Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - Morrokain

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 143
1
I have encountered a bug with Archean Order stations. I wanted to supply a rebellion on Obsidian Crucible and after I sneaked in with transponder off the text says: "You might be able to establish contact dissident elements within the order if you come in later with the transponder turned off." I tried to access the black market anyway but there is not even an option to see markets, only the colony info.

Hi sorry for the delay I've been taking a break from modding for sanity purposes. I believe I did some special exceptions with a few markets to restrict access so that could be what you are running into, but I will look into it once I start modding again - which should hopefully be soontm.

Hey there! First of all thanks for making the mod. I was planning on playing it with nexerelin, however when I do the tutorial custom start I talk with the planet I get a nullpointer exception without crashing. It happens when it tries to add a ship and an officer to my fleet I think.  I am not sure what causes it or why but I thought i'd attach a file of what it gives me, so someone more experienced with mods might be able to help. I've also included my modlist, and without nexerelin the tutorial start isnt available. I like the storyline so I like playing with it tutorial and all Thanks in advance!
- Archean order
-Combat Chatter
-Concord
-DroneLib
-LazyLib
-MagicLib
-Nexerelin
-speedup
-starship legends
-Terraforming & station construction
-Unknown Skies
-crew_replacer
-Graphicslib
Since my attachment didnt work here is the error typed out: RuntimeException: attempting to add null fleet member to [player player fleet]
Could not find vigilance_Starting variant, getting random ship instead (it doesnt add anything to my fleet afterwards)
NullPointerException: Null
edit: the officer part is fixed, however the tutorial seems to not be completable since I cannot hand over the AI core to the station commander


Hello there! I am glad you like the story line I put in place. That was done forever ago and is very much incomplete so unfortunately at this time its not a good idea to use the tutorial with the mod. I disable it by default but Nex overrides the starting options so it is technically playable again but uncomplete-able. Apologies its definitely something I want to finish up at some point.

2
Completely minor and ignorable suggestion, but would you be willing to turn the standard AO starts (20 relations with major benefactor + Small Destroyer/Frigate Fleet) into custom Nexerelin starts? Because, I feel that a large part of the enjoyment of AO is slowly climbing yourself from small-time grunt all the way up to a big boss in terms of your favorite faction. And Nex starting you at friendly wherein you have access to a lot of the cool toys kind of breaks that.

I don't mean change the numbers on Nex's "faction starts", since I imagine that means working into Nex itself, but rather specific custom starts like what Tahlan did with the Red Hand and the Balisong.

Do you mean custom Nex-specific starts assuming Nex is included in the mod list? Or just more custom starts that Nex doesn't override? Iirc, Nex overrides the starting conditions at some point and uses JSON files to give modders ways to include their own ships per starting fleet category as well as some mod-specific starting values for faction specific starts - such as the faction capital and starting relations with other factions, etc.

Looking into the current Nex implementation is already on the ToDo list anyway for other reasons, so is the Tahlan (Tahlan Shipworks mod right?) example based upon new Nex features or an entirely different thing within that mod's implementation?

In other words, I'm open to the idea but it would help to have a starting point to get the ball rolling so to speak. If you can't answer that, that's no big deal but I figured I'd ask to try and save time.

Also keep in mind that this is an addition to the ToDo list that is admittedly growing large atm since I've taken some time off modding recently. (And some of the suggestions require more testing/effort than others.)

I'll try and tackle a few things this weekend since I will have some prime modding free time saturday night/sunday hopefully.

3
General Discussion / Re: MesoTroniK Donation Drive
« on: May 23, 2022, 04:38:47 AM »
Gave what I could. I hope you reach your goal Meso AC is so much more important for seniors!

4
Yes i know my problem is that all the ships are offered up for sale...The only one missing is the justicar which does not seem to spawn in markets or in AI fleets.

What version of the mod do you have? That was an issue in an older version (can't remember which one off the top of my head) but it should be fixed in the latest version. Its possible that it was fixed in an experimental version though and isn't in the primary download - but I thought I fixed it before working on the experimental builds.

If you do have an older version, iirc the fix is pretty easy to do yourself. You just have to add:

         "archean_justicar",

under the "knownShips" portion of the archean order faction file located in data/world/factions

It might take an ingame month or two, but they should start showing up in the markets after that change is made.

