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

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Author Topic: Misguided Difficulty  (Read 5667 times)

Linnis

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Misguided Difficulty
« on: April 03, 2021, 09:41:43 PM »

Difficulty should comes from strategy and tactics, not campaign numbers and stats. With the new iteration of ECM, Officers, and DP distribution, battles are more one sided than ever. In the past we could grind fleets down with patience and a little skill no matter how hard, but now so much is stacked against a smaller fleet that its not even a contest.

Right now the current difficulty is 90% in "Do you have enough officers and ships? Do you have enough ECM? Can you cap the points before the enemy so you get to deploy?" If any one of those checkmarks is a no, the player loses. With the rare case of deploy a few ships and drag the AI into a corner to fight them little by little. This way is basically abusing the AI and should be fixed by the time the game goes final.

While interesting bosses are always welcome and puts a spin to the normal fleet fight and puts up a challenge, it should be the exception not the rule.

First problem is ECM. It is simply too powerful of a statistic. If it is in game, it should be special ECM ships that players and AI would have to protect. Like a shield-less Atlas on the field, where the AI and player will actively try to destroy. This way we turn a campaign suedo difficulty into something that could be interacted with, not just "I brought 10 officers and have skill checked."

Second problem is deployment. This whole, throw everything into a box and brawl it out is not going to be interesting with the wild different sized fleets running around. It fit well when the game was a battle simulator where both sides got equal points, but not anymore.


The fix?

The gold standard to strategy and tactic games is Final Fantasy Tactics. Not counting Econ RTS games like StarCraft etc... Tactics was a refinement of the strategy genera where the player is almost in every battle, fighting statistically superiors enemies. The game gives the player plenty of opportunity to use their wits and planned strategies to overcome powerful enemies. Everyone agreed the game was hard, but no one complained it was unfair, because AI had power, player had brains, and the devs allowed the player to use their brains.


BATTLE CHANNELS!!


Example:
 In Tactics almost every battle had different areas players were forced to use if they wanted to deploy all their units, usually with minimum two areas, sometimes three or even with special events where the main character is alone surrounded.  This gave many ways for the player to use tactics or strategy to overcome more and more greater adversity. If you have played the game and know what I am talking about, skip to the next one.

If not, imagine the enemy has twice the units/combatants, who has twice the HP of you. They have knights on the streets and archers on the rooftops, and a powerful mage behind their formation of knights. For the player to overcome such odds, they could deploy their mobile units like thieves and ninjas on the streets and jump everyone on the rooftops, fighting only half of the enemy forces at one time. Or, the player could have their defensive troops turtle on the ground, while having warriors on the roof tops killing the archers quickly and flanking the enemy knights and mage. As the game progressed and players got more options, the possibilities were expanded, while the difference between the player and the enemy widened even more.
In the end, it made the game more interesting. Allowed the player to fight statistically tougher opponents. The game was hard, but not unfair.

Integration:
This is merely a suggestion, but I hope it will give an idea of what could be possible.

So we make the battlefield larger, what shape exactly? Lets think using every shape we could think of while working this out. Also keep in mind sequential battles could also be a way.

Then, most importantly, we force both the AI and the Player to deploy all their ships. Hold your screams of "But the AI don't need Supplies and fuel!!!!"

Perhaps depending on engagement choices and AI fleet personality deployment areas are split into 2 or more areas where ships would have to travel a long distance to reach the other area.
Then, have the condition that when the AI fleet is not in an owned system, in addition to if all of their support ships are destroyed, they will surrender or flee (rational humans only ofc) no matter their advantage.
ECM like I said, could also be such a valuable target. Of course fleets could always not use ECM ships, but if such a powerful stat is in play, there should be counterplay.
With these changes we create multiple ways for players to encounter the battle. The player could sacrifice part of their fleet to concentrate on taking down the enemy support or warships. Does the player want to go in the capital and win the frontline battle, or does the player wish to play an assassin and lead frigates to destroy the enemy ECM or Supplies? What if the player encounter different factions or fleets that employ different tactics in splitting their ships differently?

This create the possibility of smaller fleets actually being able to do something to larger fleets. A small and aggressive ludic path groups? What will they do?

Right now we have mount and blade combat mechanics. With their cavalry, archers, and infantry units, they have a wider variety of types of units and how they function. So formation and tactics are important. But in Starsector right now, there is not early the same amount of depth to strategic or tactical side of combat. I think this is a great time to move away from this simple place-holder of a deployment system from battle simulator days and move on to something more complicated and interesting.
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Warnoise

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2021, 09:46:34 PM »

The counterplay of ECM is so high tech ships
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robepriority

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #2 on: April 03, 2021, 09:51:58 PM »

What we do know is that officer spam is getting nerfed.

