Dice, if you really think you're having some serious issues with the AI, you should take it up with Alex (main dev).
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?board=4.0
He usually responds within 24 hours, I'm sure he'd be glad to hear about any problems with fleet AI, it's something that's been an issue in the past and a lot of work has gone into making it work properly.
Nah, they're making solid progress compared to what it used to be like. This is typical AI derp behavior you'll see in any game; SS's particular shade just happens to be ships that don't prioritize threats properly, which would at best be a super-long-term goal after fleshing out stuff that still needs it.
It sounds like you have issues with frigates; just because they aren't killing you doesn't mean they aren't a problem. You shouldn't be killing capital ships before you kill frigates. You are in a freaking onslaught, a single salvo from your harpoon batteries can kill 2 frigates.
You have issues with the AI that I don't. What was your fleet and the opposed fleet? What's your logistics cap? It sounds like you're used to taking extremely hard fights w/o any fleet support. One of the things the AI is worst at is turtling against overwhelming odds.
One of my points is that mobility is the superstat. You decide who you fight, you have the ability to flank anyone, and you can run away if a mistake doesn't insta-gib you. As you experienced, armor and lots of dakka don't help you if you are outmaneuvered by your opponent.
Mm, by my recollection it was 1x Onslaught, 2x Falcon, 1x Sunder, 1x Enforcer, 1x Condor, ~5-6 assorted frigates, and two wings of Talons vs. my Onslaught, 1x Eagle, 1x Falcon, 2x Hammerhead, and 2x Wolf. So by ship tier, ratios of 1:1, 1:1, 2:3, ~2:5, and 0:2 on fighter wings, with the caveats that one of my cruisers was markedly better and one of their destroyers contributed nothing apart from keeping the fighters in the game. Likewise, a number of their ships were that new trash-tier subtype; none of mine were. Also, Talons. :V
By the by, I play the way I do in large part because of how bad the fleet AI used to be; even if credits were cheap and stations would sell whole fleets of good hulls to anyone with the creds to spend, it was annoying having to re-buy a dozen+ ships after every engagement. Also, fleet battles feel remarkably uninteresting for me, given the nature of the game; it'd be like playing Baldur's Gate, except that instead of building and playing with your party, the game became all about gathering and managing nameless hirelings who were constantly being massacred and replaced.
M&B is an excellent example of how to do this right: your mooks start out as useless trash, but the ones which survive become increasingly better and harder to kill, and you grow attached to them. That doesn't happen in SS; ships are always going to be as useless as the day you bought them, and the closest you can come to upgrading them is giving them weapons that don't send the AI into full retard mode burning through all of their flux capacity for no reason; likewise, the one mechanic that resembles that (crew experience) has a laughable impact on the game -- sure, the ships have slightly better stats, but that doesn't matter when they're still too dumb to live.
Again, that's not a criticism of SS specifically. To continue the example, M&B hirelings also tend to be pretty stupid, but once they live long enough that stops mattering so much because they're tough-as-nails bastards. My tactic for fleet battles in SS is literally "Get ship which can mount high-effectiveness low-sustained-flux-cost combo (at the moment, an Eagle with a single Hypervelocity Driver on the middle forward mount to plink down shields and take advantage of AI stupidity re: long range, a trio of Heavy Blasters to burst things whenever they drop shields or get into the danger zone, and burst PD lasers to handle fighters and Salamanders), send entire fleet to capture and defend one point to keep the morons mostly together, fly around keeping anything from flanking them and kill what I can while hoping that they don't get themselves killed against a force half their size while I play with the other half."
Incidentally and somewhat loosely related, the reason I originally adopted that high-mobility playstyle (other than fleet AI sucking something unmentionable) is because of how AI used to react to the player -- any time your selected weapon group tracked anywhere near an enemy (or, in some cases, apparently your
mouse cursor, though I don't remember well enough to verify) it would run away if it was smaller than you. So you'd end up with situations where you'd fight a fleet battle, all of your stuff would wipe and you'd clean house, and then you'd have to give up because you were trying to catch that last fucking Hound in a battlecruiser and it would never retreat as long as you didn't damage it. You literally ended up having to play mind games with the program, sitting there with your guns all facing one wait, waiting for the damn thing to get close enough, then whip around and try to snap-shot it before it ran again. Thankfully
that was fixed.
tl;dr: "You need to buy lots of ships and spam fighters because reasons," stems from the fake difficulty of needing to shepherd bad AI, rather than real difficulty of enemy AI being better equipped and murderously hard. Look at old X-com and GalCiv2 for good examples of real difficulty (if you turn them up high, of course).
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Topic: Starsector [TopDown Sandbox RPG on Space] (Read 370755 times)