5
Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« on: May 12, 2022, 03:51:19 PM »
Are people more offended by the lore implications of the Lion's Guard "Special Modifications" hullmod, or it's actual gameplay effects? What about the at-cost Solar Shielding?

For me, its the gameplay effects that essentially create cool-looking "gotcha" ships with an in-lore explanation. The lore/history will likely be lost on younger gamers anyway and that's all they will see and it just feels bad from that perspective. The lore can stay the same but the ships should at least be interesting and not a no-brainer "do not use this ever" if that makes sense. I think both can be done believably.

There are a lot of good ideas here. AAF at least changes the Executor but it doesn't solve the actual problem with non-capital ships. I'm interested in the malfunctions idea though. I think there is a lot of potential there but obviously I'm not familiar with the exact details of what that entails. It does kind of blend together with "ill-advised modifications" a bit from an initial analysis, but it at least has the right idea of not making the ships obviously worse just through stats.

6
Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« on: May 08, 2022, 09:52:33 AM »
Ok I finally read the blog and most of the comments and responses. I am super hyped about 90% of the changes - especially the league and REDACTED ones! The focus on beam missiles is a really neat way to differentiate the historically bland faction.

The capital ships are all interesting too. Some have expressed concerned over the Pegasus, but I actually like the idea of having a ship that immediately creates a tactical concern no matter what side of the battle it is on. You have to really work hard to not lose ships when fighting it and you have a pretty limited window of peak effectiveness when using it. Good stuff!

The Apex is a beautiful ship so major props to David on that one. I'm sorry to see the hangar bay go on the Brilliant but I get the reasoning. The Terminator ship is something I really want to try out to see how it feels. Imo that was one of the coolest recent additions to the game. I'm curious though, did you happen to fix the nullpointer issue with using the AI tags that SUPER REDACTED gunships use when combined with that system? Specifically: "attack_at_an_angle"? I know its not a vanilla use case or anything, but it would be cool if you could use both!

Anyway, I think the game is moving in a really good direction by making the factions more unique and a few more gated goodies to reach for. It's something I've wanted for years and I'm glad its finally being worked into the roadmap. (This should be the main take-away from my post I hope.)



And now on to the controversial changes. I want to first focus on the lore part of it as I feel the lore and design aspects of this issue are very much separate things.

So, lore-wise, the change to the LG makes perfect sense to me. While I can understand why those who had a different interpretation of the LG would be disappointed of course, when you look at how all of the lore comes together (haven't done all of the story yet I'm sad to say) and the timeline, etc, I think it all holds up just fine from what I know - and importantly it creates something a little different since the XIV ships are already kind of supposed to be the elite remnants of the Domain, etc. So for me everything looks good there. And hey, who doesn't want to push tyrants down a flight of stairs and get some cool toys in the process?  ;D

Speaking of cool toys however....

Spoiler
In brief: that's exactly correct and the LG ships (aside from the Executor) are not intended to be appealing to the player. As someone pointed out earlier, the blog post kind of just goes from stuff that *is* appealing to the player into those without making that distinction super clear - to me it was just because, I mean, they're clearly worse, so what other conclusion might you draw from that? But it's definitely something I could've framed better in the post. In-game, I don't think it'll be like that; you'd have to see them in-campaign to even become aware of them (at which point you also clearly see they've got a d-mod!), it's not like they're presented as something good you want to get anywhere.

Basically, it's best to think of them as you might of a few extra d-modded pirate hulls - though in this case shinier than usual. But in the end it's just some added Diktat flavor that mainly comes into play when you blow them up.

Oof, to me that is a wasted opportunity. Especially since:

On the one hand: they really do, don't they? :D David really outdid himself there.

On the other hand: you can still use them and feel awesome, knowing that you're flying with style despite taking a (minor) penalty. That's true style, that is. There's an applicable saying that I think is really thought-provoking - at least, it was for me - that I first saw here - "fashion is pain".

