Perhaps this has been brought up before, but I think the success/defeat conditions need some polishing- its possible to lose a game, even when victory is still achievable.
A quick example: Load up Battle of Mexallon II (normal/easy). Stack your fleet with (only) a pile of cheap, fast fighters- you should have most-but-not-all of your pilots filled, and about half of your ship value. Run the battle- you should mop the computer easily. Go back to the fleet page, and, to your fighters, add as many points in expensive-but-vulnerable cruisers as you can (I used my standard anti-fighter cruiser- it has no heavy guns. You should be able to add at least 3). Set your fighters to sit in formation (tied to the last cruiser that will likely be killed) at a corner of the map. Run the game, and watch as just your cruisers get killed and you fail the battle, even though you still have your fighters waiting, untouched.
Obviously, this specific example takes some work to create, but the point is that it clearly exists.
As I don’t know exactly what the conditions are, I don’t have a GREAT suggestion on how to resolve it, nor do I suggest removing the function, because in 99% of battles, it works great.
That would make a good scenario. Escort that rich kid, where if you lose that ship, you lose. And of course he wants to be in the center of the screen and charge headlong into the enemy.
The metric used by GSB to determine when to end the game is based on hitpoints. The percentages displayed in the upper corners of the game screen show each fleet’s strenght as the proportion of HP left relative to the starting total. The game ends when one fleet is at 10% or less (or when it decides there’s a stalemate situation).
That metric has some shortcomings, as shown by the scenario you described, where a fleet of fighters that would win alone will lose instead if useless cruisers (with many more HPs) are added to the deloyment.
I think it would be better if the game used price rather than hitpoints to determine a ship’s strenght. Fighters would be valued more apropriately by such a metric and probably would not be counted as losing a battle where they could still win.
I believe with just fighters left, that this percentage is higher (40%?). However, since a very long-running battle may end the game even though neither side is down to 10%, that may be part of the cause too.
To maximize the honor from some missions you need to use fighters protecting some decoy to deal with the enemy fighters alone, and in many situations you’ll be conceding defeat even though you’re winning.
I’d like to suggest an easy fix for this: Never concede defeat for me, I have the “Admit Defeat”-button ready. When the opponent surrenders, allow me to ignore the “You win” dialog and replace “Admit Defeat”-button with a “Show Mercy”-button.
I have to agree with this. I just finished making two in-game videos to show this, but since I see this is already brought up, I wont bother posting them. It just happened to me moments ago but I had a Frigate and a Cruiser that were still able to mop up.
The solution which has already been suggested by wicked is, I think, the way to go. Add a “Continue Battle!” button to the victory/defeat dialog that will take you back to the battle, and will cause a fight to the death. The “Admit Defeat” button becomes an “End Battle” button which causes the game to refigure who the winner is. This makes it so that no matter how off the victory/defeat algorithm may be. we can still force the battle to continue, and perhaps snatch a victory that we otherwise would have lost.