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[Greiger]

I don't seem to have much difficulty with hounds in my opinion, I'm actually more worried about those little oval shaped pirate frigates than a hound, but I've always built my flagships to have at least one long range non missile weapon of some kind, and it seems they will only evade out to a certain distance, probably trying to stay out of range of all your guns but realising if they stay too far out they can't realistically close in to try to do damage themselves.

I started with a wolf with that gravity beam that wrecked them pretty good, my next flagship was a falcon with a pair of hypervelocity drivers that would absolutely wreck the poor things with a little bit of target leading, (Nothing quite as satisfying as seeing one of the things strafe right into a pair of hypervelocity rounds and lose both it's guns and an engine) and my current flagship that's class I don't recall is a heavy criuser (I always thought it was capital class before) with a single tacyon lance up front.

They just don't even try to stay out of range of these really long range guns, and at that point it's just a matter of good aim(or a lot of long range dakka) or a beam weapon to take them out.  Don't need to chase them down if your guns shoot farther than the distance they like to kite you from.

[Tarran]

I'm actually more worried about those little oval shaped pirate frigates than a hound,

Lashers. And yes, I also view them as a much larger threat than Hounds with their double small missile slots. Harpoons and Salamanders are not fun when you're in the middle of combat.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, I have very little difficulty with Lashers, mostly because I when I'm dealing with multiple targets/large groups of missile platforms, I put my primary offense on autofire, switch control over to a missile or fixed-mount control group, and just concentrate on steering and hotswitching my shield position to catch missiles.

I agree that the Hounds can be a bit annoying - their behavior is more suited to when they're not the only opponent left. Still, Salamanders (or just a few fighter wings) eliminate them as a problem. Having played from the start quite a few times recently (playtesting for the recent releases), it's really not *that* bad once you get the hang of it.

But therein lies another issue I have: it is far easier to get through the early-mid game by just mounting a high DPS weapon or two and ramming every enemy that isn't several classes larger than you while holding down M1, both because the AI apparently doesn't know how to handle it and because it finishes fights much faster and more safely than autoresolve.

I have to ask - are you playing on half or full damage? On full, I can perhaps see this working in a 1-1, but it's definitely not optimal. You'll take lots of damage in the process, and may well get killed by a desperation missile salvo.

On the first, yeah, it's probably my fault in that I tend to go solo until I'm at least in a cruiser, because before that point keeping other ships around is essentially just throwing money down the drain, as they seem to be prone to getting themselves killed whenever you don't have overwhelming firepower, to the point where even if I have the crew to man other ships that are with me, I normally order them to retreat right when the battle starts, unless I'm facing absolutely terrible odds and need something to pull attention.

Regarding the second, I do tend to take damage if I screw up even a little bit, but as long as the fight isn't completely imbalanced (say, my frigate versus 2 frigates and a wing of fighters, or my destroyer versus 2 frigates, a carrier, and two wings of fighters), doing a bum-rush on one of the frigates for a quick kill is usually worth the damage I take, because it becomes much easier to kite the remaining enemies when I don't have to be worried about being flanked by something that could do a lot of damage quickly.

Also note that a lot of my builds are expressly designed for this; my typical midgame is a Medusa with a pair of pulse lasers, PD lasers (possibly LR), the percentage-by-size-class range buff (I can't recall the name), nothing in the universals (now replaced with 1 ion cannon, since I figured that a bit more aiming was worth the extra points), and possibly one of the shield stability buffs, with every spare point going into flux dissipation. That will typically let me charge in with shields up, spamming pulse lasers from the moment I get in range, and let the enemy overload their own flux with weapon fire, at which point I drop shields and get in as much damage as possible, raise shields, rinse and repeat until they die. For smaller enemies, this works fairly well, but for obvious reasons it stops being practical for the high-end destroyers and all the cruisers (except mainly Falcons with small escort groups), and against very large fleets (which I don't normally fight anyways at this stage).

So in short, it is a fairly specialized tactic for solo pilots who need to even the odds in battles with small groups of enemies. It lets me get away with fringe-range kiting against whatever is left, or alternately running far away if there are fighters, to let me pick them off first. Good enough to build up a fairly large pile of credits and the occasional prize ship (now, I mothball the good ones instead of selling them off, which I really must thank you for adding in so soon), but rather poor against anything except even odds or groups of weaker enemies. Against the former, I'll often just settle for kiting, but against the latter, it is practically required if you don't want to get picked to pieces (if you're intentionally handicapping yourself by flying solo, that is  )

Might put up a LQ video to show how I use it (and probably how I screw up with it) with a few sim battles.