I understand that this is half joking, but let me get this straight. You are adding something very visually appealing with all downsides and no upsides as a sort of "player challenge" and essentially making these ships pirates 2.0? Or is that a justification to all of the expressions of disappointment? Kind of a salve to the burn sort of thing. I just... I don't want to be too harsh here as like I said 90-95% of the changes are golden and spot on design, but this just feels wrong to me on every level from a design perspective.

I think it has been established that it is a patently bad idea to create player traps like that in any game. Now, I'm not the good idea factory or anything (very likely the opposite  :D ) so I'm not arguing that in any way, and I definitely get that its just supposed to mostly be fluff and the penalty is minor, but the issue here is the combination of the two quotes. "This looks really cool - but you will also feel bad for using it" is just not the way to go prreettty much ever. I'd even argue that doing that is a major pitfall that should be taught in design classes if it isn't already. Even for new players, I think those who notice this will likely say something. With all the min-max talk already present on the forums, adding fuel to that fire is a mistake imo.

Your point on "different rather than better/worse" should be the design goal for paintjob ships. LP and pirates get a pass for all of the reasons already stated in the thread and I won't touch on them here. But if you are making ships that look good, they had better at least be on par with the other ships. Pirates as a theme is so well established that you can get away with it there. You can't get away with it on a custom sub-faction unless you specifically make their ships look bad as a warning to the player that "you don't want these".
[close]

Please don't take any of this too harshly. As Grievous69 already pointed out its a very small thing when seen in juxtaposition against all of the other amazing stuff here. I just think its something to be avoided down the road and the attempted justification worries me a bit - even jokingly.

All in all well done!

7
Archean Order Plus Nexerelin means no Civilian tankers, and possibly other issues. Either mod on it's own works fine, but together breaks spawning somehow.

Used the Stellar Networks mod to do a universal search, and no fleet or shop contains them at all.

Edit: There seems to be other mods that cause this to happen, but Archean order is clearly required. Optimistically, fixing it with Nexerelin will fix it with other mods as well.

Huh I wonder what I do that causes that to happen. Thanks for letting me know about it though! Quick question: does Nex define tankers by id somewhere that you know of? I haven't looked in the mod in a bit but I know its had some major updates since the last time I did. That would be my first guess but I'll probably have to look into it more in depth to figure it out.

8
An additional increase in defense would be nice. At the moment, its weapon is very poor and can't really do much against crafts or missiles which ruin its sole purpose. It's going to need some kind of AoE weapon. Clashing with Hydra won't be much of a problem I believe. Since they have very different ranges. Actually, giving it a new flare system would be ok as well. Mass flare deployment and something to deal with crafts.
Flares could definitely work well and mines deal with crafts very well when based upon another craft due to the damage boost. I'll play around with it.

Quote
That would be mainly for the uniqeness, I suppose, to balance the OP cost. Phase behaves like the armor counterpart, deflection shell, which has become quite common.
I'll keep it in mind. I'm not sure exactly if a teleport would do much, but I can try and give it something flavorful.

Quote
Firing too rapidly, I guess? It's very good in both anti-craft and anti-ship aspects.
Iirc correctly it has combat capacitors. Maybe just removing that would do it.

Quote
Lol, unbelievable. Such a simple and plain game makes so many people addicted.
(The nuances between weapons and the general balance and feel of the game is great. Its simple to learn, but rewards careful decision making and micro. And picking a different character makes a pretty huge difference in how your early game build will look.)

9
Not super important but the Heavy PD Drone is so weak right now. It should at least has a Scythe cannon and maybe proximity mines as well.
Scythe Cannon would clash with the Hydra. Proximity mines is a good idea though. And maybe just boosted defenses?

Quote
What do you think about the Specter interceptor having a short-range teleport as a skill?
On top of phase? I think that might be OP considering its replacement rate. Of course, that could be adjusted. The question I'd ask is: why does it need that? Or is it more of a flavor/uniqueness kind of thing.

Quote
Hellcat is kind of OP and it's cheap.
Too much damage?

Quote
Torpedo firing delay should be reduced somewhat. Low max ammo already hurt its DPS by a lot and I don't like Atropos large and medium to have different firing delays, lol, very painful to make it work properly.
Noted. I haven't gotten to torpedoes in the medium weapons category. I think I've done a single or maybe two passes at them atm.

