Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[onewhosaysgoose]

Many derilects are being guarded by collections of tiny, weak, but cowardly redacted frigates. While these guardians may hold tiny amounts of loot, it is the static station that contains the valuables.

Their AI makes them kite for minutes at a time while harassing destroyers and cruisers, which makes no sense within the world when harassing a cruiser thousands of units from the derelict should have no affect on my fleet's ability to pull a mule up to the derelict, stuff all the goods in, and motor away to sort it. As long as my warships can escort the freighter in and out, this should be possible in-game.

Place the derelict probe or survey ship on the battle map as a capture point, under redacted control and ~1/6 of the map away from their starting line. This point can be captured either "by any combat freighter or freighter" or "any warship with 2x the cargo capacity necessary to hold whatever it actually holds", were it must remain in the point with 0 flux and not firing. If that ship is then retreated without being destroyed, the player can claim victory and collect the derelict's loot exactly as if they had completely won the battle (excluding drops from surviving redacted vessels).

[onewhosaysgoose]

Or just make redacted's frigates fight with reckless AI once their largest allies have been destroyed. They exist to defend their objectives, so self sacrifice when no alternatives remain would be much more sensible.

[Thaago]

Redacted frigates, and their incredibly long PPT, are really annoying I agree. I take a cheap carrier loaded with interceptors (Talons, Wasps, or Sparks once I'd raided them) specifically to chase them down and pop them, but its a bit obnoxious that I need to when I have larger ships available.

[intrinsic_parity]

I always have a SO tempest to deal with mop up situations. TBH, I hope auto resolve is allowed for fights where you have more than a certain advantage, especially against the derelict fleets. I actually start ignoring probes defended by fleets at some point because the fleets keep growing as you kill them. They get big enough to be time consuming but never threatening. It's just annoying.

[Alex]

Just wanted to add that in the next release, when the fight gets to that point, remaining enemy ships will be super aggressive - beyond what "reckless" would do - and won't back off. (The Remnant ships already have "reckless" across the board, anyway...)

[Serenitis]

This has reminded me of something I keep seeing, and then forgetting about.

Has anyone else seen this?

Spoiler

A Picket drone with SO, and no weapons at all. So all it does is scoot away from you at every opportunity.

[close]

[Megas]

AI faction frigates tend to have more PPT than other ships of their size.  The optimal strategy for high PPT ships (with sufficient mobility) is to run and cower away until the other side runs out of PPT and CR first, then go for the kill after the enemy is crippled by zero CR.

Radiant aside (which is flat-out overpowered for its price), Remnants ships would be overpowered by outlasting the enemy with their superior PPT.

Of course, outlasting the enemy by waiting for their CR to tick down to zero first would be a very annoying fight.  Even more annoying when the AI tries to do that to you!

[Alex]

A Picket drone with SO, and no weapons at all. So all it does is scoot away from you at every opportunity.

That should be fixed, too!

[intrinsic_parity]

Just wanted to add that in the next release, when the fight gets to that point, remaining enemy ships will be super aggressive - beyond what "reckless" would do - and won't back off. (The Remnant ships already have "reckless" across the board, anyway...)

This is definitely a significant improvement (not complaining), but I think there's still another separate problem of the derelict fleets just being a tedious chore required to collect minor loot after some point in the game (but there's always a small chance of really good intel and AI cores, so you don't really want to skip them either). I think auto resolve in those scenarios would be a significant a QOL improvement. Those fights can easily be less threatening than retreat scenarios where you're already allowed to auto-resolve.

[Megas]

If the AI engages only to kite and run away (while not retreating) like Spathi, better to make them flee to enable pursuit-and-autoresolve instead.

If we can auto-resolve normal fights like in pre-0.6a Starfarer, I probably would pick that option to get fights over with (in seconds instead of minutes) and to power-level (for more story points).

[FooF]

Ah, we're talking about derelict drone ships, not

Spoiler

Remnants

[close]

I was confused for a bit.

I agree that there comes a point where no amount of drone ships is a challenge and tends to be tedious more than anything because the defensive fleets keep getting bigger. Autoresolve would be fine, I guess, but I'm not a huge fan of skipping combat. Perhaps these kind of "easy" fights could be some sort of challenge: kill so many in X seconds, survive X waves, only use X DP...etc. Rewards would be more/better loot, survey data or other points of interest, etc.

[Morrokain]

While I understand that these encounters are tedious for an experienced or well-equipped player, I'm not sure we should give options to essentially skip the encounter without some kind of very stiff penalty to discourage it until late-game or something.

These were originally added as a way to give new players something to chew on in order to get the hang of the combat system. Allowing a player to skip that or otherwise increasing their challenge in order to make them more interesting goes against that.

I agree that there comes a point where no amount of drone ships is a challenge and tends to be tedious more than anything because the defensive fleets keep getting bigger. Autoresolve would be fine, I guess, but I'm not a huge fan of skipping combat. Perhaps these kind of "easy" fights could be some sort of challenge: kill so many in X seconds, survive X waves, only use X DP...etc. Rewards would be more/better loot, survey data or other points of interest, etc.

Good idea but one consideration for this sort of thing is that afaik these fights are limited in number. It would likely be a significant source of frustration for those who want to play optimally to know that they didn't meet the challenge requirements and therefore didn't get loot that they otherwise would have and there is no way of trying again. If the encounter was repeatable until the highest reward tier was met that could be avoided, but even then that would have its own issues - mainly breaking immersion pretty hard and feeling more like theme park design rather than dynamic simulation.

I think that having the drones essentially suicide into whatever they are facing is the best overall solution. Make the battle faster rather allowing no battle at all. It sounds like Alex is already moving in that direction.

Another thing that might help would be to ensure higher challenge encounters for the same types of rewards are possible. That would make ignoring the encounters in question feel less bad to an experienced player. The completionists will still have to slog through each one though. That probably can't be helped.