I’ve used a formation order, around a central ship. That central ship had its engine destroyed, but still had 2 repair modules plenty of supplies. It lasted another half hour. The other ships, while able to move, didn’t. They didn’t chase down one heavily damaged missile ship. Now if cautious worked, that ship would have fully repaired, came back, got pounded, and retreated. It would have done so over and over until it was out of supplies.
Now if I use an engineless deployment, this happens more regularly. I see that you don’t like engineless designs, but since the game allows it, and you didn’t write the game, I’ll have a deployment that uses them until the rules change. Besides, I think it’s cool to allow engineless for a more TD-type mode - it adds to the game, not detracts.
Anyway, in the above scenario with cautious fixed, the ship would have retreated, repaired, come back, got beaten down, retreated, etc. It would create a loop that would continue until the ships repair supplies ran out, at which point we’re right back where we started. So no, fixing cautious is not all that needs to be done. Cautious either needs reworking, or just simply remove it from survival. Removing it the easiest thing to do.
Please explain to me how the (no doubt) single Engine I you mounted on a ship with 2 repair modules, in the centre of a formation, is destroyed before any other component?
Here’s a fix for you: stop mounting only 1 engine on your cruisers. Here’s another fix: the waves in Survival should spawn on a timer, so you have to continue dealing with that one ship while its mates keep turning up. And here’s another: use x4 speed if youre bored watching space ships shooting at each other. If youre really getting bored watching the combat, then my best suggestion of all is stop playing space combat games.
No amount of discussion is going to make me endorse taking legitimate orders away from AI ships just because youre incapable of fielding a build that doesnt get its engines shot out from under it. And fielding a build with no engines should penalise the player, not reward them. Its a game about ship design. Design your ships better.
My thread got hijacked by someone’s crusade against engineless designs. Instead of some kind of real discourse on the problem, I get told my designs suck. I get told that I should only be designing my ships with engines - more than one even. There seems to be a group of people who think they should dictate how I play a game, and it’s not even a MP game, and they think I should have fewer options than more, so that what I do fits with their ‘ideal’ of the game.
Next maybe they’ll try to convert me to scientology.
I’ll play the game within the rules given to me by the game, thank you very much. If you have a problem with that, go cry elsewhere.
I don’t care what your guys religious views are. My view is there is a problem that needs to be addressed. It can be addressed one of several ways, one of which, for you engine nazis out there, is to force an engine (or rather, since one engine is not enough, as has been pointed out) two or more engines on a design. Another is to rework cautious, or remove it from survival.
Of course, fixing cautious alone won’t do it, as I now realize that the ships in question have exhausted all their repair supplies before their first retreat.
Sorry willis, I wasn’t trying to be mean, I was only joking about how absurd the thread had become. You’re right, the first few posters were unnecessarily snarky and the thread went somewhere else entirely.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that people want to dictate how you should play by reducing the number of options, forcing you into their ideal of the game. However, I think you’ve done the same thing. You’re right, the cautious order in survival mode means that ships without engines result in long delays between waves, but does that mean the cautious order should be removed? I don’t think so. It doesn’t work with your style of play, but that doesn’t make it wrong. As others pointed out, there are several ways around it: put at least one engine in your ship, add other ships for hunting down retreating ships, or whatever you need to do.
The cautious maneuver actually does make sense here. That ship is a long-range missile ship. If it gets damaged, it really should run away and shoot from afar. It would be nice if there were some better way to do this, but with the current orders, cautious is as close as it gets.
So yes, there could be no cautious in survival. Or cautious could work differently. Or we could add a different order that’s more fitting for that ship. Or you could add an engine. Any of these would work. Some people think no engines is unfair; I don’t agree. But they do have a point: just because you can’t hit that cautious ship without engines doesn’t necessarily mean cautious should be removed. As you said, “I’ll play the game within the rules given to me by the game.”
I’ve offered more solutions than that - a lower delay between waves could work. Maybe even have cautious ships retreat entirely - if they’re hooped there’s no reason for them to stay on the map. I’m not having survivability issues, I’m having game-time issues - it just takes too long for a game that plays itself, but won’t run in the background. Amusingly enough, had the game had the ability to run in the background, this would be far less of an issue. Right now I have to leave the game in focus on 4x, and even then it takes a good 3-4 hours to get through a survival match. It would be done in 2 if there wasn’t the introduced delay from the occasional ship ‘hanging out’ out of range.
