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Author Topic: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad  (Read 28841 times)

Megas

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #30 on: June 26, 2016, 03:16:29 PM »

The biggest problem with ammo is baiting the AI to run out of ammo, then you kill them.  I have resorted to this before when I could not win any other way.  (For example, Medusa vs. elite Onslaught with high Combat - wait until Mjolnir and HVD run out of ammo, then kill Onslaught).  Of course, with the shield degradation idea, I suppose one would want a very fast ship and circle-strafe the enemy for a while (or just take the damage and regenerate hull with Damage Control 10) to make them waste ammo.  Even better, get Hyperion and teleport like crazy.

Given how the game works, CR is probably the lesser of two evils between CR and ammo limits.  I like to see high-tech with cheaper CR costs because they used to have the ammo advantage, that is sub-par energy weapons with unlimited ammo vs. otherwise superior ballistics with limited ammo.

Heavy Needler used to be great because it had lots of ammo, 1500 instead of 200-300 shots of other weapons.  Now, with unlimited ammo, Heavy Needler is simply a Heavy Autocannon with slightly better speed, accuracy, and flux cost for highly inflated OP cost.
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Voyager I

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #31 on: June 26, 2016, 07:56:55 PM »

Just contributing my 2 cents worth here:

I hate the timers specific to each ship, and it feels like a very artificial mechanic. "Okay you've got 180 seconds to finish this fight before your fun runs out and you need to retreat." That said, I very much like the idea of ships "running out of steam" mid-combat once they exhaust their ammunition/supplies/repairs/whatever. The Onslaught is a great example of this. It's near unbeatable as long as those annihilators still have ammo. Once they're out, however, you might have an opening.

My advice is get rid of the CR timer completely and replace it with the following extremely easy to implement mechanics:
- Hard ammunition limits. No more magically regenerating missiles and autocannons. Once your ship is out of ammo, you're done. This gives an advantage to picking otherwise sub-optimal weapons that have higher ammo capacities and/or don't lose performance over the course of a fight (energy weapons could become very advantageous in long fights, even though they might have worse flux efficiencies up front).
- Make engine malfunctions and degraded engine performance scale with amount of damage taken by the engines. Again, once they've taken heavy damage, you won't be able to pull the same acceleration and you need to be really skillful to be able to push damaged engines to their limit.
- Shield efficiency could decay with damage taken. You could pick hullmods and skills to lengthen the amount of time you can last under heavy firepower. Alternatively, you could use lower-tech ships that are less reliant on shields and see less shield efficiency decay over the course of a fight.
- Phase ships should lose the ability to phase (or only partially phase out) the more they use their phase systems.
- After a battle, the levels of all systems get set to the CR value of the ship.

Basically I want a mechanic that reflects actual use of systems in combat, not an artificial, "oh you picked this ship, that means you get X seconds of fun". You should be able to control how long and in what ways your ship lasts in combat with your choice of weapons/skills/hullmods. It used to be very worth it to pick expanded magazines on a ballistics-heavy flagship. Otherwise you'd be a sitting duck after a few minutes if you really had to start blowing people away.

CR does a really good job of abstracting a million little attributes, none of which are worth tracking individually, into one comprehensible statistic.  Trying to dive into that level of detail is going to be phenomenally tedious while adding negligible real depth to the game and will almost certainly result in some inane behaviors designed to game whatever mechanics track performance decay.

