I posted this in another thread, but I wonder if the problem is with laser fighters that can crit cruisers and frigates to death… then why mess with the power ratios of the fighters, why not disallow fighter weapons that aren’t specifically anti-capital ship weapons from doing crits against frigates and capital ships? There could be ways to maybe get the critting ability back, like maybe an anti armor nanyte missile that does minimal armor damage (maybe none if they have repair bots) but during it’s effect it allows fighters with anti fighter weapons to have crit chances again and doubles the crit chance of other anti-cap weapons.
This would push players to field more varied fighter forces which I’d like to see. Another related part of this is how easy it is to kill the slower fighters… something has to be done so that Having a torpedo and a slice of armor isn’t an immediate death sentence for a fighter… heck for that matter having anything less that 2 engines is essentially a death sentence.
I definitely understand your point, but I would argue that some level of anti-cheating will be necessary once the game is released
Can you set up a server to automatically run through scenarios? Any time someone places 1st (or in the top 10), you could automatically run their fleet against the challenge on your server and verify the score. There is some randomization that happens in each battle, but a margin of error can be established to keep the legit scores in and the cheaters out.
I just want to make sure the top scores will always actually mean something
From my experience, dedicated anti-fighter cruisers have two big problems currently: Multiple tractor beams will target the same fighter, but the actual guns don’t seem to prioritize fighters that are caught in tractor beams. So if you slot too many tractors, frequently they’ll all gang up on one or two fighters but then turn off before those fighters actually get shot down.
To bring down fighters you usually want only the bare minimum in tractor beams, one or two per cruiser, and then as much volume of fire as you can get. This is way defensive fighter squads are so helpful, sixteen shots at a low fire interval pretty much guarantees that something will hit an immobilized fighter.
I have to say that the more I play Survival Mode, the more I mess with ship designs, the lower my score gets…the more frustrated I get with it.
As for Anti-fighter Cruisers, and Frigates in general, in this mode, I’ve found that the enemy appears to make a be line for them. In one fleet setup I had a pair of dedicated Anti-fighter Cruisers and everytime I field them they are the first to be taken out. Then the fighters simply overwhelm the rest of the fleet.
Sometimes you see two beams on one ship, but that should be where a single beam has been placed in a hardpoint with teo turrets, and is purely aesthetic. You shouldnt (often) see two different installed tractor beams grab the same fighter.
Guns definitely should be prioritizing fighters caught in a beam, if they are ordered to engage fighters at all.
i found this thread a little amusing i must admit… the (apparent - i’m on holiday, reading it all in a lump) reaction to people posting higher scores than others managed was an almost immediate discussion on how to prevent cheating. almost as if the scores were unbelievably high.
couple 'o comments on the comments though.
serverside simulating the battle is a very bad idea. for one, it will take a lot of cpu for each one, and unless the rng seed is presented along with the depolyment - it’ll be wrong. potentially totally ‘omg you cheated!’ wrong.
also, the speed the fight is run at has an effect - bullets move 4x the speed at 4x timestep, and can skip over things. it may happen less so with stock weapons, but that would potentially make a server run totally different from the actual battle. (and is actually something that could do with being checked/corrected - you could have a fleet that wins at 4x and fails completely at 1x. that’d be a bug)
and what i just thought of - the web server could well not even be running windows… meaning a chunk of development time to strip out the windowness/ui/graphics just to try and catch the 1/1000 bad apple.
i don’t personally see any reason to spend time and/or effort making the score system tight. if there were prizes, yes. if this was a huge community, maybe. but as it is - anyone who cheats like that will be found out eventually. and then, everything they’ve done - every accolade they had will be dust, all the people who thought they were cool… will shun them. there’s not really many other reasons to be gaming the system (apart from ‘because it’s there’, and to be quite honest… the more complex you make it, the more likely that is to happen!
Escort your capital ships with your own fighters. They do a much better job of killing enemy fighters than cruiser weapons do. The armor and repair systems are just to keep your cruisers operating while the fighters kill off the enemy fighters.
Eh. Have you ever seen the high score lists for your average Flash game, such as you find on Kongregate or what have you? They’re routinely full of “999999999999999” at the top, followed by “185024” in about 27th place. People will abuse anything and everything, community or no, for no reason.
The problem is that, if you don’t keep bad scores from being on the high scores list, you may as well not have high scores at all. Most systems only show the top 10 or something, and since those will be full of fake scores, you’ll never actually see the “real” high score, or be able to set one yourself.
Even if you saw every score, you still couldn’t tell which scores were real. If it’s possible to enter a fake high score, I could easily enter x+100 and get a 1st place score that looks legit. All it takes is a few lamers doing this to poison the high score list.
Just for the record, I don’t think anyone is cheating right now
I disagree! It doesn’t take much CPU to run the game with full graphics turned on, imagine how quickly you could simulate a game without graphics rendering. Also, the check wouldn’t be for every submission, just top scores. As to the game speed affecting the outcome: do you actually know this? As a programmer myself I know its possible, but its also possible (and more likely) that the game speed does NOT affect the outcome. Maybe Cliffski can confirm?
I know cheaters are almost non-existent so far, but we are still in beta here. I am not saying my suggestion should absolutely be used, but some form of anti cheating should be. This is the internet, it’s dangerous!
Just got about 70K with four cruisers and three squadrons of laser fighters. The laser fighters were doing serious damage. I hadn’t realized that I had two ECM Shock weapons on my cruisers…I knocked that down to one and added another light plasma. That may help the score a bit, as it let me add in another cruiser to bring my fleet up to five.
In the game previous to that, all of my capital ships had died, but my fighter squads were still shooting and killing other ships. Sadly, I had already received the “You lose, loser.” message so my score stayed in the 44K range.
As an aside, do the Empire ships in this scenario kamikaze you when they get close to dying? I had an awful lot of them close to my ships and just hang around until they went boom.
I’m pretty sure that they do, and it’s the second-nastiest thing about the scenario right after the uber-damage fighters. A close range detonation can wipe out a single armor portion, which then cannot be repaired. Have that happen a couple of times, and it won’t matter how many nano repairs you have - fighters will turn you into hamburger.
This isn’t happening every time, but I’d estimate just under half the time all four tractors are grabbing only one or two fighters. When I’ve got some more time I’ll try to run a ton of trials with different fighter types and take an accurate count.
Yep, in my games that’s been their main weapon. Every one of my ships eventally loses its first armor module to an exploding enemy cruiser after which the fighters can finish the job. I don’t think the enemy ships are using a deliberate kamikaze tactic, though. I think it is more likely that there is a bug in some kind of collision avoidance logic that tends to make ships fly straight at each other instead of staying away. It’s been discussed in this thread over in the Support forum.
I just played two games of survival mode and I like it.
My fleet consited of two cruisers, two fighters and a bunch of escort frigates. Scores were 20k and 25k, the second one due to adding shields and armor to my frigates and a repair kit to the cruisers.
I’ll try next with the cruisers + fighters approach and see how that scores.
Those are anonymous kids playing a free game. Every highs core in GSB has to be submitted with someone’s username and id. They have to have bought the real game with real money, and are trivially banned for life