On a completely unrelated note, Hounds become much less annoying once you're in an Apogee and can just put your shields up and ignore them.

Sorry about the WoT. :|

ed: Well, fuck. Video ended up recording a vertical band about an inch wide somehow. In any case, it was essentially what I was saying above; on full damage the whole time, these were the results using the 'charge in to get early kills' tactic:
-1x Medusa v. 2x Lasher + 1x Vigilance; result: Medusa wins, >95% hull remaining.
-1x Medusa v. 1x Enforcer, 1x Hammerhead, 1x Lasher; result: Medusa wins, >75% hull remaining.
-1x Medusa v. 1x Eagle, 1x Lasher, 1 Talon wing; result: Opfor wins, only Eagle survives. This is the first failure case I talked about, where the enemy just has too steep an advantage to beat in any solo battle, even the other ships are destroyed, because it has a range, flux, and damage advantage.
-1x Medusa v. 1x Condor, 2x Lasher, 1x Talon wing, 1x Gladius wing, 1x Piranhna wing; result: Opfor wings, Condor, 1x Lasher, 1x Talon wing survive. This is the second failure case, where there are too many enemies for the early elimination of one or two to make a serious difference.

All tests were run with the default setups for the Opfor ships, and with:
1x Ion Cannon, 2x Pulse Laser, 5x LR PD Laser, Turret Gyros, range enhancement for the Medusa, with all extra points into flux dissipation.
All tests were done with full damage on.


So essentially that displays what I'm saying: The setup doesn't work if you aren't careful to choose your battles, but if you do, you can get through most of the midgame with it, eventually upgrading to a cruiser, possibly with a few durable escorts. I typically will end up with the Medusa, a Xyphos wing, a drone wing, a carrier, and a few disposable low-tech meatshields ships for escorts.

[Paul]

Well, you're talking about a powerful high tech destroyer vs low tech ships. When you totally outclass an enemy ship it's easy to just rush them. The issue is when your shields are so dang efficient you can just take the brunt of their fire and then hit them hard when they drop their shields from being low on flux.

I just did the same simulations with one of my Medusa builds. Two AM blasters, two grav beams, a pair of single harpoons, and three PD lasers. Aug engines, hardened shields, resistant flux conduits, and 4 points in vents.

The first case it's three frigates, which was over in less than a minute. I just rushed straight on ramming them in turn and didn't even take any armor damage fighting that since the Medusa outclasses them so much. The poor vigilance lost its shields on approach and went down in a single AM blast. Then the first lasher was quickly overloaded by the other AM blast then taken down by the two harpoons. I got distance for a few seconds to vent while the AMs recharged, then moved in and dropped the other lasher with two rapid fire AM blasts after it lowered its shields to prevent overloading. All the missiles they fired were either taken down by PD or hit uselessly against the shield.

Then the second one it's two low tech destroyers and a lasher. The lasher approached first and was taken down quick by just rushing it, although I used a bit of fancy flying for the other two. I strafed the Enforcer's rockets and vented the flux from the AM, then strafed my way around the hammerhead to keep it between me and the Enforcer. The hammerhead's flux got high from firing on me and I overloaded it with one AM and hit it in the nose with the other, followed by the two harpoons. That left it with a tiny bit of hull left. I flew off a bit and vented, then went back in and hit the hammerhead again. It's shields dropped and one AM blast killed it. I went straight on the enforcer and it hit me point blank with one of its two torpedos but still barely dented my flux, then I nailed it with two AM blasts right on the side. I flew off and lost a bit of flux, then came back and finished it off with two more blasts to the side. No hull damage. If I had just rushed straight in at the hammerhead focused on killing it without dodging the Enforcer I would've probably taken heavy damage.

The eagle one was the first that actually outclassed the Medusa, but was still beatable since the AI kept firing away while I just strafed back dodging most of its shots, then moved in to hit it with two AM blasts every time it lowered the shields. That one is a bit of an AI shortcoming, since I never would have been able to overload it under normal circumstances since my sustained DPS just wasn't enough. At least it didn't drop its shields when it was near death - for that I had to fire the AM blasts and overload it, finishing it off with the missiles.

Then the last one I was saved by my augmented engines. I managed to take the Piranha wing quickly by dropping two of them with my AM blasters and the third with concentrated grav beam fire (I have it on automatic while I aim the AM blasters), which helped a lot. The combination of the lashers, those nasty Gladius, and the Talons was rough after that though since my flux was so high from firing the AM blasters. I had to use my speed to get some distance from the lashers and vent while under heavy fire from the Gladius, spinning around to spread the damage out on the armor - I took about 300 hull damage from that. After venting I was able to drop both of them with two well placed AM blaster shots, which was the turning point of the battle. From there the Talons fled to repair and the two lashers fell quickly with help from my missiles, then I went and finished off the Condor and mostly ignored the talons (although they did another 30 or so hull damage as they buzzed around me hitting the unarmored spots with machine gun fire). The talons then kinda buzzed around a bit until the grav beams took them apart. If I had missed the AM blaster shots vs the Piranha or the Gladius it may have went differently.

