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[Astyanax]

I read people want to see what ships the enemy AI will deploy in combat.  Why not tie this to the differential between your sensor strength and the enemy's sensor profile?


High friendly sensor strength, high enemy sensor profile: All enemy ships to be deployed are visible during the initial deployment screen

Low friendly sensors, low enemy profile: No enemy ships are known

High friendly sensors, low enemy profile / Low sensors, high profile / Middle sensors, middle profile: Some enemy ships known, and some partial info for others available.


Partial info might include grayed-out blobs, each one representing a ship, but of unknown identity. The size of the blob could also represent ship class, with battlecruisers having large blobs and frigates having small blobs.

[Megas]

Since AI always sees what you deploy, so should the player, just like in the Starfarer days, without any gates.

During Starfarer, anytime the AI deployed reinforcements, a line of text with the enemy ship icons was displayed.  That was good (and it needs to come back), and you know reinforcements are lurking around, not have an enemy battleship blindside you and destroy your flagship because reinforcements were stealthily deployed and hidden by fog-of-war until an ambush.  Meanwhile, anytime you deploy something, AI deploys more enemy ships (if they have them), meaning AI knows exactly what you deploy and when it was deployed.  Player needs that same advanced warning benefit; otherwise, the AI is cheating!

Expanding sight radius with sensors (like Apogee used to with its old ion drone system) could be good... maybe.  Bigger sight radius also means bigger radius that PPT ticks down, and sometimes, I want to conserve PPT by not seeing enemies.  On the other hand, now that large screens are common, it is annoying being unable to target enemies visible on the screen because they are beyond fog-of-war radius.

[SafariJohn]

Something I think might be interesting is if transponder-on ships/fleets are always visible in combat. If both sides are t-on then there'd be no fog.

[Sharp]

Since AI always sees what you deploy, so should the player, just like in the Starfarer days, without any gates.

Why does it matter that the AI sees what the player deploys? I don't think it makes it do any different a strategy

[Megas]

Why does it matter that the AI sees what the player deploys? I don't think it makes it do any different a strategy

You deploy more, they deploy more, sort of like an arms race.  Player starts the fight with few ships, they may deploy fewer ships, but the moment you deploy more (because you are losing patience with the cowardly enemy AI), they deploy more ships and you are back to square one, only with more ships.

AI deploys more, you have no idea it did so, until you find reinforcements... or reinforcements find you by burning in from a bad angle and kill your flagship in a sneak attack, or suddenly turning a duel that you are barely winning the flux war into a two or more against you that you cannot win.  If player was given the same advanced warning the AI benefits from (and the player used to get this information in pre-0.6a releases, when game was called Starfarer), player knows reinforcements are coming (and the type of enemy ships too) and can prepare accordingly instead of possibly getting blindsided at a bad time.

Basically, if AI is given information based on your actions that it can act on, while the player is denied that information when the AI does likewise (especially when player was given that information in early releases, but not anymore), this is classic "AI is a cheater" trope.