Quote
Trebuchet missile is very spammy, half that max ammo.
Hmm. Well, they seem pretty balanced small-medium scale. Are they a problem large scale? I could see that. Just in general its a pretty difficult missile to balance. Its a fine line between "OP" and "worthless" as far as small LRMs go.

Quote
AI officer currently has access to Vanilla Combat Endurance and Field Modulation. Combat Endurance is fine but Field Modulation is a poorer version of AO Shield Modulation. It also has extra phase ship buffs which the current Shield Modulation doesn't have.



Double shields
Yeah I definitely need to look at officer skills. Hopefully there is something I can do there but I'm not sure if skills were ever intended to be completely overridden. I might just be missing something obvious though.

I've taken a small break this week. (Blame Vampire Survivors haha) Once I start modding again I'll take a look at all of these things.

10
Suggestions / Re: On importance of ship squadrons
« on: April 20, 2022, 09:52:35 AM »
I also think you're extremely optimistic if you think that players will learn to use escorts/orders instead of coming to the forum/dev whining about how their ships are suiciding into the enemy formation :P. No matter what agency the player is given, people will still not understand how to use it, and complain that the AI is bad lol. IMO that's what is happening right now. People have a bunch of expectations about how the game should function, and don't spend time figuring out how it actually functions and how they can best utilize the tools they have. That's not going to go away, nothing will be intuitive for everyone.

Probably true lol.

So I think for me its sort of a "pick your poison" situation and I'm picking the yeeting poison haha. (I laughed pretty hard upon reading that btw.)

Part of the reason for this is because I'm unsure as to how to go about reducing chasing without using speed as the primary analysis data point for the AI. Any ideas for how to actually reduce chasing? It seems like it would be pretty difficult to me.

RE: stagnation
Personally, I don't really have the same experience with stagnation being a major issue. When it does feel like progress isn't being made in combat, it's usually because the battle has become very condensed and ships are concentrating fire to the point where it's actually not wise to push into the enemy formation. The solution is to flank, which causes enemies to split focus and creates opportunities for aggression, and the AI does a decent job of flanking in my experience, it just needs some improvements on knowing how to not overextend and when it needs to play more safe because it has no allies around to assist (where I think some DP density understanding could help). The AI does sometimes need eliminate orders to effectively take advantage of opening, but I like that I am making the decision to take a risk so I can own the consequences, rather than the AI randomly making those decisions without having enough information to make them well.

I'm not saying its terrible right now or anything. I mean, it works its just got some lingering issues. One of them is chasing. You'll see a lot more stagnation if you are using equally matched builds. It won't be apparent as much in the natural flow of the game because builds aren't balanced equally on purpose. I also do this, but when you are balance testing mostly equal builds you will see it. However, even with eliminate the AI can stubbornly refuse to do obvious things - especially when a ship is overloaded for some reason. It seems like its deliberately backing off from time to time and won't use its missiles when it was just using its missiles before the overload (and yes there was still ammo left and I manually took control from autopilot and fired the missiles just to make sure nothing was preventing it from happening). For whatever reason that generally happens when the number of ships is small - like 1v1 or 2v2.

Just in general, a 4v4 vs equivalent builds often takes a lot of orders if its just AI to have a victory on the player side. That's probably partly because of the current admiral AI but of course its also related the nuance of the flow of the battle and what happens at the beginning. Its not just one eliminate order though. Its constant target redirection because eliminate creates vulnerabilities if the ship with the command on it retreats behind an allied screen. I know that is intended, but this is the side effect.

One issue for me here is that the ship doesn't pursue the ship through the screen because when I give this is order its because I think their is a vulnerability that offsets the flank and potential surround. Err, hopefully I got the point across well.

You still need to constantly check if your ships are going in the wrong direction, it's just that the wrong direction is now into the middle of the enemy formation instead of towards a random frigate. I don't think you really fix anything. In fact, I think you make a lot of issues worse.

Certainly possible. Besides the ones you mentioned (suiciding, heavy blaster) do you have any other concrete ones? It might be one of those things where you'd have to see it in action to know though.

Finally, I'm curious about the whole DP density idea. Its sounds good for sure, but some details probably need to be fleshed out. What constitutes density? And is DP really a reliable stat to use?

