alright, i made an account for this one. so I've found two major errors, the first is the hilarious one that cases everything to retreat unconditionally once it goes below 50 percent combat readiness, making a lot of fights either way easier or way harder than they should be since you cant force your cowards to stay and finish an enemy who's almost defeated, but it makes enemies flee fights they could easily win and helplessly be defeated by tiny forces, or more commonly nothing. which leads to the second part, automated drones will still "retreat", but obviously they don't go anywhere, so its treated as though it was YOU who retreated, and the game kinda cant deal with it so the text doesn't make sense. re engaging them makes them spawn and immediately retreat since they cant actually flee, so the only real way to defeat them is to continually re engage them then declare victory so their CR goes down from deployment, until it gets low enough that they take major damage on deployment and you can start getting them to explode. i kinda got used to that one since the mod is so much more fun though.
That behavior is not a bug but a feature: waiting until lower combat readiness to retreat leaves the ship unable to survive the retreat. I should have documented it in the Field Manual and noted that the solution is to reserve some fast ships with long-range weapons to pursue and destroy a defeated fleet.
the other one was guns like the anti matter blaster not firing and guns like flak guns and the heavy autocannon firing like miniguns and overloading the craft immediately, which made the monitor a total trash heap since the two built in flak guns get it to max flux immediately. that one seems to have been fixed by the recent release but now its unplayable due to an incredibly common Null Pointer Exception during combat.
129927 [Thread-4] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at listeners.DamageModel.applyCriticallyMalfunctionToNearestModule(DamageModel.java:84)
at listeners.DamageModel.modifyDamageTaken(DamageModel.java:288)
at com.fs.starfarer.api.combat.listeners.CombatListenerUtil.modifyDamageTaken(CombatListenerUtil.java:67)
at com.fs.starfarer.api.combat.listeners.CombatListenerUtil.modifyDamageTaken(CombatListenerUtil.java:59)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.entities.Ship.applyDamage(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.o0OO.A.A.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.o0OO.A.super(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.o0OO.A.super(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advanceInner(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatState.traverse(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Expect a hotfix. Also, please tell me if your average combat frame-rate has dropped in recent versions because someone else has reported as much.
i couldnt tell you, every combat crashes so fast with that error that i cant really get any good feel for the framerate. the little i can see before someone fires a shot seem fairly stable, but thats not really that usefull i imagine.
the problem is that they retreat from everything, and i cant force them to not no matter how much i cancel the retreat. a destroyer retreating from a crippled freighter because its combat readiness dropped below 50 percent should be grounds for a court martial and immediate dismissal at least, not the standard operating procedure of a pirate fleet that should be making out like the bandits they are, but are instead fleeing from helpless merchants way before they're actually down to a worrying combat readiness level.
on the subject of hilariously cowardly warships, try and join in a fight of an allied fleet against an enemy, you'll immediately engage the matrix as what i think is the reason warships disobey all orders to cancel retreats comes up, with a massive spam of retreat messages taking up the entire side of the screen that keeps duplicating every moment that the allied ship is on screen. it seems like its spamming the retreat order the entire time, cancelling out any orders otherwise. it was mildly handy before since it slowed the game down so heavily that i could be very precise with my antimatter blaster and shoot around the enemy shield before it could be brought up. i'm not sure if it works in the recent version though since i cant get it to run long enough to test