I think the lesson here isn't that ramming your ship down their throat is a good thing - other tactics can work better. It's just that when you're flying a ship with superb shield efficiency like the Medusa, you can do pretty much whatever you want and still kick their ass.

The AI just firing away until its shields are down is a weakness - but I'm not sure what else it should be doing. If it just stopped firing when the flux got high it would leave it open to other tactics. Perhaps it could check the current enemy flux and its flux and decide whether or not continuing to fire is a good idea based on its weapon efficiency and the enemy shield efficiency? If it's almost overloaded and the enemy is still barely charged then it should probably cease fire and try to get some distance until the flux dissipates, but if the enemy is close enough to be overloaded if it can hit it then it should keep firing away.

[Flying Dice]

That would probably be the best way to go about it, but at a certain point we're probably just going to have to accept one quirk or another. I know what you mean about the HT v. LT there, and since the simulation apparently doesn't have HT opponents, I did a bit of savescumming to get what fights I could.

Same settings as before;

Most of the fleets I go after get smashed before I can fight them. Going to use GRs as well, since they're a bit more advanced than Hegemony/Pirates.

Yeah, scratch that, it's enough of a pain finding one battle group that isn't either half-dead and underpowered or massively more powerful than everything I have, let alone five or six. I think it's a reasonable enough assumption that against HT ships it would still work, but would have a lower cutoff for ship class/number of enemies, given that it is more difficult to kill any individual enemy and that they're going to be dealing comparable damage.

Still, at least for curiosity for future tests, would it be possible to get a section for HT ships in the simulator? Unless I'm just derping and missed it, that is.

[alexm]

The AI just firing away until its shields are down is a weakness - but I'm not sure what else it should be doing. If it just stopped firing when the flux got high it would leave it open to other tactics. Perhaps it could check the current enemy flux and its flux and decide whether or not continuing to fire is a good idea based on its weapon efficiency and the enemy shield efficiency? If it's almost overloaded and the enemy is still barely charged then it should probably cease fire and try to get some distance until the flux dissipates, but if the enemy is close enough to be overloaded if it can hit it then it should keep firing away.

Hmm... yeah, definitely something to look at - but it'd probably end up being abusable in some other way. At some point, it's pretty hard to get around the AI being, well, AI.

I think it's a reasonable enough assumption that against HT ships it would still work, but would have a lower cutoff for ship class/number of enemies, given that it is more difficult to kill any individual enemy and that they're going to be dealing comparable damage.

Still, at least for curiosity for future tests, would it be possible to get a section for HT ships in the simulator? Unless I'm just derping and missed it, that is.

I think it'd be tougher to close in on high-tech ships since they're faster. As far as simulation opponents: you can edit data/campaign/sim_opponents.csv to get whatever opponents you want. The variant ids you'll need to use there can be found in the  .variant files under data/variants (and are usually the filename itself, minus the extension).

[Flying Dice]

Ah, thanks. Without any sort of pointer, I'm not the most likely to go mucking around without knowing what I'm doing, as my only 'modding' experience as such is making new entities and items for flavor in my DF. 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

This game legitimately has some of the worst balance I've ever seen. :| The 'campaign' makes me tear my hair out. Fun tech demo so far, needs alot of things to be addressed before I 'Love' it, since right now it just pisses me off every time I try to get into it. Guess there's all the time in the world to balance out the issue of the hostile AI being about tenthousand times better than any AI that will happen to be piloting one of your mighty expensive vessels.

Also, the mouse should auto-turn your vessel when it goes outside your firing arc. But make it a toggle-option of course. Unless that's already in or something. It's rather obnoxious to be using the forward-only ballistic weapon slots when you're trying to turn, strafe, track your target to hit, avoid missiles, accelerate, watch your allies to get them to retreat before wasting your money suiciding into heavy ballistic fire.. etc. It just makes it a bit more difficult since it feels like it should already be doing that.

[JWNoctis]

Using mouse to auto-turn your ships will cause more problem than it solves, especially when you can already strafe left and right and turn to cursor by holding Shift+A or Shift+D.

