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[Unfolder]

So I just had a build using that 30 ordnance PD energy ball of death. It's great against missiles and fighters obviously, but unfortunately it uses up all of its charges autofiring at destroyer and cruisers shields, leaving it useless against the fighter/bomb/missile swarm that follows. The weapon, which costs thousands of credits, is literally useless because of this. Likewise, I use heavy energy blaster (12 ordnance point) as my anti ship weapon. Really great weapon, especially mounted on a battle cruisers that can absorb the flux. Unfortunately, I can only sit there and watch as the three turrets blast away at talon fighters at 900 range. None of the shots even come close to hitting, even with fast tracking turrets, 7 points invested in target leading, and veteran crew, because the energy blasts just travel too slowly. By the time the enemies capitals are within range I am already at half flux (fired like 30 shots at the talons), and the talons have veered off laughing as I have to choose between lowering my shields and dying or keeping them up and dying.

This a real failure of AI and is pretty ridiculously broken. There needs to be an option on the weapons group setting to limit what ship size certain weapons targets. That way you can set megablasters to "only target frigates and above" and PD to "only target fighters/missiles/bombs."

 

[ciago92]

I agree better AI would be nice. Until then, disable the autofire on certain weapons until you want them shooting IE turn on PD when missiles/fighters are near, turn on Heavy Blaster when you're near big ships

[Alfalfa]

Didn't we get a 'PD_only' tag in 0.6? 

Found it:

Added PD_ONLY weapon hint
   - Must be used with PD hint
   - PD + PD_ONLY -> weapon will only target missiles
   - PD + PD_ONLY + ANTI_FTR -> weapon will only target missiles and fighters

Go to [INSTALLATION DRIVE]\Starsector\starsector-core\data\weapons and open weapon_data.csv (you'll need Microsoft Excel), on the far right there'll be the 'hints' column, simply add the appropriate hints to whichever weapons you want.

[Alex]

You know you can toggle autofire mid-battle, right? Just making sure.

Also, if you have an enemy ship targeted (using 'R') autofiring weapon will shoot at it if possible (with the exception of PD, which will still target missiles if possible). While a few options for targeting behavior might be nice, the game as-is gives you enough tools to manage your weapons so you're never in a position where you "can only sit there and watch". Oh, also - press 'X' to turn all autofiring groups off temporarily, and 'X' again to turn them back on. That can be particularly handy for saving charges on PD weapons, or managing flux if you quickly need to take some missile hits on shields and want to make sure you don't overload, for example.

The autofire AI isn't meant to do much thinking. Beyond avoiding obvious friendly fire, it expects that you, the player, are in charge of controlling when to fire.

(P.S. It can be convenient to bind toggling autofire for a few key groups to single-key mappings. Q and E are pretty good candidates, depending on if you actually use them.)

[Unfolder]

The autofire AI isn't meant to do much thinking. Beyond avoiding obvious friendly fire, it expects that you, the player, are in charge of controlling when to fire.

Well, I appreciate the response, and the X and R will help, however, I feel that this opinion of yours about the AI being only secondary to your control is a little misguided. The way I look at it, designing the AI to fight effectively IS what a captain of a starship would do. In effect, the leader trains his men to fight, and once the fighting starts he leaves them to their devices, especially since piloting, activating special systems and managing shields is pretty much a full time job as it is. This is how warfare works, leaders train, but once the "*** hits the fan" the soldiers need to be trusted to take the initiative and not shoot themselves in the foot. I can maybe see me failing to turn off the heavy blasters as my fault, maybe a little, but the super PD sphere? Firing ALL its charges into an enemy cruiser, doing 1/4 of its huge shield? Leaving it sputtering when the missiles start flying? That's such an oversight that I never considered it possible (all my PD up till this point had been point blank, so it did what it had too by default). I mean, yes as a commander you should have some say, but that is literally suicidally stupid on the part of the AI, wasting 30 OP of PD on an obvious bad target.

