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« on: April 09, 2023, 10:13:06 AM »
I find the orders in Starsector are more like a list of priorities that you adjust on the fly. Every ship has a list of things it's trying to keep in mind at all times; we just don't SEE that list so we don't really know what the AI is actually thinking on any given ship at any given time. Perhaps it's true that the orders are not very aptly named compared to their actual function; sometimes compressing a set of instructions into a single word is not as simple as we assume, being experienced humans who understand multiple contextual definitions of the same word.
I'm reminded of Final Fantasy 12. The game had basically an auto-battle system that looked like an MMO at a glance, but your party members could be given a list of priorities, adjustable at any time in your menus. It had a list of conditions, like "character below 60% HP" or "enemy immune to poison" or something, and a list of actions like "use weakest potion" or "cast blizzard" or what have you. Items higher on the list obviously took priority. Starsector is SORT OF doing that, but we don't have access to that priority list. We just have an officer personality with a set arrangement of priorities ("no officer" still counts as a "personality" in this context) and a few things we can somewhat override during battle by moving them up in the list a bit--though not necessarily to the top of that list...which I think is part of the frustration. Most people see the word "command" in a game and think that means "DO THIS NOW, DAMN YOU." And starsector...doesn't. Or at least, it doesn't APPEAR to.
Psychology versus computer programming is always such a FUN exchange, isn't it?
