handed it over to my reckless officer and, well...
There is no officer on the ship.
not on that one, I did that in my actual playthru with mods then removed the mods & re-created the scenario in the Random Battle mission sim to confirm that this wasnt a mod issue. Reckless officer does the same thing. P sure I mentioned all of this, sorry if that wasnt clear enough
"A 1v1 with an enemy that can't really hurt it" - that's practically impossible for it to determine, right?
... Can it not? I've never confirmed this before; a lasher pursuing a fleeing buffalo, can it not tell that it's not chasing, say, another lasher or something? I didn't know that.
RE: the rest of it; that makes a lot of sense. It genuinely helps to just show footage of what its doing so it can confirmed that the problem is not the game but my expectations
I think, I just remember that the AI used to knife-fight (to the extent that this community came up with a name for it) if that was all you gave it to the point that my go-to comp whenever a frigate has a pair of light ballistic mounts is dual MG's on one mount & vulcan on its mirror mount, & I'm not 100% sure abt this & I'm planning to check whether this is false memories but I think the AI used to armor-tank when it was called for (I spent a long time testing what a lasher will do when outmatched in 2017). I get why they wouldn't anymore tho, back then the game was an arcade shooter where every battle was It for the losing side & it's just not that game anymore. Just a hard transition for me to make, having had the old playstyle ingrained in me as hard as it was. A playstyle that used to be viable to the point that it was the only way u knew how to play, becoming not-viable but the tools it used still being there feels a lot like that game has been broken.
Plus, a big part of it is probably that I just seem to expect the combat to go faster than it does. It's hard to tell how much of it is down to the pace of the game changing now that fleets have a
need to be more conservative, and how much this comes down to me having recently gotten really into SC2 coop mode playing zagara the low supply limit & only suicide wave units where the viable playstyle is to maintain a 200+ APA spawning 150 zerglings at a time where the only limiting factor is how quickly you can crash your wall of flesh & claws into the enemy & kill your army off to make room for the next wave. Might download 0.7 to compare for scientific purposes
thanks for putting up with my whining, Alex!
one last thought before I put this thread behind me; I do find it interesting that now that the game has plenty of options to mitigate the loss of low-value ships, from base ship recovery to industrial skills to recovery-guaranteeing hullmods, that the game now suffers from a severe lack of a way to have your ships behave as if their loss is expected and/or acceptable. As-is I would never run a hulk fleet campaign just bc my ships are already piloting themselves so cautiously. I think, if there was a hullmod that guaranteed the ship was recoverable but instead of making it more survivable made it
less survivable by making it much more willing to face-tank to turn its remaining armor into free shield to apply pressure, I'd use it to do hulk playthrus
OH it just clicked in my head!! I'm playing a kite slinging extreme anti-armor loadout, waiting for my fleet to Do Work so I can swoop in & assist, while my fleet is waiting for the player to Do Work so I can swoop in & assist. The game expects me to be piloting the strongest ship in my fleet with a generalized enough loadout that I can always lead the flow of battle, & I'm piloting the tiniest ship in my fleet with such a specialized loadout that I am so incapable of leading the flow of battle in a way that it forces me to sit outside of the battle, and the AI just isn't aggressive enough to carry battles without me like that (shy of just fighting enemies too weak to fight back). Makes sense; the game just isn't built to use a kite as my flagship (anymore), its like getting mad at Starcraft for not being playable only turtling in ur first base & never expanding just bc thats how u play the campaign, except that SC having that issue is the fault of the campaign being designed badly whereas SS is just bc something that used to be viable but shouldn't have been & just isnt anymore