See, that what I want - talk about options, not people trying to ram their ideals up my a**. I’m pretty sure I’ve said that I don’t have anything against enemies being cautious and retreating, what annoys me is that it needlessly effects the length of time a match takes to run. I didn’t know that cautious was buggy, although in my case fixing it won’t make a difference.
Man, I wish I could make it past 5 minutes in survival.
I actually find that waves can come rather quickly. Maybe it’s the way the next wave is triggered? I’ll often have killed every frigate and cruiser, with damn-near unstoppable fighters buzzing around me like mosquitoes, and within seconds the next wave of ships comes in (replete with more fighters!).
Still, making waves come on a regular basis is an interesting idea. It actually ups the challenge a bit: not only do you have to kill each wave, you only have so long to do it. Just compare it to tower defense games (which is nearly what survival mode is). One problem, though, is that it means ships need to be built for fast kills rather than playing a more defensive, drawn out game. I don’t know that I like it limiting strategies like that.
What would be even better is if we could go beyond 4x. With how slow ships move, how often they miss, and how many shots it takes to break shields, I find 1x takes over 10 minutes even for short battles. I always run at 4x, unless I feel like zooming in and admiring the graphics. Perhaps have options for 10x, 20x, even 50x? If what others have said is true, that would break the hit detection, which is a shame. Or maybe we could just make the base speed of ships and weapons faster, so that 1x isn’t so painfully slow. I imagine this would have the same deleterious effects on hit detection.
Another option would be to just jump to the end of the battle. Some people have said that it defeats the entire purpose of a game about gratuitous space battles, but I can’t watch a movie for 3 hours let alone watch computerized ships taking pot-shots at each other. I like to watch, but there eventually comes a point where I just want to know if I’m going to win or not (or last longer). Often times, I’d rather just be given the score then go back and watch the replay if I feel like it. It’s kind of like watching sports: it’s often more exciting to see the highlights. GSB can actually be a lot like a fantasy football league – you build your team’s roster, find out how you did (maybe watching a few highlights of some moments), then juggle your team around. You certainly don’t watch every game to see how well each player is doing.
Changing the speed is iffy for me. Sometimes it works, other time it doesn’t. It seems that the combination of missiles + fighters (I have missiles, they have fighters), actually make everything more than 1x slower than 1x. It seems there is a threading issue of some kind. My cpu load is never going above 2%.
I don’t know about making every wave follow after a set timeout, I’m thinking just better logic - send the next wave once the ships in the current wave has been destroyed or has retreated. The timeout right now is just too long.
Could you be hitting the notorious sound bug? Try turning off the pitch shifting for sound effects in the options to see if that fixes the performance of non-1x speeds for you. Or could try the new Hardware Sounds option that was mentioned in the “Bugs Fixed” for 1.13.
Since at least one other person has suggested putting engines on your ships, I suggest you start taking advice instead of making out that the people giving it are wrong.
There was no veiling, and no attempt to. I said it as it is. You came in and hijacked my thread about the delay of waves due to destroyed ships and made it about whether or not the builds have engines. Sure, I said “enemies in survival mode use cautious” and that it would be easiest to remove it, and that’s true - it’s the easiest fix, but not the best one. I do prefer ships that retreat as well, I just don’t want ships that are effectively out of play to cause excessive delay. Nothing else.
While I’ve been saying there is a problem with cautious, you came in and told me how I should play the game. If you want to discuss engines, go to a thread where that is the topic. That is not the topic here. I don’t care what you and one other person think how the game is to be played. It is irrelevant to whether or not cautious works properly, or if an effectively disabled ship should affect wave timeouts in survival.
I did find a workaround that consistently destroys all ships on my engineless build, and it did not involve adding engines.
I didnt hijack anything. You were having a problem, I suggested a valid fix.
In just one post you say both that the problem is with Cautious, then go on to say that the problem with Cautious is irrelevant. I like the logic there.
