eagles with Heavy Machine Guns and Heavy Blasters, which are fine, but I suspect that unless you go all in on aggressive ships then you don't maximize their potential. With just 2 or so aggressive short ranges ships then they have the risk of not having an opportunity to push in, and end up burning through half their PPT doing nothing, or when they are close they don't always have the local superiority to win the fight convincingly.
Swapping the HVD's for Heavy Auto Cannons gives them more kinetic damage output at a higher efficiency, and I found that they can go toe to toe with Brilliants now, depending on the build, but it's not as pretty as I like. I also have long range spec officers piloting these, which, is not optimal for how they're currently employed.

The Gryphons are a surprise hit for me. I was running a conquest with twin hurricanes, but conquests are brain dead when escorting other ships. They fail to present their guns to targets pushing in close all too often, and big capitals don't cycle tank very effectively. Also against Remnant you can't let anything with a speed less than 90 or so free roam, at some point it's going to get jumped and any ship not in the main pack has to fend for itself, so there wasn't really a place where a conquest could fit. Even though Gryphons have pretty terrible flux stats, the unstable injector gives them a speed of around 80-90, so when fighting within the main pack they can get back to safety before taking too much damage.

Gryphons with expanded racks, missile spec pilots, and the auto forge can potentially shoot 60 Hurricanes during the battle for a total of 120 between the two of them. Since this fleet is a pretty slow burn, having the deep pool of missiles is critical.
One surprising thing I found out today, is that Harpoons launched from an ECCM equipped ship are really really good at tracking and destroying Dorito fighters, they are fast enough and more than maneuverable enough to get something close to a 80% hit rate, and each hit pops a fighter.

The Falcon (P) probably needs no description. If the AI realized that it could pop frigates and destroyers in seconds with the one two punch of sabots and harpoons then it would be the most OP ship in the game. Unfortunately it tends to hoard its missiles so doesn't have a consistent impact.

Hammerheads with built in mods are really good. Again with unstable injectors for added speed and integrated targeting to offset the range penalty, they can cycle in and out of engagements repeatedly. The accelerated ammo feeder allows them to make the most of their short engagements.
Previously I was trying them out as line support ships trying to maximize their range, but I found that they often got squeezed out the front or out the back of the line, causing them to be dead, or useless. I think they work much better as a relatively fast skirmisher. They tend to stick around for a long time, and their damage output is very respectable.

Brawlers are a really good fit for this fleet. They are really survivable, at lot more so than my tempests were. With a Heavy Needler and a Heavy Mauler they can put a lot of pressure on destroyers and frigates. However they aren't really fast enough to hunt frigates effectively, and while they can potentially gang up on heavier targets with their solid firepower. They strafe too much to hit consistently, and often bump into each other spoiling their shooting even further. They also have a horrible tendency to stand back and wait too often. Where faster shorter range frigates will stay close to the target and readily move in for sustained shooting, Brawlers equipped with mid or long range weapons will often hang back a whole screens width of distance away from the target, and then when they do get close they will only get in close when there is a massive local overmatch of forces. Short range frigates don't seem to care about local overmatch anywhere near as much. But they do survive for a long time which is their main strength.