So I will be looking into these hint file modifications, and I guess my request is maybe to integrate these hint modifications into something directly into the games interface, rather than having to go backdoor into the guts. I mean, I get your philosophy about not "auto-piloting" but my style of play is to have one "fortress ship" that takes on many, sometimes MANY MANY more ships (I have beaten 3 carriers/two broadswords and a heavy cruiser with one destroyer, on 100% damage) and I assure you that having smarter AI, or less *** AI in this case, will not in any way detract from my "command stress."

-----------

I'm getting an error with the modification to hint:

PD + PD_ONLY + ANTI_FTR

is what I put directly into the hint file

comes out with error "Fatal: No enum const class com.fas.starfarer.api.combat.WeaponAPI$AIHints.PD + PD_ONLY + ANTI+FTR"


 

[Lictuel]

Just looking at what was written and your error message I spot a problem.

PD + PD_ONLY + ANTI_FTR

versus

"Fatal: No enum const class com.fas.starfarer.api.combat.WeaponAPI$AIHints.PD + PD_ONLY + ANTI+FTR"

There is a + instead of a '_' in ANTI_FTR in your file. Change that to _ like it was written and try it then.

[Alfalfa]

Also, separate them with commas instead of '+' signs, so:

    PD, PD_ONLY, ANTI_FTR

[Magician]

The real problem is:"What you gonna do when all your ships in your fleet will fire assault weapons trying to shoot down fighters?"

[Unfolder]

Okay, those corrections worked, thanks very much. Now hopefully my crew will not be on the side of the enemy. Again, would like to see these hints integrated directly into the interface if it's not too much trouble.

The real problem is:"What you gonna do when all your ships in your fleet will fire assault weapons trying to shoot down fighters?"

Yeah, this is still a problem, it would be great to have a "large_ships_only" tag the way we have missile and fighter only tags. However, it's a lot less of a disaster since I guess I CAN control the main assault guns manually, IF I MUST, there being only 1-5 usually, as opposed to 3-20 pd guns. And I can put them on autopilot once the battle is joined in full. Still, a new large ship specific tag would be nice.

[Magician]

No-no, what I meant - you can only control 1 ship. You can't control all your fleet at the same time. The main reason why cruisers, destroyers, capitals which are not flagships die or take huge damage during battle is that they shoot some weapons they should not use in certain situation.

[Pentarctagon]

The autofire AI isn't meant to do much thinking. Beyond avoiding obvious friendly fire, it expects that you, the player, are in charge of controlling when to fire.

It would still be nice if it wasn't limited to basically "OMG SOMETHING MOVED SHOOT IT SHOOT IT!".  I shouldn't have to worry about my elite crew trying to shoot fighters with plasma cannons, or other such nonsense.  Ideally (to me) there would be some panel in the refit screen where we could choose a weapon group's Primary Target(s).

[Unfolder]

No-no, what I meant - you can only control 1 ship. You can't control all your fleet at the same time. The main reason why cruisers, destroyers, capitals which are not flagships die or take huge damage during battle is that they shoot some weapons they should not use in certain situation.

Oh yeah, that would be really bad wouldn't it. There would definitely need to be large ship only hint then.

[Borgoid]

I'm struggling to imagine the situation you're describing Argh.

For starters, I can't even remember the last time a Destroyer beat a Bomber into a fight.
PD will prioritize missiles and fighters over standard ships meaning that even if your Burst PD lasers and Guardian PD Systems blow ALL their charges firing at a destroyer or larger ship once a missile -or fighter- appears they'll target that instead.

If that's still not enough for you then there are multiple ways to avoid this involving:

• Simply turning off autofire for those weapons when they're not required
• Changing the loadout to include more non-burst lasers which will maintain there effectiveness regardless of the order of opponents
• Using a loadout with longer range anti-ship weapons meaning PD lasers will only engage close (presumably appropriate) targets

And despite all that when it all comes down to it from a counterplay standpoint... it makes perfect sense.
Imagine for a second that you're the opponent coming in contact with a ship with significant Burst PD, surely knowing the weakness of that style of PD you'd hold back your fighters and missile salvos until the charges had been wasted and then capitalize on that advantage.