And hoorah, you fixed your problem by changing your ship build, which is what Ive been advising you to do all along, with or without engines. Im glad we can end this thread now its clear the problem was your ship builds and lack of patience and nothing else.
I just realized that you have completely misunderstood the problem, sorry about not being clear enough earlier (I italicized the part I missed the first time):
Ok, let me clarify exactly what the problem is, so that this doesn’t get more off-track and more adversarial:
The last wave in a sequence is a pack of ships, one of which is equipped with missiles and attacks at long range. Plasma can pound the ship down but from time to time it just barely escapes, practically disabled and definitely unable to repair any further. If that ship gets out of weapons range, it will sit there. This isn’t a problem in itself. The problem is that when it sits there, every new wave gets delayed. So I’m not sitting there, watching space ships shoot at each other. I’m literally sitting there watching nothing happen for a full 30 seconds or more after destroying every subsequent wave, even at 4x speed.
So in short, watching ships shooting = good, watching nothing happen = bad. Even if engines are involved, the delay can happen if the engines are disabled somehow, or you’re relying on a formation and that formation’s lead has it’s engines disabled.
I would like to see some logic that eliminates that delay. As I explained in my last post, I started this thread off by saying cautious is the cause of the problem. At the time I didn’t know cautious didn’t work properly. Now, with 1.14, I can see that the ship in question actually runs out of repair supplies and retreats, which means that fixing cautious won’t help this problem after all, and something else needs to be done.
Now, the game crashes in survival mode after about 2.5 hours (at 4x). When there is a ship out of range, my score is about 1/3rd of what it is when I have ship capable of obliterating every wave consistently, meaning that the retreated ship slows gameplay by 3x, and since it’s retreated, there’s no reason for that.
I also would like to point out that the game mode is survival, not elimination. There’s no reason to factor in hunting down retreating enemies, especially when it’s at the expense of survivability. Your suggestions to add engines are mis-placed: They drastically reduce ship survivability, which is against the goal of the scenario, in order to try and counter this delay. I think something should just be done about the delay, even though the delay itself probably helps survivability. Logic that can determine whether or not a ship is still in the fight and just sends the next wave would be ideal.
I think this is already in the game - once you appear to have won another scenario, the round will end, even if not all ships are destroyed. This could apply to survival, sending the next wave once it’s clear you’ve overcome the current one decisively.
Willis, FYI, I think there’s still some clarification needed about the Cautious order. The “fix” people generally talk about is actually addressing exactly the behavior you’re seeing - ships retreating with no repair supplies and never returning to the battle. The order otherwise works fine, as far as I know; it’s just dumb to have a ship wander away from the fight and never come back, and many people have suggested that the issue be addressed one way or another.
That’s to the best of my knowledge, anyway. If anyone has other information, please feel free to correct me.
I’m not sure what the current discussion is - I haven’t seen whichever thread discusses Cautious. It’s hard to say how it should work. I’m not sure it matters, as long as it doesn’t basically stop the game for long periods of time.
Right. So we have in fact 2 issues. Firstly the Cautious order needs fixing, as Supra has detailed. Secondly the timers on the waves may need to be tweaked slightly so there are fewer breaks in the combat. Neither of these things can be fixed by ship design, regardless of engines.
The fixing of Cautious would go a long way to solving the issue, and the timing tweak would round it off.
It would appear the issue here is that the AI is not using ‘cautious’ in a way that benefits it. The simplest fix would be to give that ship some repair so that it could repair itself back above the XX% that is triggering the ‘cautious’ so that it returns to the battle.
However, IMO that doesn’t address an underlying issue, which is that ‘cautious’ is a rather poor way to get a long ranged missile ship to skirmish (i.e. use its range to advantage by actively trying to stay out of reach of ships with short ranged weapons) - it only really makes sense for ships that can self-repair. I personally would really like to see a ‘skirmish’ type order, if only to try out using groups of fast frigates equipped with long-range missiles. I am sure people would find other uses for it though.
Edit: Oh, whoops, looks like I missed the last two pages of this thread :O. So sorry if I stated anything that’s already been mentioned. Still, I think my last paragraph stands.