Also, the game had limited ammo up until fairly recently.  Simply put, it was a bad mechanic that arbitrarily favored energy weapons over ballistics since both were generally designed with the intent of being the primary armament of the ship carrying them.  We don't need to arbitrarily add more metrics of combat stamina.
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Megas

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #32 on: June 27, 2016, 06:14:02 AM »

25 ship limit should just be abolished. i'm not sure why it exists save maybe to give the ai fleetblob a nigh insurmountable advantage that the player cannot employ. as it is it seems like deploying more ships is actually a disadvantage; while deployment CR is a good way to curb deploy-all, it's too harsh in even battles and essentially irrelevant in 1 v. multitude scenarios.
I think I misunderstood when I read this last.  Yes, I agree.  Fighting even battles is punishing on your wallet if you do not have a bounty backing you up.  On the other hand, if you can solo everything with the smallest ship possible (and not dying trying), which can be a battleship against a death fleet, you will always profit a little even without bounties, although paltry commissions will add up handsomely after dozens of battles.

One way to mitigate this is if you deploy enough, standing down should always give some CR refund.  Otherwise, soloing fleets will remain optimal, at least when trying to raise income through combat alone.
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woodsmoke

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #33 on: June 27, 2016, 03:04:09 PM »

Also, combat is costly, it is hard to profit unless you solo fleets.

It's... really not. Not unless you're actively going out of your way to avoid bounties, I suppose, though I can't imagine why you would. I've been playing a bounty hunter run for the past couple weeks in which fleet combat was essentially the only thing I did. I almost always deploy at least one other ship and often my whole fighting fleet, even if it isn't strictly necessary, and most of the weapons I loot get socked into storage to outfit another ship somewhere down the line. The only money I've made from trade has been selling common/crap weapons (thumpers, LACs, pilums, etc), heavy machinery, metals and the occasional commodity I pick up as loot. Currently, the character is sitting pretty on several million credits.

Granted, I haven't gotten to the endgame point of fighting 40+ ship superfleets, largely because I generally get bored and give up long before then. At a certain point combat for its own sake ceases to be compelling.

With respect, I think Helmut's right. You seem to be primarily interested in power gaming, in finding the absolute most optimal way to play given the system's constraints. Which, hey, if that's your thing, more power to you, but I don't think it's representative of the way most people play the game.
« Last Edit: June 27, 2016, 03:05:51 PM by woodsmoke »
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Megas

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #34 on: June 27, 2016, 03:34:31 PM »

There are no bounties against enemy fleets in their home systems (aside from the paltry commission from Tri-Tachyon or other faction).  For example, there will be no bounties for Hegemony ships in Corvus because Hegemony owns Corvus.

In endgame, most of my endgame targets are detachments of major enemy factions, in their home systems.  That is, I go to Arcadia, Corvus, or Eos Exodus as an invader, kill as many as I can, then limp back to Magec to stash my loot.  So far, I pick Tri-Tachyon because 1) they sell Hyperion, Scarab, Medusa, and Paragon; and 2) because Hegemony or Luddic Church are present in most star systems, which is good for my bloodthirsty and warmongering character.  Pirates are usually limited to named bounties, and I generally do not want to fight random pirates in systems later on because it locks my fleet out of their useful markets.

And if you accept casualties and not reload the game, you will lose money replacing ships and weapons.

Early on, bounties will provide well enough.  Later, when I want big ticket items in bulk, combat is slow but steady, provided I avoid casualties.

Fighting late is the game eats money and supplies.  Combat can yield a net game, provided the player deploys the least amount of force necessary and avoids casualties.

Quote
Granted, I haven't gotten to the endgame point of fighting 40+ ship superfleets, largely because I generally get bored and give up long before then. At a certain point combat for its own sake ceases to be compelling.
I am the opposite.  I grind through the boring parts against pirates with my underleveled and underpowered character, then it gets fun when I get near max power.
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woodsmoke

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #35 on: June 27, 2016, 07:21:21 PM »

Fair enough. I don't really see any point to the giant fleet battles until I can actually win something by fighting them; at present it's effectively just large-scale raiding. Which doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it, of course, it's just not my cuppa'. Hopefully the introduction of industry will make it possible to capture territory so those giant system contests can actually mean something.