I wouldn't mind ECM focus on thematically fitting fleets, but having the Ludds somehow get an ECM advantage over you is uhhh... weird.

sector_terror

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #3 on: April 04, 2021, 12:04:13 AM »

Okay I need to start from line 1. Sorry Linus but you've made a grave mistake right off the bat. You left out the melee. Tactics, the means in which you maneuver forces against your opposing formations and maneuvers is one thing. How well you handle your ship in a shield wall, is your skills in melee. How you manage your logistics and manpower is your strategy. ECMs are also a tactical play, they define the choice of "weapons" you equip your fleet when stacking up against the enemy. The disbalance around the gunner Implants skill is another thing entirely. And the issue you have with the capture points isn't strategy, it's tactics. In fact Alex put it in explicitly to fill this very concern, that they lacked importance in combat but couldnt be made stronger without outright breaking them.

A boss fight is a tactical encounter as well. If you want tactical difficulty, and make strategic depth limited....then you have to depend on things like boss fights, where the rules of the fight are -not- equal. starsector has always been build on the melee and the strategic however. The fleet screen's command point limits removed it from becoming a flat out RTS, focusing on your piloting and the resources you have to play more than how they are commanded directly. It's why fights are more "even" akin to an Xcom fight, over a more asynchronous fight of difference rules like RPG bosses or AI Fleet Command.

The campaign numbers and states -are- your strategy. to weaker or remove the strategy is to remove a large part of the context that make battles mean something. I am still writing my post on mission balancing so I'll save that for then, but to weaken is would make the battle weak. I am afraid to fight larger fleets and take appropriate precautions because the fleet losses I might take are severe enough to make me scream "no! Bastard!" in anger when my fellow man is lost and take 200k credits with him. I know my priorities.

Okay, I'm not getting into an argument on which is better, but boy....you have an uphill battle trying to defend a game whose tactical depth has been proven to have the same effect as chess(where amateurs and pros are not playing the same game due to seeing entirely different scales of moving resources) with an RPG series that has quite a few issues in horrid balancing and outright cheating AI. But the praise also undoes your demand. The AI cheats. It's also in a field, like starsector, where your opponent and you have the same rules....presumably. Starsector the enemy just has strategic difficulty for context to the fight, FFT, the AI cheats horridly to force you to be at such a disadvantage you have to play "find the exploit" to win. I'm being hyperbolic but....my point remains

I'm actually writing a post where I make very clear the issue should -not- be tactical weakness, but strategic difficulty. It should be hard to maintain your forces while keeping fair sane jobs you can complete without severe losses. It plays to the strengths of starsector, where loss is expensive and your logistic resources are proper to managing a fleet on part with an fully funded navy. The -last- thing I want to see if starsector go down the path of Etrian Odessey where the final boss basically requires you have X classes with Y abilities because anything else gets you killed and the choice of class is a total lie.

Now as for your "battle channels" fix. We call this terrain and geography. We are in space on a 2-d rendered plane. Please explain to me what kind of geography we could possibly have. The resources to make multi-layered terrain would be astronomical and would have to have been done during the period the strategic map didn't exist, since it would require entirely re-tooling every single ship and weapon without exception, and would -severely- limit the combat arenas. FFT, and RPGs like Fire Emblem for that matter, can have scripted terrain because the players can be forced to fight in that terrain by not having direct control of an avatar character. This would not exist for starsector and it run into the issue Mount and Blade has. How do you make a string of extensive complicated multi-level terrain when fights can happen in open plains in the middle of nowhere, like in deep space. You can't without breaking all immersion and just forcing every single fight to randomly be moved to some abandon star station littered all over the sector for no reason. And -none- of this plays to what Starsector has in it.

And when it comes down to it, none of this is about difficulty. I wrote this whole thing and only -now- realized it's about your dislike of the tactical field. You didn't even bring up strategy of any kind, or anything wrong with it. If you want battlefield terrain I can tell you why it's a bad idea in this game. But you seem to be misguided in the concept of what strategy versus tactics is, let alone the effect of and management of building terrain into the tactical map.
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Linnis

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #4 on: April 04, 2021, 03:40:45 PM »

Let's do this in bits because for everyone's sakes let's not blow each posts up into page long affairs. Okok?

So to Adress the first half of your response:

Having ships in shield walls and leading flanking groups is the only real tactical decisions players make atm.