11


Unforgivable! Wait, how do I find them again I just want to know what another option does.

Not my mod I'm afraid.  ;)

But awesome! lol

12
Suggestions / Re: On importance of ship squadrons
« on: April 19, 2022, 01:15:22 PM »
Megas:

I agree with that assessment yeah.

intrinsic_parity:

You make some really good points, but I don't agree with everything. To start, the original premise:

IMO The AI should be able to behave reasonably regardless of the decisions that the player makes (loadouts/orders). Barreling through a line of enemies (of any size) has a huge amount of risk associated. All it takes is one reaper, or a big burst of ion damage to the engines, and the ship is dead. There are no ships that can be safely ignored IMO, every ship poses a threat and needs to be addressed (not chased, just addressed). Of course you can give orders or design loadouts to try and mitigate that, but the AI shouldn't assume that the player has done that, and in fact the AI will look quite stupid if the player fails to do that. If the player wants the capital ships to charge like that, it should be on them to give the order.

I think this is the heart of what we are actually discussing here. The AI isn't really behaving reasonably when it chases something it can never catch across the map. And "addressed" is pretty vague, but I'm assuming you just mean facing with shields up or something. The other things you are describing are perfectly fine, but chasing isn't imo. To me the difference between a ship getting destroyed because it was kited out of position and not contributing and one that was destroyed because it overextended while pushing into the battle line is massive. If we are talking about reasonable expectations then the second scenario feels both a lot better to me when it happens and more easily mitigated than the first.

Is that an admiral AI kind of thing? Sure. But, you can certainly argue that to the player this is unnecessary babysitting and relies upon more orders than are currently possible if they are supposed to mitigate that behavior with orders. That's why builds must be heavily optimized for the harder fights and why the tempest and phase ships are meta. (Not the only reason of course but a large factor.) They won't have this problem because they are generally fast and they will pull larger ships into positions where they can be overwhelmed under default AI without the player needing to babysit them as much. That's a pretty huge deal. Its also why the enemy AI seems less stupid than if the player doesn't give any orders. It issues escort commands to larger ships.

The current set up of "choose your partner and do-see-do" across the map has some valid problems right now. There isn't a sense of any battle cohesion and requires the player to A) understand that the AI is going to do that and B) make sure it doesn't. Hence lots of suggestions for formations, etc. Let's look at B in a vacuum. You have to "fix" the AI with an order of which (unmodded) you have very little of to begin with. That's not really ideal right? So I don't think that we can ignore that this is a problem. Even if the issue is player perception rather than strictly true, it's still valid because that's the player perception if that makes sense. The real trick is finding the root cause. In this instance, that is how I analyze the OP's suggestion. Its less that formations are strictly needed and more that the AI either has to have a cursory understanding of general position and a more refined strategic layer OR the system must rely upon some strategic assumptions to work properly even considering the current good behavior of trying to flank, etc. One of these assumptions would be that slower ships act as anvils and faster ships act as hammers and so slower ships can realistically pursue targets it can catch instead of getting kited into a bad position. And I'm not even saying that there shouldn't be a threat analysis there but rather that the threat analysis currently overcompensates and causes stagnation. The main difference between the two scenarios in question is what we have now requires repeated adjustments and is generally more annoying and assigning an escort order on a slow ship that is barreling towards something it can hit is something that only needs more adjustments if the overall attack fails. And if it looks like it will the player can pull it back. Will it cause more losses? Absolutely. But that's only bad if it causes heavy setbacks for the player. It doesn't necessarily have to. Whereas losing a battle should have some long-term consequences, losing a ship shouldn't set progress as far back as it does now. They are sort of separate topics, but they all tie together in the overall feel of game.

And that is before we get into the can of worms that is the current order system in general. I've stated this before, but orders need to be more concrete. If there actually existed an order that would do what you are describing then that would be a fair assessment (so taking the opposite approach to what I proposed but still having the behavior possible) but in my experience that is not currently the case. Far too many things can disrupt the order at large and the AI is making these decisions against the player's wishes. That still doesn't address battle stagnation either unless the admiral AI actually gives those orders.

