Fleet combat

I agree with your assessment. I do not want turn-based tactical combat but it would be nice to have some control/options that can be set before combat begins. Planet Invasions have options that can be researched and used prior to combat and It would be nice to have a some researchable options/tactics for fleet combat as well.

Most discussions that bring up the lack luster fleet combat turn into a flame fest. Can we please get a positive discussion going on what could be done, within reason, to add some interesting additions to fleet combat. To begin this discussion an explanation, in detail, of how targets are determined and combat is resolved in the current state of the game would probably help and then see what can be programmed to what’s there to add some spunk. Remember, any ideas have to be programmable for the AI as well as the player.

Let's keep this civil and positive please. No discussion on total revamp turn-based combat please.

Have you read the combat results to see what kind of weapons and defences the priates are using? Maybe you could make new ships that would counter whatever they're equiped with.

The AI on both sides always attack the weakest ship first. You can use this to your advantage by having one small ship in your fleet wiith just defences.

To get the pirates to come to you, try putting a single cheap ship a few spaces in front of you fleet as bait and see if they pounce on that first. If they do then jump on them with you fleet. Dunno if this will work, have to try it out myself

Moe

The targetting issues goes both ways and can be exploited to your advantage. When you form fleets, just start using fighter screens. If they've got enough shields/armor/ecm, and they can survive long enough, your main ships-of-the-line won't have target priority.

Also: please, seriously...start using shields/armor/ecm. You'll be surprised how much fire your ships can absorb when they've got good defenses.

Targetting is based on a combination of enemy toughness, and enemy firepower. A GC2 ships fights at maximum effectiveness till it is gone, theres no component damage. Firing on a dreadnought with insufficient firepower dosent accomplish anything but to knock off a few hitpoints, firing on the fighter may remove the fighter leaving the fleet weaker for the next time around. Look at your attack/defence ratings versus the pirates ratings and simulate this combat without the fighters. What would firing on the capital ships have accomplished?

Whoops scratch my second idea about making ships with just defensive stuff, just read "Tiny Ships in later game" thread that the AI will ignore them till the last.

Try making fleets in similar fashion as the pirates do with fitghters.

Moe

Targetting uses the formula:

Attack / (Defense+HP)

There is no modification based on weapon/defense types, and starbases are not factored in. Just a straight total of a ship's attack/defense points, and current HP. The ship with the highest result will get targeted first.

I keep hearing two distinctly different lines on the "which ship" gets attacked frist scenario. Is it the most powerful ship the AI goese after(thats what I have seen) or the weakest?

Whats up?

Of course the way it targets now is the best way. Simply targets the thing that does the most damage and can be killed fastest. Why don't you do what AI does if it's so overpowering. A light fighter is a tiny hull with average 6 hps! That's one shot! It makes total sense to kill that first. I can build tiny hull ships with 50 attack power!

If you change the fleet combat so you select what to attack, it's not goign to work. The AI will never have the same perspective of a person, so warfare will be totally one sided.

Increase your speed so you can attack first. Defenses help greatly if there's more than one turn to a battle, but many battles will only last one turn if you attack first.

I beat a pirate dreadnought and two other pirate ships with 3 medium hull ships. The catch? I also had defense on them. Find the combat simulator in the forum. An equal size fleet with half the attack rating will almost always beat the other fleet if they have appropriate defenses. Granted, it was several turn battle, but I lost only 1 ship and never saw pirates again.

A light fighter is a tiny hull with average 6 hps! That's one shot! It makes total sense to kill that first.

Not really. If there's two enormous capital ships packed with weapons and two tiny fighters shooting at me, I'd rather kill the big boys first while I have the power left to do it.

Ask any navy officer. Do you go after the enemy's capital ships or the little escorts first?

From my experience, the AI does an excellent job in determining what ship to attack in combat to get the most enemy casualties. No complaints from my end.

Not really. If there's two enormous capital ships packed with weapons and two tiny fighters shooting at me, I'd rather kill the big boys first while I have the power left to do it. Ask any navy officer. Do you go after the enemy's capital ships or the little escorts first?

The thing is that the firepower most likely wouldn't be enough to kill the big ships, and thus acomplishes close to nothing (depending on the repair rate of the enemy and the amount of HP they gain for experience.) In real life if you put a couple of holes in a carrier, you've made it slower and more vulnerable to later attack, and it isn't going to repair any time soon.

-Dewar

Question on HP. I just completed my first couple of fleet battles and was shocked to see that my hit points were reduced from 144 to 96 (about 33%) before the first shot was fired, and the enemy's was reduced from 85 to 78 (about 8%). Suddenly a 96% victory probability on the simulator ended up being a loss. Can anyone explain why the discrepency? The same thing happened in both battles. Could this be a starbase effect.? The enemy does not seem to have any nearby.

Probably the Random Number Generator just screwed your fleet. Sometimes luck is in your favor and sometimes it isn't.

I believe I have the answer. The hit point bonus is counted twice in the window for indivudual ship and fleet data. In my case with a base fleet HP of 4x16=64 and a bonus of 50%, total HP should be 96, but the ship data and the detail screen both show 144 for HP, i.e. an additional 50% on topof the 96. However, in the fleet battle, the correct number is used. I just have to learn to ignore the ship data. The same error occurs for the AIs. Has this been reported as a bug? I still have the original 1.0 version in this game, so it may have been corrected in later versions. Anybody know?

