So I was trying my hand at top of the line cruiser combat and decided to try using a swarm cruiser to take out an alliance cruiser and a tribe cruiser. The swarm cruiser is fast so it can kite and make sure to keep itself in the correct range… Until it gets in a corner and dies because it can’t escape.
What would happen if the borders expanded significantly once the game started to allow you to kite the other ship? Or the keep moving command avoided the corners when possible?
Perhaps a maintain range command where the ship retreats at 90% of the engage range will also help. Currently ship retreats at 50% engage range, so kiting can only be emulated by setting engage range to twice the shoot range. It’s bad because anyone with slightly longer range can just fire while your ship sits there.
I was playing around some more and found that in general range keeping could use more work. I had an alliance python that I put up as a single cruiser combat challenge and it can do well against a lot of ships, but it needs to try to set the correct range (keep at range from tribe ships, charge missle boats). Unfortunately there’s no option for ranges to “pick the range that gives me the best DPS ratio to the other guy”
I LOLD. That would rock. Get right on that, Cliff! 