Combat Discussion

[Spocks-cuddly-tribble]

Botf had arrows for camera navigation...

It's an early test version. As told the outstanding Supremacy guys are still working on new stuff...

[the6the]

Outstanding they are!

quick question though. Will there be an option in the future, like there is in BOTF, to either go into tactical battle, auto resolve, or auto retreat. Or will it automatically take you to the tactical battle like it does now?

Really cool stuff guys! Keep up the awesome work!

[Misfire]

Was planning on adding a button to the combat window for auto resolve. The combat would then be resolved by the existing combat engine in Supremacy. The combat results would be a little different (turn based damage vs tick/frame based damage), but I don't see that as an issue as long as it's balanced to some degree.

[Misfire]

Botf had arrows for camera navigation...

It's an early test version. As told the outstanding Supremacy guys are still working on new stuff...

Yea there is still a lot to be done. The current options for controlling the camera are pretty limited, more needs to be done.

[Iceman]

I have got desired but unexpected result from the final combat against the Borg at Unimatrix 01.
Did anything change it the combat resolution? I had 82 ships, all decloaked, but too lose only one? The combat lasted 2 turns.

This is due to a conjugation of factors, including something that has not been implemented yet in the non-CE version of the game, which is all ships firing their torpedoes at the start of the round. Since ships fire according to their initiative, your (massive amount of) ships destroyed the Borg's (which are slow) before they could fire - so even taking 16 or so ships to down a Cube doesn't help the Borg.

The (auto) combat engine needs to be improved in a few areas. Made some changes yesterday, but mostly to combat logs and processing time.

[geordie]

so tactics against torpedoes should be available

Btw - is a new CE patch expected? I was plying like 230 turns of my first CE game, without any problems, but I am stuck by the error I have reported.

[Iceman]

so tactics against torpedoes should be available

Auto combat is very limited in what you can do; unless we implement Evade and whatnot with buttons.
I've been mulling over how to improve combat over the past few days, but I've been really busy at work, so there's not really much done yet. It's going to be a substantial amount of work.
I also want to take a look at AI shipbuilding again, they tend to overbuild some classes under certain circumstances.

Btw - is a new CE patch expected? I was plying like 230 turns of my first CE game, without any problems, but I am stuck by the error I have reported.

The error only triggers when you scrap or upgrade a station. Misfire has already fixed it some time ago, but he must be busy right now. I'll give him a nudge.

[geordie]

Thanks.
In my case it must be a station of other race, Like minor race station being destroyed, so I cannot do anything.

[Iceman]

Fix uploaded.
I also uploaded a new full build, with this fix already included.

[geordie]

I tried to test the Unity engine in bigger fights. Apart from some initial encounters, like 1 to 1 ship, I managed to test 9 destroyers against the Diamond, 40+ fleet against the Diamond and 70+ ships against the basic Borg armada. The test was successful, no problems, no errors. The only obstacle was that no Borg ship was destroyed, they always managed to escape. The Borg probe even has escaped from an encounter with my one scout mark 3.

[geordie]

I got first (but repeatable) hang in combat: my outpost versus cloaked scout.

Screenshot 2023-03-23 124215.jpg (369.07 KiB) Viewed 2795 times

btw - the background in combat is too dark sometimes

[Iceman]

I got first (but repeatable) hang in combat: my outpost versus cloaked scout.

Do you know if this battle was a ship vs a station? The logs show only one ship (Romulan) and nothing else. A battle between a single station and other ships will cause an error since stations don't exist in the combat engine yet.

[Iceman]

So, a recap of issues with the current CE build, mentioned in this thread:

- stations do not exist in the combat engine yet (single stations will hang the game)
(Echo Papa 607 is a ship but needs a 3D model too)

- add a auto-resolve button to the combat window

- improve camera controls

- the background might be too dark ? (maybe an option?)

- the model for the Romulan Colony Ship II doesn't load correctly


My own feedback from one of my games:

- cloaked ships start the battle with full shields, and they do not [/might not] fire first when engaging (a non-cloaked fleet can fire first on a cloaked fleet [effectively negating cloak], even if there has been no prior [first] contact between the civs)

- in 3-way battles, one of the civs' (the player's?) ships start the battle facing sideways (facing the left side of the screen)

- support ships (like colony ships) sometimes get deployed in front of combat ships

- damage and targeting might need to be tweaked

In this 3 way battle (me Dominion Scout vs 1 Romulan cloaked Scout and 2 Suliban cloaked Scouts), my scout was drawn sideways (facing the left side of the screen); the other ships were ok.
Also, the cloaked ships started the battle with their shields fully recharged.
BTW, I targeted one of the Suliban Scouts, and destroyed both in the same round.
In the 2nd round I fired on the Romulan Scout and destroyed it too.
I had no contact with either the Romulans or the Suliban before the battle.

Pages 9 and 10 of this thread also have Misfire's ToDo list, which might not be up to date anymore.
If you guys think of anything else, please post here.

[Spocks-cuddly-tribble]

Over there we had a discussion about transferring ownership of space stations in BotF: viewtopic.php?p=60191#p60191

In BotF it would be hard to change ownership of objects during tactical combat, but for you guys it should be easy to add a slightly altered 'ram' command when coding the base ram feature.

Best reserved for troop transports or special boarding party transports (smaller/faster/defense+ to increase chance to 'ram' the target before destruction).

Just remove boarding party transport at 'ram impact' and calculate random chance for enemy ship/station takeover (probability shouldn't be too high for balance reasons and since not a common star trek tactic).

You could also look into a 'beam boarding party' feature when shields down, but this might end up on the overcomplicated side of things...

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Will the new Unity licensing affect this project (e.g. in event of more than 200,000 installations)

[Iceman]

Over there we had a discussion about transferring ownership of space stations in BotF: viewtopic.php?p=60191#p60191

In Supremacy, the station owner and the sector owner cannot be different.
Stations are transferred on membership, systems with a station cannot rebel (to keep things simple) and cannot be invaded (landing troops can only happen when the defender is fully defeated).
I need to check what happens when breaking a membership agreement (or being bribed away) but I think the station is returned to the minor civ. edit: I checked, and it is returned.

In BotF it would be hard to change ownership of objects during tactical combat, but for you guys it should be easy to add a slightly altered 'ram' command when coding the base ram feature.

Best reserved for troop transports or special boarding party transports (smaller/faster/defense+ to increase chance to 'ram' the target before destruction).

Just remove boarding party transport at 'ram impact' and calculate random chance for enemy ship/station takeover (probability shouldn't be too high for balance reasons and since not a common star trek tactic).

You could also look into a 'beam boarding party' feature when shields down, but this might end up on the overcomplicated side of things...

Sounds somewhat similar to akido's ship assimilation code. (where's the borg smily when you need it?)

Will the new Unity licensing affect this project (e.g. in event of more than 200,000 installations)

Oh, definitely