My humble suggestions -

Keep the combat engine as it is (AI controlled) but tweak/improve it to be more, well, tactical.

Some fairly straightforward concepts that should be in there -

*Weapon ranges! Ships should have limited weapon range. With bigger ships having bigger range, naturally. No more ganging up on a single ship on maximum range.
*Speed is life: Faster/smaller ships should be harder to hit.
*Cut down on energy weapon power with distance. Boost on close range. Makes the engagements last multiple turns instead of first barrage takes all.
*Give extra malus on accuracy on long range projectiles.
*Ability for ships to break off + flee - At end of turn surviving ships should have a chance to beat it if damaged/losing.
*Generic behavior profile chosen at start of engagement. For example: Cautious/Normal/Aggressive which would be basically "try to deplete escorts and flee", "disengage if significant damage and/or losses" and "fight to the death"

All that would make the combat much more sensible and to my mind, interesting, without changing the premise of AI-handled combat too much.

Oh, and if we have pipe-dreams, discrete systems for capital ships which lose effectiveness with damage would be perfect

Perhaps for the add-on?

The bug about the double hit-point counting was still in the second Beta, I don't know yet whether it was taken care of in the third. I keep meaning to report it, and I keep forgetting.

KK maybey im just really nooby or am i missing something. i have never encountered "pirates" in any of my games.....

can someone explain this?

I have noticed this problem as well. In my current game I have been using large ship fleet, so I get no more than 5 dreadnoughts per fleet. I do this to maximize firepower. So when I come up against a fleet of 11 ships of 2 dreads a battleship and the rest fighters, I want to take out the big guys first. There is no was with my defenses that there little ships are going to do a damn thing to me and I can kill them all mostly with one shot, but it still takes 2 or 3 rounds to get to them all.

By this time there large ships have had 2 shots already and I have probably lost one ship so far. By the time it’s done I will have lost 2 to 3 ships before I take them all out. It makes no since to kill the one shot kills until last if they can't do any real damage. But a ship that can deal out 30+ hp damage a shot should be the main target.

My ships should be set to fire on the ships that can deal the most damage per shot.

Not really. If there's two enormous capital ships packed with weapons and two tiny fighters shooting at me, I'd rather kill the big boys first while I have the power left to do it.

Not when they're VERY powerfully armed. You can either smash the dreadnaught anddo nothing, or hit that little bugger of a tiny fighter with a doom ray (26 att) and vanquish it's threat. It's been stated that the toughest yet easiest to kill ship is hit first, and that makes sense if you think about it. Biggest yet easiest killed threat is gone first, lowering the enemy's damage capability the fastest.

@ johnsje:

I don't know if the AI does this already, but it seems that what you are wanting is for actual ability to do any damage at all from a single ship to be included in the fire priority calculations. Perhaps that would be enough to resolve the issue with your play style.

Ability for ships to break off + flee - At end of turn surviving ships should have a chance to beat it if damaged/losing.

I don't know if the first one of those is what the 'auto retreat' option does, but it would certainly be handy at times I'm sure (though I haven't gotten to those times yet myself).

*Generic behavior profile chosen at start of engagement. For example: Cautious/Normal/Aggressive which would be basically "try to deplete escorts and flee", "disengage if significant damage and/or losses" and "fight to the death"

I would love to see this added to the game. I like the way we have many options when invading a planet, and it would be great to have a few available when attacking in space. We could perhaps also need the appropriate techs to take advantage of them too, but having the options at least would be a great addition.

Just my 2 cents.

rangers are slow, so you can consider taking them out of your attack fleets. also, stop sending in defenseless cap ships. fighters can get so many more shots in, so an easy pirate counter would be to stack fighters with all weapons and some engines.

as for sensor range, if you are lacking 'eyes of the universe' which i usually beeline for, then at each mining starbase post a sensor ship. just a cargo with some engines and maxed out 15pc sensor range.

I'm surprised to see this thread's still alive.

I understand what is going on now. The smaller fighters are ESCORTS. You have to blast your way through any escorts before you can get to the capital ship being escorted. I get that now.

As for it making more sense to attack fighters first instead of battleships, because you CAN kill them, that's way off. In a fight to the death, you don't want cheap kills, you want to win. Take out the dreadnought and you remove a massive weapon platform. Take out a fighter ... and who cares? But, that's not how the game works apparently....

Just to add my 2 cents, I don't know if anyone has ever played Star Wars Rebellion but I really liked the combat system used in that game.

Basically the ships in your fleet would be grouped based on type; fighters as a group, some light cruisers and destroyers as another group and so on. At the outset of battle you could give orders to each group individually or to your whole fleet.

You also had a few options about how your orders were carried out. For example you could order your group to charge straight on, flank left or right or come in from the top or bottom. You could also order your ships to either stand off in order to take advantage of greater weapons range, or order your group to surround their target. (this was particularily useful when you had a few smaller ships attacking something larger.)

I understand that this would be a difficult system to introduce, espescially in terms of balance issues, but it sure would be nice if battles hinged at least a little on our tactical prowess and not just a random number generator.