ECM is not tactical play. Because there is no interaction. Because you cannot change your or your ECM aside from capture points that is both not likely to change the favor from one side to another. On top of that, Destroying ships to get ECM? That's already the whole point so let's not pretend that's a tactical decision either. Also with the flat rectangle deployment most of the fight is literally on the points, by the time you get to capture the ones on the enemy side, you have already won.

The capture objectives were put in to try to pu ish players and AI from kiting forever. It was never meant for tactics or strategy. RTS have the same idea, stuff like dawn of war had similar capture systems but now not many games use that system for a reason.

I don't want to talk about boss fights because it's 1% of the gameplay. But on your point of strategy in starsector. The campaign econ and other interactions have great strategy, the player fleet composition has great strategy. In the past I never complained about strategy. But with the recent update, strategy has now with its primary focus on ECM, officers, or grinding down fleets through sheer size because infinite money machine. The strategy sucks now, wich is my whole point of the post.

Starsector's foundation was how the ships interacted in a fight. But with the ever growing strength of ECM, officers, and now, built in hullmods. That core interacton that has kept me playing for a decade suddenly almost donst matter in the sheer power difference.

I'm not saying that I hate change and want everything to go back. I am saying if we want such powerful stat effects to remain in the game, there should be something to bring the skill back. Not turn this game into a level up type of game where the only solution to a difficult opponent is more stuff and stats.


« Last Edit: April 04, 2021, 03:42:27 PM by Linnis »
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Jet Black

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #5 on: April 04, 2021, 03:55:22 PM »

There are ship mods to improve ecm and skills. I even have some mods that add ships that boost ecm (diable avionics i think). Once the ai gets a limit on officers, this will be fine. If you spec into it and invest in it, its very strong. However, if you use a few big slow ships and cant cap points fast, don't spec into it, you kind of deserve it?

Furthermore, I don't want the enemy to get a big nerf to officer count (maybe just a small nerf). The AI has to be able to cheat a bit to make it challenging.

I really like the idea of capping points. Having certain points be more valuable to you based on your fleets composition. It gives me a reason to have a few fast ships, helps me shore up weaknesses in my lineup, etc. If anything I think the point system needs to be more fleshed out. An anomaly that boosts shields in the area? Black holes that deviate weapon fire trajectory? This makes the battlefield less empty space and makes players think critically. Instead of rolling straight in with ten paragons on auto battle. We need more punishment for playing large slow fleets. Kind of turned into a ramble.
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Linnis

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #6 on: April 04, 2021, 04:10:43 PM »

I guess you haven't hit near endgame fleets that have 70 - 90% ECM yet? Tell me with the 100 DP maximum I get to have how I am suppose to reach 90ECM just to break even.

I always get almost every point aside from the last one before the real battle begins, that is not a choice really in end game fights. Because the player won't be able to deploy anything if they don't.

Again having terrain in battle is something that is arguably harder to pull off then strategic deployment. Though different programmes have different preferences I guess.

I don't normally play large slow fleets. But I want to ask, why should big slow fleets be punished. why should we cater to fast capture fleets? Shouldn't we Create a situation where both is viable depending on how they use them?

« Last Edit: April 04, 2021, 04:18:50 PM by Linnis »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #7 on: April 04, 2021, 04:29:56 PM »

The 90% ecm in those fleets is almost all coming from frigates with gunnery implants officers (6% ecm per officered frigate). Once that issue is resolved (Alex has already said he's making the ecm part elite so the AI will be much less likely to have it.), the situation should be much more manageable.

Also, it's worth trying to kill enemy frigates ASAP, that will halve (or more) the enemy ECM right away. Once frigates are dead, your big ships will be fine.

I think it's fair that capital ships without support are not an effective strategy.
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NoMercyForLudds_

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #8 on: April 04, 2021, 04:45:39 PM »

Furthermore, I don't want the enemy to get a big nerf to officer count (maybe just a small nerf). The AI has to be able to cheat a bit to make it challenging.


I'd have to agree with you here. But it'd prefer AI fleets to be larger, at the expense of them always outranging me. Challenge, not frustration.

I really like the idea of capping points. Having certain points be more valuable to you based on your fleets composition. It gives me a reason to have a few fast ships, helps me shore up weaknesses in my lineup, etc. If anything I think the point system needs to be more fleshed out. An anomaly that boosts shields in the area? Black holes that deviate weapon fire trajectory? This makes the battlefield less empty space and makes players think critically. Instead of rolling straight in with ten paragons on auto battle. We need more punishment for playing large slow fleets. Kind of turned into a ramble.