When it comes to your Heavy Blasters shooting the wrong things, simply turn them off when appropriate or better yet actually take control of them and destroy those pesky Talon wings, a single shot will do it.
Also as noted selecting a target (R) will cause your non-pd weapons to prioritize that target over all others meaning your Blasters shouldn't target Fighters while in range of the intended targets.


Autofire is not really so much AI as it is "Fire at will" with some really basic decision making under the hood and the rest is up to you.
You're at no point helpless because the weapons are never beyond your control.

This is literally player error, the tools are there that account for all relevant situations.

However!
All that said when it comes to the actual AI flown ships, not simply the Flagship autofire that's a different story.
Making truly complex and comprehensive AI is a monolithic task and not one I really expect from... well any game if I'm honest.
(Low expectations, high hopes ).

[Unfolder]

I'm struggling to imagine the situation you're describing Argh.

I understand that, i struggled to imagine it too, in fact you might say my failure to forsee it got me killed. But there are two specific issues with my specific build that got me killed very very quickly and it really shouldn't have, this build is a bruiser that basically got killed by two fast frigates a destroyer and a wing of bombers/talons that it should have had no problem mulching if the AI had allocated attacks somewhat reasonably.

Issue 1: point defense sphere (30 OP energy) has high range +1000. Plus capital bonus 50% plus entopic rangefinding was pushing it 2000. A great weapon, can fry fighter or missile wave in nanoseconds. A fast frigate got within range quickly, quicker than the bombers, and the PD sphere fired all its charges (even with extended ammo) in seconds, doing basically no damage (it's not designed to kill large ships). It takes a long time to recharge and while it did start tracking the fighters/bombs they had already released their payload by the time it got spinning up again and it was too late. Especially considering

Issue 2: auto tracking assault turrets had been shooting at talons coming in from other side. Now I'll admit I had options to mitigate this disaster but I was so shocked by PD failure that I didn't realize my *** assaults had burned through 40% of my flux shooting at impossible to hit microfighters. The two resulting disasters, all a failure of AI to track targets properly (the talons were literally no threat to my ship, but ended up doing 40% flux damage through gunner incompetence) killed my ship in under 20 seconds.

Now you can say, you should have turned off this, you should have turned on that, you should have X'ed, you should have R'ed, and I say that's bull$hit. Sure, I could have done these things and maybe I would have survived, but the battle is no fun. It's not skill. It's not a challenge. It's just a failure of game design that can be overcome through micromangement. This is the kind of thing that needs to be integrated into the AI and interface. That PD sphere should not automatically fire on large ships in 99/100 cases.  

And, in effect, the designers had already acknowledged my point with these "hints," which shoes horns the long range PD AI into less suicidial behavior. Like i said, the next two improvements should be making a hint for assault weapons to only target large ships, and to integrate all these hints into the interface properly.  

 

[Wyvern]

The Guardian PD is overall still pretty lackluster, due to exactly the phenomenon Argh describes.  Edit: Plus the fact that it's exceptionally flux-hungry; I forgot about that because I don't use them, but it's another critical flaw to the weapon.  Plus it taking up a large energy turret slot; in general, you're better off putting an autopulse laser or HIL in that turret and then finding some other way to deal with missiles.  (A Paragon, for example, can usually deal with missiles by simply ignoring them; it's got strong enough shields to do that.)

Still, personally, I'd be much happier with a burst PD AI that had all the same aiming / target-choosing priorities as the current AI, but would not fire at shielded or destroyer+ targets unless it was at full charges.

Fortunately, we can now mod in our own custom autofire AIs - which means that it's at least theoretically possible for me to implement the behavior I want.


That said, I disagree that heavy blasters should always avoid shooting at fighters - I can see possibly wanting to have the ability to control that, but I have several ship variants I use where the heavy blasters are the only real armament, and having them not shoot at fighters would be a crippling flaw.  I'd suggest to Argh that he put more focus on controlling those heavy blasters - whether shooting at fighters or anything else, they are extremely flux-hungry weapons; if you put them on autofire and leave them there, they will make you overload when you shouldn't have, pretty much no matter what you're fighting.  Much like plasma cannons, you have to pay attention and turn them off when they're not appropriate.