[BUG 1.12] Enemies in Survival mode use 'Cautious'

I’d call this a bug over a feature. In survival mode, I noticed that the long-range missile ship has a cautious order on it. If my ships have their engines destroyed (or no engines at all) and inflict enough damage, that ship will move out of range and just delay subsequent waves unnecessarily. The cautious order really doesn’t help the enemy at all, as my ship now have time to repair and whatnot between waves, however it makes survival mode unbearably boring. Coupled with the fact that the game pauses when out of focus it’s a real drag.

deal with it either with fighters or long range weapons

I also don’t think this behavior is new to 1.12 either, I recall this type of behavior when Survival Mode was first introduced.

As mentioned these ships make excellent cannon fodder for Fighters and any ship(s) still moving…

It becomes a bit mote when the next wave arrives anyway.

This response was more constructive.

Yes, they make excellent fodder for ships that are still moving (and fighters), the problem arises when your ships can no longer move, your fighters are destroyed (if you had any), but you can still fight. It doesn’t stop you, it just delays all the next waves by a lot, and makes the game take unnecessarily long.

Other than admitting defeat, the only other course of action currently is to speed up the battle and then slow it down again when the next wave hits.

Speeding up the game has it’s own issues - 4x is slower than 1x when fighters are involved on both sides, for example.

There is just no need for enemies to have ‘cautious’ in surival. All it does is allow situations where a ship can move out of the way of fire (in, for example, no engine builds, or builds where engines and fighters are destroyed) and delays the subsequent waves. Removing it will make the game more enjoyable.

I think you mean it’ll make the game more enjoyable for you. Personally I dont understand the problem. Enemies in Survival mode making you WORK for your score? Surely not!

But it doesn’t make you “work” for anything. It just makes it take longer. Nothing more, nothing less. I mean it’s kind of cheesy to go in with no engines, but ideally the survival waves would include some ships that do a good job of dealing with immobile fortresses. And anyway, what if you deploy mobile ships but their engines get destroyed?

It does make you work for it, in the sense that you have to consider putting engines on your ships, you cant just field Cheese Fortresses. Also in the sense that, you have to consider that the enemy ships want to survive the encounter. So if one of them does a runner youre going to have to factor that into your fleet composition.

Ive never imagined Survival mode to mean that the enemies willingly fly in range of your guns until you or they die. One of them is moving out of weapons range forcing your fleet to either follow it or ignore it. Either way you have to plan to deal with it.

Sitting there saying “its not fair that the enemy ships dont want to get blown up” just seems a bizarre complaint to me. Are you really suggesting that AI controlled ships shouldnt be allowed access to the same orders you are?

Again, this doesn’t increase the challenge of survival mode one iota. It only makes it take longer. I would be completely in favor of cautious AI ships withdrawing, repairing, and coming back, and missile ships that would sit outside your range and pummel you. Heck, how about if an enemy ship lives through an entire wave until the timer expires, it gets fully repaired and re-deployed with new attack orders?

Any of those solutions would penalize you for failing to pursue without necessarily leading to a long delay between every single wave. Bottom line, survival mode should be a test of your fleet composition skills, not your patience.

Of course it increases the challenge. Potentially your fleet can get drawn out of formation/position for the sake of chasing a lone damaged cruiser thats done a runner. Factoring behaviour like that into your builds IS the challenge. If your engines get knackered and you cant chase the ship to kill it, then your build was wrong, fix it. Thats the point of the game, isnt it?

Your answer seems contradictory. Are you in favour of AI having the full range of orders, or not? If they get the same orders as us, then you have to be prepared to design your ships to deal with stuff you didnt expect to happen. If they dont, then youre essentially asking for easy mode.

I think this issue should be considered without limiting it to Survival mode or a specific instance of a ship running away. It’s more general that that.

The Cautious order is intended to let a ship fall back to repair itself without dying, but in some cases, the ship never returns to the fight. Probably this is because the repair modules on the ship have run out of supplies (a feature that was added during this beta). I think the order should be fixed so that it allows all retreated ships to return to their regular behavior when they run out of repair supplies. Such a change would probably require an extra check to prevent non-self-repairing ships from being given Cautious orders (though the order might just do nothing in those cases).

Sure, Cautious should work like that. But even if it did, you’ve got a retreating enemy ship to consider and factor into your fleet build. Its possible Ive misunderstood the point of this thread, I am knackered. But the gist I got was that it was frustating for AI ships to want to run away and repair, not that there was a problem with the Cautious order (which has already been brought up and discussed and whatnot).

Harathan, I think we’re all saying the same thing in different ways. Nobody is suggesting that you shouldn’t have to deal with retreating ships in survival. The only (very limited) point that anyone is trying to make is that it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t just lead to a bunch of boring downtime.

In which case the problem is with the Cautious order itself, which has already been covered. As I said tho, thats not the impression I got from the OP. It reads to me like wtfwillis is moaning about the enemy ships having the Cautious order at all in survival mode. Mainly the line “it doesnt help the enemy at all” was what made me think this.

Really? He even points out that, if anything, it’s an advantage for the player when the AI has cautious orders, since it gives your ships times to repair/recharge before the next wave. I thought it was pretty clear that he was just unhappy about the unnecessary delay.

Maybe your right. Thats not the way I read it tho.

I’d be inclined to think that he simply didn’t know about the possible bug with the cautious order rather than just that he was whining. Fixing that issue would also fix his complaint, since the fleeting ship would eventually turn around and come back to fight his non-moving ships.

There is another issue that I think forms a subtext to this thread: Some players don’t like that ships can be designed without engines. While I don’t feel any need to insult the folks who do build ships that way, I do think it is a questionable game design decision on clifski’s part. Perhaps an “Engine Only” module slot would eliminate some of the advantages that kind of ship design offers now (the Imperial “Weapon Platform” hull could still be engineless).

Yes, I did say the cautious order makes it easier while also making it longer. My ships can repair/recharge while nothing is shooting at them. If there is any effect to my ships’ survival, it is a positive one.

Unfortunately, it makes an already long battle take much, much longer. This is especially bad for a game that pauses when not focused.

Whether your ships have engines or not, or your fighters are present or not, is moot. Engines eventually get destroyed, as do fighters. The enemy will run away, repair, come back, get whooped, then run away again and exhaust his repair supplies and not come back, putting us back in this problem. Perhaps if there are no repair supplies left, the enemy ship should do a kamakazi run or something. If nothing else, it would at least add another level of difficulty.

The easiest fix, in the short term, is just to remove the order. The better fix is to rework cautious so the ships always come back when they are repaired or when their repair supplies run out - better yet, just add a toggle to cautious for “All or nothing” where a ship with no repair supplies and nowhere to run will always just fight to the end, and enable this option for enemy ships in survival.

Ive never been in the position where my engines are destroyed and my ship isnt also dead. Most of my designs, by the time the engines go, the ship is already lost.

Now that the OP has been clarified tho, we’re back on the Cautious order needing to be fixed. Which we already know about.