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Missiles need to be rebalanced. They are too slow. For this one, I'm guessing to save cycles they had them move to your final destination and not move toward your current location at each tick. |
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If the missile "knows" your ship's path, that's a problem. OTOH if it's predicting where you're going to be based on your current velocity and acceleration, I feel like that's legitimate. In fact, that's something that's actually done with real-life weapons [1]. Based on my experience in the game, this actually seems to be what's happening, with bullets at least. In fact, it's an important tactical principle in this game: If you move in a straight line through a hail of bullets, you'll get hit a lot because the bullets are fired based on the assumption you'll maintain such a course, but if you take a curved path every turn, you won't get hit nearly as much. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_targets |
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I made a two-waypoint flight path with afterburners and max engines: http://i.imgur.com/IeeFitk.jpg Result: The missiles followed me downwards as I moved in that direction, then started moving upwards only when I reached the first waypoint and started moving to the next. This indicates that the missile precognition is limited to the next immediate waypoint, which seems fair (and making it more realistic might well be a lot of work for little gain). The problem I see is that you don't actually get to do something like this particularly often (certainly not on more typical engine settings). Missiles are very slow (as ptarth notes) but can turn on a dime, so the best way to evade is to just move straight away from them. If this is to be fixed, I'd change them to fly faster and have larger turning circles. |
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I understand predictive targetting, and clearly that's needed, but they need to respond to ship facing/velocity, not a precognitive awareness of accelleration and flight path. If they are going for the waypoints, this is a bit better (maybe the missile cluster I had was just so slow I didn't notice the 2 stage turn, and they do a kinda "wavy" thing that can make it difficult to tell exactly what they're doing. Which is why I made this a "note to test" instead of a bug or issue.) I really like the idea of missiles being faster and having inertia/turn radius, as that'd allow you to flank the missiles and get back around to the targets behind them, instead of just having this impenetrable wall of destruction that makes it difficult (or impossible with enough enemies) to get close enough to shoot at the launching craft. |
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The problem I'm having with the whole thing is that I find myself running into bullets (and missiles) more than they run into me. And not bullets that were on the screen, but bullets dropped by craft during the predetermined flight. Which is fine if you're heading straight at the enemies or something like that, but when you're flying at perpendicular angles, or even in wavy "juking" (non-leadable) patterns, I still find myself smashing into the sides of shots, and missiles that should've been out maneuvered, but turned around and waited for me. Now, for most bullets this isn't too big a deal, you just adjust shield power acordingly, but there are two classes where this becomes a real problem: Missiles and Disruptor boilts. If the only reasonable defense is "dodge" and you can't dodge, then there is no defense, so these weapons basically just require you to run away and waste turns that shouldn't be wasted. |
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Just watched an enemy ship dodge a giga cannon shot by slowing for a moment to let it pass, then speeding back up to finish it's flight, so clearly the player's shots are predictive, but not precognitive, and enemy ships can respond real-time (I see this alot with energy blaster too, I'll see if I can get a good screengrab of the energy balster thing, it's pretty clear when it happens certain ideal conditions). The player on the other hand cannot. |
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Got a good screengrab (not of the missile thing, but of the enemies reacting in realtime to shots fired after the "planning" phase). You can see the curve created by my ship firing at "leading" positions. That curve is created by the enemy slowing and turning to avoid the shots AFTER the planning phase ended, so it's changing it's motion in response to realtime data. Included the save too. |
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EnemiesReact.JPG (27,911 bytes) |
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Since I'm paused for a few seconds at least usually, the enemy could be creating (and locking in, same as player) flight paths that are then unadjustable during the flight. (weapon fire would stll be predictive in real time, but shouldn't be precognitive). Complete honesty: I'd rather click to start moving and have an "Enemy still planning move, please wait" blink across the middle of the screen than the frustration of them dodging in realtime and firing precognitively. Spreadshot used to make this a moot point (they couldn't dodge the spread, so they didn't do it), but since its nerf, spreadshot is actually, in all ways, less effective than the minigun, which I now use in it's place. Also, because the energy blaster is slow enough for the enemy to dodge, I tend to use minigun for everything now and only use energy blaster when close or in the few setups where they can't decelerate and turn quickly enough to dodge (and have shields or ballistic resist armor and there aren't any small craft to draw off fire, and, and, and...). |
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EnemiesReact2.JPG (17,530 bytes) |
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To be fair, given this used to be all calculated in real time, the enemy ship behavior makes sense. The question is then: Should enemies be bound by pre-planned routes like the player is? If so, that might take a ton of work to work out ship AI of that nature. A moderate compromise would be to remove knowledge of the waypoints from the AI and then have the AI adapt in real time to the ships current location, heading, and velocity. |
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I don't think it would be hard to fix the AI, simply ignore any shots fired during the turn (flag them or something, or have a creation time property, make anything created during the current turn invisible to the AI), then the AI reacts as the player does, only to information it would've had during the planning phase. Not fixing this results in penalties to the player based on GUI/design limitations (rather than player decision making). It also makes long range weapons much less useful than they otherwise should be against moving targets. It also happens with ship movement (and again can be easily fixed by making this turn's movement invisible to the AI - not for weapons, but for pathing). I've had enemies accelerate, turn, and generally maneuver in response to my movements during the turn, rather than my predicted path, etc. Basically, weapons fire needs to respond to real-time movement, but AI pathing needs to respond only to last turns weapons fire and maneuvers, or predictions based on last turns movements. OR player weapon fire needs to be made "psychic" as well, but since this would also require the AI to create motion paths, there's no reason to go with the lesser solution. |
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Hmm, I never got to play the game when it wasn't turn based, but I imagine you would create a flight path (of any length or convulution of waypoints), then unpause, then pause agtain and change the flight path/targets/weapons as needed, then unpause? Giving each "turn" a variable length based on hitting pause? If so, then yeah, the current behavior makes sense, since the player could also adapt. (In fact, this actually sounds way better to me, wonder why it was changed...) |
- Anonymous
