Have fleet AI anticipate when a ship will be disabled by shots already fired
brendanjones opened this issue · 7 comments
Problem Description
I realise this might be unrealistic and extremely difficult to solve, but I’ll put my problem out there for discussion anyway:
If you have anything but beam weapons on your fleet then they will often destroy targets instead of disabling them. This is because they only stop firing when the ship is disabled, not when they’ve fired enough to disable the ship. Therefore shots that have ahead been fired will still hit the ship, potentially destroying it.
This is not a problem with beam weapons because they stop firing instantly. It’s also not an issue with weapons that affect ships in other ways, like flamethrowers or ion cannons.
The effect of the current situation if that as soon as I have more than a handful of ships, I fit out most of them with (heavy) lasers (and later other alien beam weapons), forgoing other weapons. Especially secondary weapons. Otherwise the fleet destroys ships that I want to plunder/capture.
Related Issue Links
None that I can see.
Desired Solution
Fleet AI know when to stop firing in order to only disable a ship. No, I’ve no idea how to achieve this.
Additional Context
I can see that the moment of disabling becomes extremely hard to calculate as soon as you have weapons with a long range, slow firing rate, slow projectile speed, and/or large inaccuracy. Especially weapons that expend ammo, like most secondary weapons (missiles, torpedoes, etc). It’s also hard to take into account secondary damag, for example AoE damage from destroyed ship explosions.
Implementing this wouldn't be too complicated, but:
- it would probably reduce performance (especially in large battles), which means it would need to be disabled by default (a preference for player ships and maybe a gamerule for other ships),
- it would make boarding and capturing even easier than it is now.
I feel like this is an issue that has been discussed before, however I can't remember where.
My opinion is that we really don't need to be making it even easier to capture or plunder and reducing collateral damage, from already fired weapons, would effectively do that. @brendanjones In your disscusion you talk about this.
@xX-Dillinger-Xx I agree that wrt balance we don't want to make capture easier, but I guess it feels to me wrong to not optimise one part of the game because it needs to compensate for another part that isn't working as well as we'd like.
After all, if you had a bunch of humans piloting ships in a big battle then they'd fire at each ship only as much as they needed to in order to incapacitate it, and then start firing at a new ship asap in order to maximise damage output. Real, effective battlefied AI would also behave that way. Don't we want to optimise our AI to behave realistically?
It's not like this would affect the actual capture mechanic, and it would only minimally affect the outcome of fights.
Speaking of that linked issue, lowering the DPS of human weapons will slow down the destruction of ships after being disabled, which will indirectly help with this issue at least in the early game. Other things would help too, like more granular escort controls so you could do things like forcing your more powerful ships to hang back while only a few escorts engage and disable a ship.
but I guess it feels to me wrong to not optimise one part of the game because it needs to compensate for another part that isn't working as well as we'd like.
Oh, I agree. I still maintain that the whole boarding and capturing mechanism isn't very good, in it current state, and needs a complete rework. So, I would prefer not to make it easier to accomplish the former, until a better mechanism is in place.
As far as I know, the development team and it's helpers are aware the AI isn't where it needs to be, but it's a difficult thing to work on and progress is slow.
Also, one other word of warning, many people here do not like the word 'real' or any words related to it. I've suggested more 'realism' many times and it never goes over well. I try to use things like more believable. My take on it is, ES is a fictional world where we are expected to take a lot things on faith and expand our imaginations. I've been told that good game play is of much greater value then realism. I personally believe we should strive for as much realism that we can up until it starts to effect game play negatively.