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[Gothars]

While playing iron mode I notice more than ever how all or nothing battles are most of the time. If you lose, you usually lose most of your fleets, not just some ship. One reason is that by the time a battle goes haywire, your ships are not in the position for an organized retreat and most get annihilated. That's kind of a shame, I think, as it encourages you to play safe and boring (or safescum).

My idea is simply to move upward the line after which ships can engage their burndrive to escape each time one of your ships get destroyed. That way, if you start loosing ships, your other ships have only a short way to escape. And if you lose a lot of ships, the line will move up so much that the survivors can just turn and engage their burndrive on the spot.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

Maybe, although perhaps having BOTH sides contract over the length of a battle might be better, since sometimes you only seem to get out of place by being baited.  Baiting/kiting is a legitimate strategy, just seems kinda harder for a player to bait AI vs AI baiting a person.  Put another way, penalizing the early battle winner by making it easier to for the loser to retreat ships while still allowing for reinforcing might have unintended ramifications.

Or, in the case of SS, perhaps it maybe has to do with basically the following:

Ships in NPC fleets do have CR and it can be lowered through your actions, the terrain or in battle, it's just that NPCs don't buy their ships, don't pay for their maintenance (you could say they have infinite supplies) and don't care if they survive or not (unlike the player, who could be hurt financially or emotionally over a loss of certain ships). You can't wage logistic warfare against NPCs.

So perhaps instead game AI needs a more nuanced general retreat mechanic, wherein it makes more of an attempt to conserve at least hull %, FOR BOTH player and AI. Or maybe just always make the direct and tactical retreat order free, since on more than a few occasions I've had stuff die while waiting for a command point to retreat something, but the darn thing won't override an order to retreat on its own just to save itself.  Not like we can also try the crew for mutiny...

Adding some code for CR conservation might also help, but seems just as likely to backfire; why bother saving CR for tomorrow when you might "die" today?

Further discussion in spoiler, but since only semi-related, seems better to stick into something that drops down...

Spoiler

A bigger issue is perhaps that game/battle AI has kinda the same issue that arose when initially testing neural nets with poker and betting.  Since a lot of algorithmically procedural game-playing opponents lack a mistake heuristic (ie, they don't accidentally make exploitable mistakes like stoopid hooomans, but DO engage in exploitable bug behavior left there by the programmer/s).  Neural nets don't get their bugs from the programmer, but still can pick up "bad habits" based on the data sets (a neural net isn't inherently racist, but since most data sets are composed of scraped photos from databases primarily used by white people AND average white person more likely to own a digital camera... data set basically become racist by accident).  In the case of poker, since AI never had to worry about paying the mortgage next Tuesday, it would never bother "learning" to play at 110%, it skipped right to 157% (if you follow the metaphor); so bluffing against it became a kind of pointless exercise for the above average player, let alone the average player (plus no body language, etc.).

[close]

EDIT:  Thinking about this further, my above suggestion about having both sides contract for retreat purposes might be too difficult to elegantly implement (both literally and for AI decisions to exercise).  Prolly easier to just allow direct retreating from any other side of map after some time period that varies depending on the total DP/fleet size of entire battle (like maybe only 10 minutes for a small battle, but 20ish for a large battle), BUT the tradeoff is that while direct retreat will always choose the most direct route to any map side, if ship ends up retreating from any side of the map that isn't that fleet's starting side, ship takes some CR and hull damage (even more if the hostile fleet side is the closest retreat side).  But this would only be the case when using the direct retreat command, while tactical retreat command would still just retreat normally to the fleet entry side (ie, retreating from that fleet's entry side is free, no CR penalty or hull damage; thus sometimes directly retreating is still free, so long as direct retreat command given to a ship that is near proper retreat side).  This would be only in the case of normal battles, pursuit battles would stay normal (ie, pursuit battles still have to make it to the far side of the map in order for any given ship to "escape," while avoiding enemy ships that pop out of sides).  I also can't remember if the game already did this and then it got dropped; if so, please disregard.

[Oni]

Like the slowpersun above added, I wonder how difficult it'd be to allow ships to retreat from any side of the screen when a Full Retreat is declared instead of only "your" side.

Basically while it makes sense for a ship to flee in the direction away from the main enemy force, space is large and 3D. When your situation is "anywhere is better than here" you stop being picky about where you're running. Just add damage to ships that fled directions other than the normal one (like 30% if running on the enemies side, 15% if running on the sides, 0% additional damage for your on zone, etc).

Add a speed/shield boost and deactivate weapons (to represent captains redirecting all power away from weapons and trying to stay alive), then you might get more survivors when declaring a Full Retreat after the battle's gone bad.

[Megas]

Idea that sort of harkens back to pre-0.6 releases:  Auto-resolve in mid-battle if you want instant retreat and end the current round.  No further damage or casualties to the enemy.  You roll the dice to see if your remaining ships on the field are destroyed or take further damage.

[SomethingOrOther]

I like this idea and I'm noticing this like a plague having revisited the game again after a while: my fleet either completely facerolls the enemy, or the enemy completely facerolls me - there's no middle ground. Very often lately, as I'm losing my last few ships, I've found myself thinking "I just wanted to try a battle that was fun." It's pretty depressing honestly. I'm finding it almost impossible to play a frigate-heavy fleet outside the early game because - even though (in theory) you should be able to deploy more ships on-field than the capital-heavy enemy fleet, what happens is you whittle them down a bit, but not enough for clean disengage, and AI isn't aware-enough to avoid getting their escape route cut off - so it's usually not possible to make a good trade during each "turn".