You seem to be suggesting that the AI should default to taking risks and the player should be responsible for mitigating the risks with orders. That seems like a recipe for disaster to me, since it relies on the AI's ability to asses the risk and value of actions which it is not good at IMO (and is a really really difficult task, even for a human). I think the current default behavior is correct: the AI defaults to playing it safe and the player is responsible for telling it where it should take risks via eliminate/engage/search and destroy orders. If there is a problem with the games current approach to AI risk taking, it is that the player doesn't have enough/effective enough tools to give the AI these orders (and maybe that the enemy admiral AI is not agressive enough).

To split hairs a little bit, I think you got the wrong impression when you say that I'm suggesting that we have the AI assess all risks in a sophisticated way. I'm actually arguing the opposite. I don't think it needs to in all cases because of baseline assumptions of what ships can or cannot do. So:

I think maybe what is needed is more abstract strategic orders. Something as simple as a 'try to engage ships of the same class' order could be helpful. But I think a more general 'try to move towards the center of the enemy formation' order vs a 'try to flank' order would be more useful (and also a 'retreat towards allies' order). In practice that could mean doing some sort of DP weighted clustering (or DP density calculation) to find centers of combat and basing some of the positioning logic on that. That also might achieve some of what the OP was thinking of: ships with the same orders (e.g. flanking) will tend to move towards the same areas and thus stick together. It also could be helpful to have a sense of where allies are concentrated using the same DP density/clustering to identify where safer areas of the battle are for retreating even without orders.

These would certainly help, but they don't really fix the key issue which is the default behavior. In order for this sort of thing to work, you'd definitely need more command points. And then you get closer and closer to RTS micro as you implement more and more of these sorts of things for edge cases. I'm not sayings its a bad idea or anything, just stating that these things aren't exactly the stated design goal of "orders are for special occasions and the AI is pretty autonomous" which I think is still the current intention.

What I meant by "tactics" isn't that the AI needs to necessarily be more tactical, but having a capital ignore a frigate line creates tactics because it creates a risk that has to be mitigated. And the important things is its decisive in nature. Its really no different than the current system as far as necessitating orders except that I think its more intuitive and creates more interesting scenarios at the cost of heavier losses. And even then, that is only before the player learns to properly escort the ships that act this way.

Basically I disagree that the behavior is a "bad idea" by the AI because the "good idea" of battle stagnation is pretty boring at the extreme levels like what Megas was referring to.

13
Suggestions / Re: On importance of ship squadrons
« on: April 19, 2022, 09:44:31 AM »
I've been thinking about this a lot recently and obviously this isn't the first or likely last time its come up, but-

However, your third request I would argue does require sentience (or at least a lot of algorithmic considerations) to implement properly, or at least doesn't result in just as annoying behavior as we have now, since it's context dependent.  Enemy fleet has mixed slow and fast ships.  Player fleet is made up of SO Hyperions only.  Does half the enemy fleet simply not bother going anywhere and sit at the top of the map (or just grab objectives). 

Yes. It's better that the ships stay together in almost every scenario I can think of. If they can't catch anything anyway, spreading out is exactly what the enemy fleet wants so that they can be easily picked off by the concentrating faster ships on isolated ones and leveraging numbers. The slow ships can move towards the center or something after objectives but the onus should be on the player to engage them not for them to engage the player. And that is only because the player has the faster ships. If the situation was reversed, that is where orders like Search and Destroy and the various override orders come into play. But it shouldn't be the default behavior imo.

Quote
Perhaps you meant to say slow ships should prioritize other slower ships, and if there is nothing left, only then go after the faster ships.  Although even then, having an Apogee decide to go after the 120 speed Lasher across the map instead of the 150 speed Omen adjacent to it might look funny (and equally likely to fail to catch).

Yeah this is something that would have to be weighed and prioritized or it would indeed look funny. This is the most complicated part I think. I could definitely be missing more edge cases too in my thought process. Unfortunately, actual implementation would probably be required to flush them all out.

Quote
Take it to an extreme, and have the player deploy a Paragon from reserve into that all SO Hyperion fleet.  Do all the slow ships stop engaging the frigates right next to them, and make a beeline for the Paragon across the map that just entered (even if they had cornered a frigate on the edge of the map?). 