I don't think capping points work properly - at least not in my games. The challenge of a battle is to concentrate enough forces locally to overcome the enemy piece by piece. When I tried to get to capping points, I'd always loose to AI (they don't have a limit on "go there, do that" orders they can give), get my forces dispersed, get my frigates sniped, and would only capture the points if a big chunk of my forces "rolls through" them while doing smth else battle-relevant.

About ten Paragons: You do have a good point, but I think the solution should be 11 AI Paragons. At the end of the day, this game is about fireworks, so let's see more of Paragon-exploding screen white-outs (somebody complained it wakes up their neighbours at night lol)

I also think your idea of a non-linear battlefield is terrific - Why don't you formulate it as a suggestion thread? Smth akin the hill/fortification advantage in ancient warfare, or an ambush from a for-of-war area, maybe a minefield or deployable turrets when fortified. This would be wonderful. Much better than capping points.
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Thaago

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #9 on: April 04, 2021, 04:57:28 PM »

... When I tried to get to capping points, I'd always loose to AI (they don't have a limit on "go there, do that" orders they can give), ...

They do actually - same as the player IIRC.
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sector_terror

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #10 on: April 04, 2021, 04:58:16 PM »

Furthermore, I don't want the enemy to get a big nerf to officer count (maybe just a small nerf). The AI has to be able to cheat a bit to make it challenging.


I'd have to agree with you here. But it'd prefer AI fleets to be larger, at the expense of them always outranging me. Challenge, not frustration.


I disagree heavily, in fact, that would just be frustration. The AI doesn't have to cheat to be challenging, they already are. The AI is excellent, it just lacks the ability to ever use the command layer. And that is fine, its your tactical advantage, which is heavily limited by the command point system, to cover the absolutely massive tactical penalty you, the player, has due to strategic deployment. A bounty fleet can go all in and fight to the absolute end. They can run their frigates to zero CR and thus for far longer than you. They can fight with extreme damage and down to the last man. I once lost a fight because I expected the tempest I let go to run with its 20% hull and 30% CR. I was surprised when it appeared at my back and destroyed my flagship cruiser. but the enemy doesnt have to worry about the aftermath of an encounter. They can be reckless, fight to the last, stay in beyond the point of reason, and stay for longer deployment time because of that strategic edge. The command screen evens that out by giving the disadvantaged player more control to manage their power while it's on the board.

So no, the AI doesn't need to cheat. In fact the mass officers is one of the issues causing even more disbalancing because it's destroying your fleet deployment due to the officer spam and overshooting the ECM bonus' to absurd levels. If you want cheap crap difficulty fine, but I will petition for smarter tactics and more use of the asynchronous gameplay.
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Histidine

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #11 on: April 04, 2021, 06:35:38 PM »

The ECM problem is at least partly that (as others have pointed out elsewhere) it's too easy to get huge stacking bonuses that render sensor jammers and the enemy's attempts at ECM irrelevant.

I'd like to mess with reducing the EW skill's bonus to 1.5% per ship, and making the moved-to-elite-tier Gunnery Implants ECM effect be 4%/2%.
And/or cap the base range penalty at 10% or 15%, with sensor jammers increasing the penalty up to 20%. (I kinda feel that tying it to the ingame objectives is good because it makes the outcome of the battle more about things that actually happen in the battle rather than out of it)
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Linnis

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #12 on: April 04, 2021, 08:29:24 PM »

... outcome of the battle more about things that actually happen in the battle rather than out of it.

This is basically my whole point.
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Space Cowboy

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #13 on: April 04, 2021, 09:48:03 PM »

bump, agree with op
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sector_terror

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Re: Misguided Difficulty
« Reply #14 on: April 04, 2021, 10:25:50 PM »

The ECM problem is at least partly that (as others have pointed out elsewhere) it's too easy to get huge stacking bonuses that render sensor jammers and the enemy's attempts at ECM irrelevant.

I'd like to mess with reducing the EW skill's bonus to 1.5% per ship, and making the moved-to-elite-tier Gunnery Implants ECM effect be 4%/2%.
And/or cap the base range penalty at 10% or 15%, with sensor jammers increasing the penalty up to 20%. (I kinda feel that tying it to the ingame objectives is good because it makes the outcome of the battle more about things that actually happen in the battle rather than out of it)

The issues with ECMs are on the Gunnery Implant skill and Electronic Warfare skill, not the concept of all strategic play. Like I said in my post, there is little hope of full blown multi-layed useful terrain in a game where combat can happen anywhere and everywhere without restriction in -space-. Not to mention what it do to long-range and Safety Override style close-range builds in regards to balance. If you want tactical play, so play an RTS or TBS. starsector doesn't have the ability to operate this style of tactical play.
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