It’s interesting what influence the seed fleets had on the resulting chain of matches. Think we forgot anything? 
To illustrate, SAC #10 trounces #1 through #9 with a method of maximum embarrassment. We got sloppy, gents!
I see what you are saying.
I posted an SAC-10 also. Basically, a bunch of short range fast Tribe cruisers beat anything posted so far, except for your SAC 10 and Blitz’s.
The Order are rough.
I assumed Yurch was talking about fighters.
Sloppy indeed!
I didn’t forget 'em, I think they’re lame, and don’t use 'em.
Any fleet that takes some expenditure against fighters is going to be at a disadvantage to one that does not, provided there are no fighters in play.
So obviously we need to get some fighters in play to even things out.
Yeah, once I got rid of the idea that I needed things like shields, armor, missiles or beams, and just loaded that 8/7 tribe cruiser with 8 howitzers and a couple of cheap engines, even a total noob like me could win against quite a few of those challenges. Put a few ships with no weapons in front to serve as decoys while you’re closing and it becomes shooting fish in a barrel.
SAC 11 is up. Order. 10 9 and 8 had not much fighter defence and were asking for it. The cruisers themselves aren’t very good. Might need to ask mrblitz a few things.
A couple of concerns I found for the order
- Radguns purportedly have to pass through both shields and armour to do radiation damage. This seems to be a counter to tribe, who regularly hull tank. But even if I loaded up a ship with them, the tribe lasergun ships still won.
- Some order cruisers are too big and don’t have good fire density. Perhaps a similarity to empire here.
One thing occurs to me. While I think this is an awesome idea (any GSB metagame action gets my vote) I’m not entirely convinced that we need the 0.15 speed rule. It’s a pretty small map as it is, so even the tankiest fleets will engage pretty quickly compared to, say, Defend Caspian IV. And while I’m not one of the uber-statisticians that post on these boards, I’d be surprised if having to include so many engines didn’t give some advantage to one race. It certainly limits the tactical options available IMO.
Thoughts?
SAC 12 is another fighter heavy deployment
I agree 0.15 is really quite fast, it makes a lot of styles of fleets impossible. As speed in this game is a defensive measure in and of itself, I don’t think you need to enforce anything, except that maybe ships have at least one engine to avoid stalemates, where both sides are a stationary gunnery platform.
If you feel that a slow speed is not enough of a disadvantage, then that would be more of a general balance issue.
Oh, and as a newbie, I love these challenges to hone my skill. I can’t yet design a fleet that would beat all of them, but just designing a fleet for each of them, until I beat the specific SAC is a challenge of itself. They all show great versatility and some very smart tricks. Compliments to those that designed them!
Dunno.
Weight/thrust is a direct ratio, so a .15 speed is requiring everyone to make a minimum investment percentage towards engines. I’ve no doubt that it precludes some designs that require crazy cruiser real estate, but I just wanted to keep the first iteration of SAC interesting. I don’t want players feeling compelled to use .03 speed cruisers just to counter someone else who does so.
On the other hand, I’m not sure what speed Follick’s cruisers are with #12 - those things are slooooow.
Maybe the next SAC-2 map we’ll drop that requirement and just outlaw the color green or something.
Some ideas for another SAC contest:
Still have a minimum speed, just make it lower, like .07 - .10.
Require stock races from vanilla GSB. The Order is brand new, and a lot of people don’t have it yet and most people already know how strong the Tribe are with their uber hulls. Make sure if you’re posting the next challenge, that expansion content isn’t checked.
13 is up. Deeply flawed, but this one is too strange not to post.
The fun starts when the cruisers go down.
Yes those cruisers are slower. Feel free to ignore them if you want.
SAC 15 is a slow moving tank fleet that has defeated SAC 1-14 including both SAC 10’s. As one of those challengers has indicated, it doesn’t win every time. Many challenges are very close. In fact SAC 15 had the hardest time defeating my own SAC 2, which beats it more than it loses.
Please take note of the cruiser down in the corner. It represents what I believe is an important, albeit in limited situations, new tactical innovation in GSB. Someone else may very well have done that before, but I haven’t noticed it. It is not useful everywhere, but there are several challenges that this fleet would have lost to without it. Can you figure out what it does?
I’m working on a faster .15 speed fleet using the same basic tactics that, I hope, would accomplish much the same thing.
This is fun.
Initially I thought it was a carrier. Is it to keep 10% forces long enough for the fighters to kill off something?
I’ve added a couple more as well; one each from the Order and the Tribe. They weren’t tested against all challenges, so were uploaded as ‘SAC A’ and ‘SAC B.’
If you search on challenges by ‘map’ you’ll probably see these challenges under the ‘SAC-1’ map.
The tribe one of the pair is very strong; the order one is hopefully interesting; both of them have defeated some key, previous SAC-1 challenges in testing.
I’d say, for the next SAC; raise the points to 40,000, but keep the pilots the same; or keep the points the same and lower the pilots. At 30k points/150 pilots, you’re averaging 200 points per pilot.
200 points per pilot is a fairly fighter heavy battle. Defend Caspain IV is fighter heavy, but has a lesser fighter ratio than this (~267 points per pilot).
In my opinion, things get more interesting when you give out somewhere between 300 and 500 points per pilot.
You know, it’s really hard to make a respectable plasma fleet without resorting to that goofy retreat tactic.
It needs to be done though, if only to get all these tank fleets under control.
This is indeed fun, although scrolling through the challenges to find the SAC ones is quite a pain. If you’re reading this Cliff, streamlining the challenge browser would, I think, be at the top of lots of players’ wishlists.
I’m still not 100% sure about what effect that cruiser has on the battle, but it totally screwed the fast retreating plasma cruiser tactic I’ve been working on. My group toward the top of the map did exactly as expected - retreating whilst firing barrages of hot plasma death into your main group. Meanwhile, no matter what engagement range I set, the cruisers nearer the centre of the map - about halfway between the main group and the corner cruiser - stayed stock still and were demolished by missiles and fighters.
I can’t quite work out why this is happening, although I’ve noticed similar behaviour before using retreating tactics. I do have a hunch that when presented with two equidistant targets that are a fair distance apart, something about the engagement range behaviour gets a bit screwy. Maybe the ship’s line of retreat from one of the targets takes it into range of the other one, at which point it gets stuck in a loop retreating from each in turn but never actually getting out of range of both.
If I have time tomorrow, I’ll try to put this theory to the test a little more. It’s entirely possible that (a) I’m completely wrong about your reasoning for putting that cruiser there, or b) my deployment / orders for a retreating fleet aren’t up to scratch.
Oh, and one final thing guys and gals: there are now at least two cruiser designs in the SAC challenges that move at <0.15. What’s the general conscensus on the speed rule now?
Retreat orders are pretty screwy and are broken quite easily.
It is a related issue to what I bring up here. The attacker chooses one driving target and one target only when:
The previous target dies
The attacking craft comes back after breaking off with “cautious” orders
The attacking craft breaks formation
For retreating purposes usually the problem is that the driver is not retreating from the closest target. Sometimes you actually can observe the ships keeping perfect distance from enemy ships in the middle or rear of the formation.