Yes. The reasoning is simple. There is no point to engaging the frigates. If they can't be bursted down (and they already likely would have been) then nothing is actually being accomplished by engaging them in the first place. Flux damage isn't actually damage when the ship is a lot faster. If they can be bursted down then not engaging isn't an issue because when the frigates naturally decide to harass they get bursted down. Er, does that make sense?

Quote
Does the slow ship press through a line of frigates, ignoring their flux levels, towards that capital, or do they have to engage with the frigates in between, despite them being twice as fast?  Do they attempt to go around and fail because the frigates are faster?  I could imagine some interesting degenerate fleet strategies for the Paragon + fast frigates setup assuming such an AI.

The first thing. Barrel through the frigate line. Same reasons as above. If the capital ship can't ignore frigates it can't catch then is it really a capital? If it loses a battle with another capital because that frigate line put too much flux pressure on it while breaking through then all the better! Now there is a better reason for escorts and the important thing is that its very intuitive! Chasing a frigate while the enemy capital mows through everything isn't intuitive at all to me.

Quote
What if the slow ship has carrier support or long range missile support from an ally.  What if the ships is equipped with a pile of ECCM Harpoons?  Is it enough to drive the flux up on said frigate, which will be driven higher by pursuing since 120-60 = 60 relative retreat speed instead of 12).  Now that ship needs to be aware of ally weapon and range considerations to properly make an intelligent decision on whether to continue pursuing.

I would just ignore that kind of complexity entirely to be honest. The choice of whether to pursue is basically a binary decision based upon relative speeds with the wrinkle already mentioned above. I don't think it actually needs much more nuance than that in the majority of cases. I'll further explain my reasoning below but I've already touched on it a bit.

Quote
In general should an isolated capital just let a frigate constantly shoot it's engines if there's a distant, slow target?

Either that is a feature of the ship and it really needs allied escorts, or it has rear guns exactly for that reason. As stated above, taking the frigates into account is a tactical error because that isn't what the capital ship is really supposed to do. If there was a concrete benefit to turning and engaging the frigates then ok but I honestly don't think that there is in over 90% of cases. It just slows things down a lot. Probably more so than the engines getting taken out a bunch because the frigates can always vent and close the gap and the capital can't actually get anywhere it really needs to be because its always concerned with the presence of ships it cant catch but could beat if it could. Hopefully this makes sense as I'm not sure I'm explaining it all that great.

Quote
The fundamental issue is there's no guarantee of any given type of fleet configuration, on either side.  The absolute statement "not chasing frigates twice their speed" only makes sense in a classic spread of ship types versus a similar spread, and assuming the slowest ships die last.  The AI has to be general enough to handle a very wide range of situations, including situations where the "obvious" behavior that should be hard coded no longer works.  Not to mention as the fleets take losses, the AI still needs to do something vaguely sensible.  Capitals chase frigates because sometimes frigates are the only ship around it, and the ship AI has a very local view.  Making a decision of whether it's better for a really slow ship to ignore the really close fast frigate and instead pick from 5 different potentially slower target ships across the map that is going to take 2 minutes to reach any of them is a sentient level strategic decision weighing many considerations, assuming you want it done right.

I think you are sort of right here, but I also think we have a tendency to over think things as well or otherwise expect more complexity than is really needed. Why do I feel this way? Thinking about it, the painful thing about a capital chasing a frigate is that it will never, ever, catch it in a reasonable time frame that brings value to the battle even if it eventually does catch it and kill it. The big thing here is the "value" part and of course that's high subjective. A capital breaking the loose "formation" to go on a wild goose chase will always be a negative thing imo and so it doesn't bring value to me. Honestly there isn't a situation in mind where its beneficial to do this off the top of my head, but I'm sure others could come up with them.

Anyway, to me I think the best course of action for the AI would be to not ever pursue it and let the ship come to it instead. That is, unless an order to pursue/engage/eliminate, etc was given. Capital ships are not obligated to engage anything but stations, really, or anything they can catch. They are the anvil around which the hammers of the battle operate. 