At any rate, I agree about the ship cap. I've not run up against it myself, but I can certainly see how it could cause fairly significant problems in the late game.
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Morbo513

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #36 on: June 27, 2016, 07:51:30 PM »

I like SS+'s way of limiting fleet size by supply consumption, which can be upgraded with the fleet logistics skill IIRC, rather than limiting players to a certain number of ships; when a ship that fills one of those 25 slots can be anything from a Hound (D) to an Onslaught it doesn't make a lot of sense.
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Serenitis

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #37 on: July 01, 2016, 02:00:04 AM »

I like SS+'s way of limiting fleet size by supply consumption, which can be upgraded with the fleet logistics skill IIRC, rather than limiting players to a certain number of ships; when a ship that fills one of those 25 slots can be anything from a Hound (D) to an Onslaught it doesn't make a lot of sense.

This is the way Logistics used to work.
It was (imo) better in every way than a flat numerical limit.
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Tartiflette

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #38 on: July 01, 2016, 02:05:17 AM »

The supply consumption was a bit problematic to convey and to anticipate when buying a ship. Personally I prefered the previous version where ships had a "Fleet Points" value, and you could only have 200 FP in your fleet. Tabletop games style.
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Megas

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #39 on: July 01, 2016, 05:13:06 AM »

I do not mind a flat limit provided I can bring as much as an AI fleet.  We cannot; we are stuck at 25 while the AI can bring a little more than 40 ships per fleet.  We should be able to bring 40 ships.  If AI wants a numbers advantage, it should bring more than one fleet.
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frag971

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #40 on: July 05, 2016, 04:51:35 AM »

I don't like CR. It's an abstract mechanic that feels like it's artificially limiting the fun. I understand why it's there but i think i'd rather play in a game that can counter the exploits rather than curb it with another mechanic.

Is it then not possible to translate the CR mechanic into actual ships? Instead of having this Readiness mechanic why not have actual ships that cover that? For example: each ship has its own ability to recover, but that ability is limited and the player would want to get a logistics ship that handles that. This ship would be deployed in combat to provide repairs, rearm and drain hardflux. The more ships you field the more/bigger logistics you want to field alongside. This also "fixes" the solo-kiting of deathball fleets by letting the AI retreat and rearm/repair while your single frigate runs out of ammo or gets hardfluxed.

A few things logistics could provide:
- Rearm drones - drones would fly from the logi into the friendly ship to add a flat amount of ammo.
- Repair "fighters" - flies to friendly ships and "deals negative damage" to repair the ship. Note how this is a fighter and uses up deployment. These are also suicidal so you would need to spend Supply to build new ones during a battle to provide more repairs. Visually it would look like a canister of nanobots that gets used up to repair the ship.
- Flux drain "weapon" - a turret that targets friendly ships and deals negative hardflux, effectively draining flux. This also generates flux on the logi ship inefficiently so you would be trading efficiency for effectiveness between the two.

The above mechanics could provide an interesting oportunity for players to have protracted fights while "paying" for it. it is more efficient to be out of a battle and let Supply repair and rearm your ships but you still have the option to repair in a battle by pay more per repair. This also lets players to play "the healer" and let AI fly the fleet while the player focuses on logistics (which ship to repair, which to rearm, which to deflux, etc...). Logi ships are also vulnerable since they don't usually feature any weapons aside from a couple of PDs similar to fuel tankers.

I am always the fan of emergent game mechanics that drive behaviour from the set mechanics rather than make mechanics to fix specific issues. I probably sound like i'm trying to teach Alex how to design games and i'm sorry it comes off like that (armchair gamedev yay) and i'm sure he already thought about this and has a reason to design it like that; i'm just sharing my opinion and how i feel. I also don't know the big picture and how the game is going to be in version 1.0. I'm just saying that i don't like CR and i would prefer the ships themselves to handle the problem CR wants to address (whatever it is).
« Last Edit: July 05, 2016, 06:30:52 AM by frag971 »
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #41 on: July 05, 2016, 09:01:00 AM »

CR is intended to address the following:
  • Campaign-level supply use and logistics
  • Preventing kiting from being the god-tactic
  • Breaking stalemates - i.e. forcing battles to keep pace

It addresses the first issue just fine; you deploy, you pay some supplies.  It makes sense and feels fair.

