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« on: December 05, 2022, 02:29:13 AM »
I'll get straight to the point: the Radiant is broken. Not only is it the fastest battleship by a quite large margin, it also has the Phase Skimmer which makes it go even faster, and has no downside to compensate for either of those. Other Remnant ships can be annoyingly slippery or tough, but that only drags out the fight - any decent fleet should be able to handle just about any sized Ordo... as long as it has no Radiant in it. Once even one Radiant is in the enemy fleet, that roughly doubles the difficulty.
But that is not even the main problem. So-called common sense says that you should be able to simply concentrate your firepower on the Radiant as it closes in and if not kill it then at least push it back. Disregarding the micromanagement and command points needed to do this(since it requires you to adjust ship positions one by one even before the Radiant actually arrives) there is one tiny, teeny problem with the idea: it is actually impossible to order one of your ships to attack another.
"Engage" simply means "Grab some(~= target DP) ships that are currently not terribly occupied then issue a MOVE command towards the target"
"Eliminate" simply means "Grab some(~= target DP) ships that are currently not terribly occupied then issue a MOVE command towards the target with threat calculations turned off"
Putting aside the problems with grabbing "not terribly occupied" ships(which tend to be scattered all over the place and therefore will not arrive simultaneously - if they manage to arrive at all) just because you MOVE a ship towards an enemy ship does not mean it will start FIRING at it. Every ship is doing its own target prioritization based on things like hull damage and flux level. Even in the best case scenario, when you have, say, four Eradicators sitting in a neat line with a Radiant right in front of them, they will still keep shooting at the Brilliant NEXT to the Radiant because the Brilliant is at 90% flux level and 80% hull - AI prioritizes finishing off ships, so it considers overfluxed cruiser a more valid target than a "fresh" battleship.
Combined with the fact that Radiant will enter the battle later than other Remnant ships(since it's slower) and therefore the "90% flux, 80% hull Brilliant distraction" is a rule and not an exception, the Radiant basically has free reign and by the time AI reacts to it, it likely already killed a cruiser. Words can't describe how frustrating it is to order your ships to attack the huge-ass battleship that is about to murder them, and then have said ships completely ignore your order shooting at something completely irrelevant instead which ends up in a disaster. Is this how raising children is like?
Because of this, there are basically only two methods that I know of dealing with the Radiant:
- Fly a flagship yourself and directly intervene, either killing the Radiant or at least distracting it, or even just fluxing it up enough so that friendly AI starts considering it a "valid target", or distracting rest of fleet so that the Radiant is isolated, the ability for the player to mess with AI is almost limitless;
- Bring such overwhelming firepower that you beat the enemy ships so hard that by the time Radiant arrives it sticks out like a sore thumb and AI starts shooting at it based on proximity alone. Doing this basically requires Squalls, Safety Overrides or just spam(Support Doctrine and/or Derelict Operations) and in general drastically reduces the number of valid fleet compositions you can use against the Ordo(And I could also add that you don't need such overwhelming firepower against ANYTHING else in the game; even the Omega, which are supposed to be endgame boss fights, are a lot easier than Ordo with a Radiant in it)
Now I would love to see Radiant's speed nerfed to that of Paragon or even Onslaught(nerfing the phase skimmer is also a possibility but it's so iconic that I don't think it would be a good idea) but what I would love even more is this: If a player is NOT piloting a flagship, give them an extra set of DIRECT orders, letting them control ships like it's an RTS(i.e. if I tell a ship to go somewhere, it goes exactly there, immediately, at full speed, without any further AI considerations, even if it has to bump friendly/enemy ships out of the way) and maybe also a command points generation bonus. So that the player can directly intervene in a fight at crucial moment(s) even without a flagship.