And AFAIK this game uses the same AI for your ships and enemy ships, although there's no automatic fleet AI for the player, which means you always have to work out the strategy yourself on the C2 screen and give out the appropriate orders and assignments. And---It's almost never a good idea to pit most lighter ships against something much heavier like an Onslaught or an Odyssey unless there's a lot of them. Even then you're bound to take a few losses. It's also almost never a good idea to battle a much larger force, as you will be easily overwhelmed. The AI is surprisingly good at flanking maneuvers.

[Tarran]

This game legitimately has some of the worst balance I've ever seen. :|

Example? The game has had a lot of balancing over the past. I'm not saying it's even near perfect, but I don't think there are extremely serious balancing issues that haven't had an attempt or two taken at them to balance them.

The 'campaign' makes me tear my hair out.

It's not even nearly done, don't judge it so harshly. So far it's basically only a small section of what it's supposed to be.

Guess there's all the time in the world to balance out the issue of the hostile AI being about tenthousand times better than any AI that will happen to be piloting one of your mighty expensive vessels.

What? Running simulations, your AI seems about as competent as the enemy AI. It definitely gets confused on some weapon combinations (Hound+Heavy Needler), but besides that if you pick the right weapons and parts for your ship the AI should be able to handle quite well. Heck, I'm willing to bet that with some combinations, the AI would be able to do a much better multitasking job than I can.

Also, the mouse should auto-turn your vessel when it goes outside your firing arc. But make it a toggle-option of course. Unless that's already in or something. It's rather obnoxious to be using the forward-only ballistic weapon slots when you're trying to turn, strafe, track your target to hit, avoid missiles, accelerate, watch your allies to get them to retreat before wasting your money suiciding into heavy ballistic fire.. etc. It just makes it a bit more difficult since it feels like it should already be doing that.

Have you tried holding Shift? The ship should turn to your cursor the moment you turn left or right even a small amount after starting to hold down shift, and should continue doing so until you let go of Shift.

Also, I think that is a bad idea. I do not want my ship to turn to the enemy if I have frontal shields blocking the shots from another just because I wanted to keep my turrets ready in case he got into their arc. Plus, imagine taking a look to the left or right of you to see how your fellow ships are doing then suddenly ending up with an enemy behind you because your ship turned that direction.

[SeaBee]

The Shift+A and Shift+D keys are necessary controls for some ships, haha. Can't imagine flying certain ship/weapon combos without them. I do think there is room for improvement in the controls, but I'm not sure where they could be made. Generally they're quite solid IMO, but there are things that irritated me a little before I got used to it.

Not real sure what you mean by the AI being different between the enemy ships and yours; although, as already mentioned, AI ships don't do as well with some weapons as others.

[Paul]

I always set my Q and E keys to strafe left and turn to mouse/strafe right and turn to mouse. Very handy controls to use, and not having to hold shift makes it convenient.

As far as AI, your own ships have just as good AI as the enemy. I've yet to encounter trouble with my ships being stupid - maybe not doing things quite as ideal as I would be doing, but the AI does the same things (like flying between two large ships with omni shields, blocking one side and taking heavy damage on the other). I don't see that happening too often though, they're usually quite smart.

In one game I got three Medusas. I flew one and set the other two to escort me at the beginning of every fight. Boy did that kick ass - I tore through pirate armadas and carrier groups. The two escorts would keep with me and seemed to be pretty smart in focusing together on my targets and backing off when nearly overloaded. Occasionally one of them would get in a tight spot and eat a little hull damage, but I always pulled back a little (with them following me) when one of them got close to overloading and I never did lose either of them. Rarely lost any crew either, I wound up with elite crews on all three after a bit. Even took out some Tri-Tachyon fleets, although those were harder than the pirates.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, you certainly can't just ignore the fleet command screen and expect your ships to do as well as the enemy.

[Sonlirain]

I recently decided to check it out (since i love being a carrier and sending fighters en masse to do my dirty job and the game lets you do just that).

I realize the game is quite a way from being finished but... is there anything else to do besides hunting pirate scouts and getting murdered the second you accidentaly encounter a pirate armada/raiding group?

Things like trading mining missions ETC. are not yet implemented yet i presume?

Also if someone in charge will read this:

Will there be a option to regulate battle size?
The game runs fine on my aincient PC but i fear larger battles (late game) will become unplayable just like in S.P.A.Z. where my FPS could drop to 0.2 at times (yes a screen refresh every 5 seconds).

[JWNoctis]

You can try some mods, some of them have missions coded in.

This game's system requirement is already low for a new game, and it runs with high fps on my univ's public 4-year-olds. However it's also somewhat memory hungry like other JVM-based games, and anything less than 1GB would probably not cut it. Lowering screen resolution might help a bit, but only a bit.