It fails to satisfy the second issue; kiting is still the god-tactic, but it's more inconvenient now.  If you can't kite everything to death where you previously were able to, you can chain-flagship to do it in the world of restrictive CR timers.

The third issue is half-addressed.  Yes, it breaks stalemates, but due to chain-flagship tactics it does not force battles to keep pace.  You can potentially fight for an hour, plinking away at enemy ships in a chain of 25 Medusas.

On top of that, it does have the downside of making early game battles more difficult and less fun, due to the fact that the ships you start with (frigates and sometimes destroyers) have the worst CR timers.  Later in the game, when you're piloting a cruiser, the CR time limit is not as restrictive and only becomes a fun-limiter in edge cases (an acceptable trade-off).  Of course, even then, you're incentivized to chain-flagship because the overall supply costs will be much lower that way.


Bottom line is that if you removed CR timers, you would have to address the following somehow:
  • Endless kiting tactics (for those of you who haven't played prior to CR being a mechanic, kiting was vastly superior to every other tactic.  It's like a duel with pistols, except that you snipe your opponent from afar while he's waiting for you to show up.)
  • Unkillable phase ships
  • Infinite stalemates -- the AI certainly won't give up on its own, so the player automatically loses ties if there's no mechanic to fix it!
  • Costs for lengthy, hard-fought battles


On the topic of the ship limit, I'm not a fan of the hard 25 ship limit.  Every other limit in the game is bendable; you can win a fight at 0% CR, carry more than your maximum cargo and fuel, etc.  But for ships?  At some point you're forced to juggle your fleet composition in storage locations like it's Diablo, and your late-game growth and fleetbuilding fun comes to a grinding halt.
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Megas

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #42 on: July 05, 2016, 12:42:52 PM »

Bottom line is that if you removed CR timers, you would have to address the following somehow:
  • Endless kiting tactics (for those of you who haven't played prior to CR being a mechanic, kiting was vastly superior to every other tactic.  It's like a duel with pistols, except that you snipe your opponent from afar while he's waiting for you to show up.)
  • Unkillable phase ships
  • Infinite stalemates -- the AI certainly won't give up on its own, so the player automatically loses ties if there's no mechanic to fix it!
  • Costs for lengthy, hard-fought battles
Slight nitpick.  In 0.54, autoresolving everything once your fleet grew big and skilled enough was far more efficient than everything else.  Instead of playing a battle for minutes, you simply got results instantly.  Of course, that defeats the point of the game - combat!  Although it was great for powerleveling and getting even more skills if the player could not bear to cheat!  Aside from that, I agree with your post.

If player wanted to fight, then yeah, lone Hyperion playership with skills and no CR limits could solo everything.  Back in early 0.6 to 0.62 days when only frigates had peak performance, Medusa could solo everything, which was useful because with so much loot dropped at the time, multiple Atlas needed to loot one endgame battle ate my remaining Logistics.
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Plantissue

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #43 on: July 08, 2016, 03:10:30 PM »

Perhaps the best solution would be to reword combat so you cannot repeatedly fight over and over again.
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Megas

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Re: In-battle CR Timer - Why It's Bad
« Reply #44 on: July 12, 2016, 07:54:54 AM »

Combat is the reason why to play this game.  What is the point of a well-built combat engine if you get punished for fighting as much as you want?

Deployment costs hurt quite a bit.  Shenanigans like using max Combat/elite crew, chaining flagships, and herding all enemy fleets together so you fight one death fleet instead of six or more little fleets, and pay the cost for deployment twice (once for fighting, once again for pursuit) instead of two times number for fleets, mitigate the costs.
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