Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

Moderator: Oberlus

Post Reply
Message
Author
Ophiuchus
Programmer
Posts: 3433
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2014 10:01 am
Location: Wall IV

Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

#1 Post by Ophiuchus »

One idea to use combat speed in the current system:

When shooting at passive ship (one not set to attack/interfere), roll a dice depending on ship combat speeds. If the hunted ship is faster than yours, there is a chance that you will miss.

For example chance_to_hit == ( attacker_combat_speed / fleeing_combat_speed ).
So for a medium basic hull (speed 60) attacker shooting at a passive organic hull (speed 90), one shot in three is wasted in average.

I think this would be very easy to implement and would differentiate the influence of the hull types a bit more (and feel a little bit more "realistic" as well)
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

User avatar
Vezzra
Release Manager, Design
Posts: 6095
Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2011 12:56 pm
Location: Sol III

Re: Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

#2 Post by Vezzra »

As that kind of breaks the basic design decision not to have to-hit-chance mechanics in or combat system at all, I'd rather factor that in by having faster passive ships having a reduced chance of getting targeted.

dbenage-cx
Programmer
Posts: 389
Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2016 12:08 am

Re: Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

#3 Post by dbenage-cx »

Vezzra wrote:... I'd rather factor that in by having faster passive ships having a reduced chance of getting targeted.
Sounds like that could tie in well with targeting computers.

Telos
Space Squid
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu May 09, 2013 4:46 am

Re: Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

#4 Post by Telos »

A related issue is that passive ships with heavy stealth will avoid combat if only one enemy is present in a system (that's good), but will join into three-way combat if two enemies are present in the system to initiate the combat (that's bad!).

I can see two easy solutions, each of which might also help with the OP's concerns.

First, the system that chooses which ships will participate in combat could exclude passive-stance ships whose stealth is high enough to avoid detection by anyone else who is present. This solution could also be extended to allow passive-stance ships, especially ones with higher speed than any (visible) aggressive enemies, to have a chance to avoid even being included in combat in the first place. This restriction on who enters into combat needn't violate any (IMHO misplaced) desire to have combat itself be largely deterministic.

Second, the system that "decloaks" cloaked ships after round 1 could be made to exempt ships that didn't fire weapons that round, instead allowing those ships to remain cloaked. This would keep passive unarmed scouts from stupidly joining into brawls between third parties. However, this wouldn't directly allow *armed* passive-stance ships to restrain themselves from joining into a nearby brawl. A simple solution would be to make the passive setting be a firm order to avoid combat, and to have armed ships refrain from firing, and hence from decloaking, in any battle where they have the option to remain undetected. Other more complicated solutions could allow various conditions and/or random chances to determine whether or not a ship that is stealthy/fast enough to steer clear will nevertheless join in. E.g., you might make passive-attitude ships steer clear except in the case where visible allies are present, in which case they will be obligated to join in. Or you might make "passive" ships opportunistically decide to ambush tempting soft targets, while steering clear of more dangerous threats. It could be interesting to have racial traits affect these decisions: disciplined races always follow orders exactly, cowardly races take any opportunity to flee, honor-bound races always defend their brethren, cunning races pick only those fights that they can win, aggressive races never back away from a fight. This sort of restriction on targeting eligibility could also be extended to allow for visible fast ships to keep themselves out of range of slow pursuers, or even for slower ships to evade being targetable as long as they have slower or more aggressive allies present to engage pursuers. This would also be a good step along the way toward a combat system that allows for long-range weapons, kiting, and the ability for ships to use speed to close in to where they can use shorter-ranged weapons.

Ophiuchus
Programmer
Posts: 3433
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2014 10:01 am
Location: Wall IV

Re: Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

#5 Post by Ophiuchus »

Telos wrote:A related issue is that passive ships with heavy stealth will avoid combat if only one enemy is present in a system (that's good), but will join into three-way combat if two enemies are present in the system to initiate the combat (that's bad!).

...
Hi, i took the liberty of starting a new thread with your post so we can continue there:
http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopi ... =6&t=10383

I'd like to keep this thread about combat speed, not stealth.
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

Telos
Space Squid
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu May 09, 2013 4:46 am

Re: Give passive fast ships a chance to escape

#6 Post by Telos »

Speed and stealth are intuitively quite closely related though, as each is a mechanism that can be used to avoid getting shot at when you don't want to. The main differences are just that stealth can completely hide your presence until you want to reveal it (usually by firing weapons from a desired range), whereas speed never hides your presence and only allows you to gradually change distance from an enemy. So long as the game continues to idealize away from lots of the details about where exactly ships are located, high combat speed and high stealth will amount to pretty much exactly the same thing on passive-stance ships: both amount to a way of keeping such ships from being targeted by opposing weapons. If people were to follow the OP's suggestion to allow speed, in addition to stealth, as a way to evade unwanted combat, then (so long as the game continues to idealize away most details about ship locations) that almost surely would end up using pretty much the same mechanics as stealth uses. So there's no reason to try to excise discussion of stealth from discussion of speed.

Here is one interesting difference between stealth and speed though. The game's design documents describe starlanes as being sort of like the Deep Space 9 wormhole, with a particular smallish region of space that serves as entry/exit point. A fleet could conceivably guard that small region and get a chance, at least briefly, to engage even a fast ship trying to enter or exit the wormhole. In contrast, a good cloaking device might conceivably be able to allow a stealthy ship to avoid engagement entirely. If you wanted to represent that difference in-game (and I'm not at all sure you should), then you'd probably make passive fast ships that just emerged from a wormhole fight in round one of combat, before becoming untargetable for later rounds, and you'd probably need to prevent ships that avoid combat by fleeing to a safe distance from using the wormhole that turn.

Again though, I'm not at all sure this would be good to include in the game though. The game is already highly unrealistic about distances within a star system, e.g., allowing all planets to be equally able to fire at all ships everywhere in the system (but only if there's at least a simple comsat in orbit to initiate combat, because, y'know, otherwise they somehow just can't be bothered to start firing). So long as planet locations are treated in this highly unrealistic fashion, there's probably no plausible way of making a speed mechanic seem all that plausible. So it's probably a mistake to obsess too much about the most realistic way to allow wormhole blockades or the like. Instead, it's probably better to just ask for what would make the funnest gameplay, within reach of what limited manpower the volunteer developers have available.

Post Reply