Taking my earlier comment into account, why should capitals brute force their way through enemy frigate lines? Because they can a lot of the time, and that's a lot better than stagnating the battle by getting out of position. If the capital gets destroyed because it over extends itself, that is a player problem in my mind because its really easy to avoid with a defend order or a target redirection or even taking manual control. But what it certainly isn't in this case is an AI problem. The AI is doing what it should be doing and have the ships engage targets it can realistically destroy. Anything in between is part of the tactical layer of an engagement.

To put it simply, I think battles should be far more decisive than they are right now and it would make for better combat both visually and in a tactical sense if ships operated this way. What we have right now is a lot of stagnation by ships being overly cautious and spreading out too much. The really painful thing here is that despite all that work put into these edge cases to try and make sure the player doesn't lose ships in silly ways, it still happens from time to time. So what is really being accomplished here when you think about cautious AI? It isn't fulfilling its primary directive, and the cost of that directive brings a host of other problems along with it that are equally if not even more painful.

Alex has stated that part of the reason the AI is cautious is so that the player gets to do the heavy lifting in a battle. That does indeed make a lot of sense don't get me wrong - especially considering the narrow view of the player outside of the tactical map. However, when you consider scale it gets a bit messier. I don't think the player wants to personally destroy every enemy ship if that makes sense - and I think that's what we are close to at the moment.

I think cautious AI was a mistake that was a well-meaning reaction to player frustration over ship losses. I was talking with my brother in detail about this and I think the better approach to that problem was to tackle it at the campaign level. For instance, tweaking the recovery system to always allow player ships to be recovered without an OP tax (because why does it really need that?) and something like templates that make restoring a built ship with as little button presses as possible.

Our conclusion was that the real reason that losing ships is annoying has little to do with the money lost or the supplies, etc. That is manageable as long as there are ways to make money without combat - and there are plenty. The real reason is the tedium of rebuilding your lost ship and by the fact that in the current system RNG is such a large factor. If it takes you half of a campaign to find the ship you want and then it gets lost in a battle because of AI derp - that's where you are going to see angry posts on the forums. If its just a matter of pressing a few buttons and maybe waiting a bit (we discussed a mothball sort of situation that takes docking with a station to repair or something along those lines) as well as what essentially boils down to lost money, its a lot less painful to lose ships.

So to really simplify this, iirc the line went something like: "You should really only have to build a ship once. After that, its just some sort of minor penalty for losing it that makes it unavailable for a bit but you don't have to find it or its weapons again."

To summarize: The AI should be more decisive for the sake of both tactics and battle stagnation with the implied expectation that ship losses are more common. Because ship losses are currently really unfun, that needs to be addressed at the campaign layer with a variety of QOL improvements which I've detailed a bit.

Now I could definitely be wrong here and I don't want to make it seem like I 100% know the answer to these issues, but after a lot of thought and some discourse on game design this is what I came up with. Hopefully it can fuel some friendly discussion at the very least.

14
For player character well yes that hull mod would be the main attraction. But when it comes to Officer piloting your ship the benefit is reduced to only one line which is a measly 30 seconds increase in peak performance and nothing more. Of course, no one would waste an elite point there.

Ah yeah I see what you mean there. I'll try and spice it up a bit but not sure what to give it just yet.

15
I have some complaints about skills, especially the elite upgrade for officers. Currently, Reliability Engineering, System Expertise, and Polarized Armor are undesirable at the elite level.

For elite Reliability Engineering, I think, giving it an increase in fighter redeployment rate would be a good addition.

Polarized Armor could get 25% EMP resistance at the base skill and an additional 25% at the elite level. It's "based on current hard flux" could get a bit more explanation as well like range description on Ranged Specialization skill. Its base skill is also pretty useless to high-tech ships at the moment.

For System Expertise, I don't know. You should give it something worthwhile. Increase active flux vent rate? Flux capacity?

Ok I'll take a look. The Reliability Engineering change is a good one and I'll do that. Polarized Armor is a bit trickier, but the point on high tech ships is solid and I'll see what I can do.

For Systems Expertise, however, the Safety Overrides unlock is pretty huge right? Just to make sure, you shouldn't be able to get that anywhere else. So if that's not the case that changes things since that is supposed to be its main elite perk.

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 143