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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: Easier Clean Disengage  (Read 831 times)

float

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Re: Easier Clean Disengage
« Reply #15 on: June 02, 2023, 05:48:45 PM »

One thing about player-generated ship graveyards is that they're actually an indirect buff to missile weapons. Currently, if you start a sequence of engagements and lose ships, you have to finish that sequence in order to recover said ships -- cleanly disengaging causes them to be lost forever. And missiles don't regenerate between re-engagements.

With the proposed change, you could cleanly disengage and then re-engage to regenerate all missile weapons with no downside, since you would be able to salvage your lost ships in the debris field / ship graveyard afterwards.
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Histidine

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Re: Easier Clean Disengage
« Reply #16 on: June 02, 2023, 05:53:18 PM »

Aside from not being able to recover any ships you lose after disengaging (which encourages a sunk cost approach to the battle) (making the dead ships remain as salvage is great)...

I think the requirement to kill 40% or 100 DP (whichever is lower) means that clean disengage only really works in two scenarios:
  • When you're badly outnumbered but have qualitative equality or superiority (so you can beat some of their ships, but would eventually get overwhelmed), and are close enough to the battle size limit that the enemy can't just swarm you under immediately.
  • If you can't manage that much, sometimes it's possible to pilot a single supership and pick off enough enemies to meet the quota. Or at least get close enough that you can complete it by luring any remaining enemies to the bottom of the map, ganking them with a large allied deployment, then retreating before the enemy AI can send reinforcements after you.
In short, to clean disengage you have to be able to put up at least some of a fight, while not being strong enough that you'd just fight and win. That's a pretty specific level of disadvantage.

Maybe there should be some benefit to partially meeting the quota, like a bigger head start if attempting the escape round? Or it could carry over between engagement rounds? Maybe escape scenario could be easier in some way in general (unsure how)?


I dunno about mechanics where the enemy fleet stops being aggressive if the player retreats after reaching the clean disengage threshold. It generates the desired gameplay in each case which is important, but there's still a dissonance where if you retreat the enemy stops trying to fight in order to preserve their remaining forces or whatever, but if you don't retreat they all happily charge to their deaths until their fleet is almost completely annihilated.

But afterwards, when I want to actually retreat the ships to the boarder, it's a massacre. By now I order all my ships to stay as close to the lower border as possible, but still, the big slow ships take heavy losses the moment they turn around to flee. It's all but clean!
I generally put a Defend order on the slowest ship and retreat that. So everyone sticks together in a ball that's difficult for the enemy to take apart and scary for them to chase (or if it wasn't, my fleet would be dead already) and once the target ship retreats, everyone is near the border and should be able to make it off as well.
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Goumindong

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Re: Easier Clean Disengage
« Reply #17 on: June 03, 2023, 12:52:56 PM »

I dunno about mechanics where the enemy fleet stops being aggressive if the player retreats after reaching the clean disengage threshold. It generates the desired gameplay in each case which is important, but there's still a dissonance where if you retreat the enemy stops trying to fight in order to preserve their remaining forces or whatever, but if you don't retreat they all happily charge to their deaths until their fleet is almost completely annihilated.

Eh. “Cornered rat” and “unwilling willing combatant” are reasonable strategic states for a fleet.

It would also give some potential space for more nuanced reputation changes.

Like say. If another fleet engages you and you fight until the clean disengage this maybe would produce less of a reputation loss than if you do not. As it stands there isn’t a lot of space between “I was attacked and definitely want to kill this person but have goaded them” and “I was attacked because I refused to turn my transponder on or submit to a scan but don’t actually want to kill this fleet”. This is particularly important if you’ve been ID’d for some reason*

So you can think of some options that go along with this

1) clean disengage allows both sides to retreat free and reduces reputation loss if the disengaging fleet was not the initiator.

2) clean disengage only allows looting by the side that has more power than the other. IE you don’t get to clean disengage and then loot the wreckage. If you clean disengage and they are still technically stronger then they get to loot the wreckage and you are unable to recover your losses

Edit: that is. AI Fleets should be more willing to disengage if they feel like they have won enough of a battle that the resource expenditure for continuing doesn’t make sense. (At the least in the theoretical sense of a simulation not in terms of actual resources since AI fleets don’t have actual resources). The AI fleet destroys a few ships, collects its salvage, and goes on. This would also allow different behavior for different factions and even towards different factions. Pirates are more likely to let you leave when they’re low on CR because they need fleets to attack in order to continue to pirate. Killing you doesn’t make sense. But the LP are gonna make sure your heretical ships are scrap.

Edit2: another advantage of this kind of behavior is that it significantly reduces the penalty for losing a fight. Which means that players can be more risky when choosing fights and are less likely to reload if a fight goes bad. As it stands unless you have a colony that can make your desired ships. Losing a single ship in a combat isn’t so bad. But losing a battle is almost as bad as restarting in many senses since you lose basically your entire fleet.


*also it would be nice if you could turn your ID on and submit to a scan without rep loss provided you did so before you were contacted by the enemy fleet.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2023, 01:01:35 PM by Goumindong »
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