FreeOrion

Alright, it's time to do for ships what we previously did for Fighters. If you aren't familiar with that thread, take a quick look before commenting here. This is the first draft of the ship missions (again, it's in code form):

EDIT: Changed the description of ATTACK_THIS slightly, and added ATTACK_THIS_STANDOFF.



The MOVE_TO, ATTACK_THIS, and DEFEND_THIS missions are all just like they are in the fighter missions, with one exception. Ships given the DEFEND_THIS mission that have a suitable amount of PD weaponry will act as pickets for the ship they are defending. They will place themselves between the defendee and hostile ships with LR weapons.

ATTACK_THIS_STANDOFF is like ATTACK_THIS, but indicates that the attacker should keep its distance. See the other STANDOFF variants below.

PATROL_TO is similar to the fighter PATROL_TO, except that only non-fighters will be engaged. Ships will presumably be quite a bit slower than fighters, and so shouldn't chase them around forever.

ATTACK_SHIPS_WEAKEST_FIRST and ATTACK_SHIPS_NEAREST_FIRST are also very much like the fighter missions of the same names. The ship will close to within range of its closest-range non-PD weapon.

ATTACK_SHIPS_WEAKEST_FIRST_STANDOFF and ATTACK_SHIPS_NEAREST_FIRST_STANDOFF are just like ATTACK_SHIPS_WEAKEST_FIRST and ATTACK_SHIPS_NEAREST_FIRST, except that they make the ship attack at the range of its longest-reaching weapon, keeping the ship at a safer distance.

Finally, ENTER_STARLANE is pretty self-explanatory.

As always, comments welcome.

Looks pretty good. Maybe If a ship isn't on a starlane entry point, ENTER_STARLANE could automatically move the ship to the nearest starlane, or highlight all the starlane entry points (labled with the system they lead to, of course) for the player to choose a specific one, rather than simply doing nothing.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Some missions to consider adding:

-Hold Position Attack: Ships don't ever move from their assigned position, but will attack enemy ships, missiles or fighters that come into range that can be targetted.

-Hold Position Passive: Ships hold position and don't attack anything, even if it comes into range, including enemy missiles or fighters. Likely this is useful for stealthy ships you want to keep hidden. This may need to be modified so ships defend themselves if it's possible to tell whether a missile is targetting a ship, or just moving towards its position coincidentally.

Another way to organize or describe some "attack" missions is like so:

-Disengage: Ships move away from any enemy ships or fighters than come within (the enemy's) weapons range of them, but will fire back while fleeing (if this is possible in the game mechanics and/or given the applicable ranges).

-Cautious Attack: Ships move towards enemy ships enough to bring their own longest-range weapon into range while keeping the enemy's longest-range weapon out of range, whichever is further. This would require a fixed maximum range value for each weapon, which probably isn't a big problem or assumption.

-Agressive Attack: Ships move towards enemy ships enough to bring all their weapons into range, although keep outside the range of any weapons the enemy has that can't reach as far as the shortest-range of the ships' own weapons.

We might want to have "missions" or mission-like ongoing orders to enable / disable ships' weapons. Default would be to use all possible weapons, but you might want to select a group of ships that have a weapon that uses ammo you want to conserve, and order them not to use that weapon. You'd then order the ships with other missions, and they'd act as though they didn't have the banned weapon.

We could also have standing orders to "Attack nearest first" or "Attack weakest first" or "Attack Strongest First".

It might be better to have several categories of simultaneous / standing orders, each of which has a relatively few options, rather than having 20+ orders available that have all permutations of specific behaviours we want to include. If we have a basic mission (like the first five listed in this message), an authorizations standing order, and a targets priority standing order, that might / could / should be manageable to keep track of, and would make the individual choices in each category easier to describe and understand or decide on separately. Or perhaps it would overcomplicate the UI..?

How will we handle compnents that give special options to ships? Take trope transports for example, how do you order them to invade? If its attack what happens if the troop transport also has bombs and you want to soften the planet up a bit first.

I think it would ease the UI. The player should be able the choose very basic mission types and then go deeper(in a menu) to specify.

Good question. I'd like to answer it when we get there, though. The idea for these missions is to get the minimal system possible that allows us to start adding game logic to the combat system.

I was thinking along these lines too, after I made the OP. I think it would be better to have an engagement stance that is separate from the missions above. Hopefully two properties will be sufficient -- stance and mission. I'll change the OP later and we'll try another iteration.

Ok, here's version 2. I didn't edit the OP, so we could have them both around for comparison.



The missions are back to something a lot more like the fighter missions, except for HOLD_POSITION.

The attack postures are designed to control how the ship should move with respect to range, and how it should fire. This could perhaps more cleanly be defined in terms of a range-setting and a weapons-use setting, but I'm thinking ahead a bit here -- it is going to be a massively simpler interface to select 2 settings than to select 3.

STANDOFF allows a ship to stay at extreme range when using LR weapons. If it doesn't have any, it will stay as far away as it can while still using its SR weapons. ASSAULT puts a ship within SR range. BRAWL is all-out attack. It puts the ship at point-blank range, and even directs the PD weapons to attack the target, regardless of the presence of LR and Fighters. Note that the "95%" is a placeholder -- it may have to be closer than that to keep the weapons in range of moving targets. Testing will define the real number used.

HOLD_FIRE indicates that the ship should move to STANDOFF-range, but should not fire yet. SAVE_AMMO indicates that the ship should move to ASSAULT range, but not fire ammo-consuming weapons. It is assumed that all LR weapons will consume ammo, which explains the use of ASSAULT-range for SAVE_AMMO.

I should also note some assumptions made in this missions thread, and the one for Fighters.

1) Firing and movement are separate. For instance, Fighters will shoot at their primary target when in range, but will take pot shots at targets of opportunity when their primary target is in range. So, even when under an ATTACK_THIS mission, if a Fighter cannot hit its attack-target, it will fire on the nearest thing it can hit, with bombers preferring to hit ships and interceptors preferring to hit other Fighters. This firing policy applies to ships as well (though they will always pick near ships first, then near Fighters, regardless of type).

2) All weapons fire in all directions. Only range is considered when selecting targets/firing opportunities.

3) Fighters and ships will try to get out of the range of enemies firing at them, within limits of accomplishing their missions. So a ship with the STANDOFF mission that starts taking fire from the left, will move to the right in a big circle around its target, moving away from its attacker. The HOLD_POSITION mission is obviously an exception.

4) Ships' PD weapons are reserved for shooting down LR and Fighters. If there are no LR or Fighters around and there are ship targets in range of its PD, the ship will use its PD on ships, even though it may not be too effective. When a ship is given an ATTACK_THIS mission on a Fighter or Fighters, it will also use its ship weapons in addition to its PD to try to shoot down the fighters.

5) Weapons do the same damage at all ranges. Getting closer doesn't score more damage, and there is no minimum range.

No avoid mission, colony ships, and dedicated fighter carriers should have a dedicated mission to stay out of trouble. Other ships may occasionally find it useful. Or are players expected to keep an eye out and give move orders

For the first pass, I'd like to leave avoid-style missions out. Such things are not simple to do well. We would get far better results by letting the player designate where such ships should go if they should stay out of reach of the enemy's attacks.

Fair enough, apart from that it looks good. The whole Pot Shots concept is great

I still think authorization for individual weapons would be good to have. "Save Ammo" isn't specific enough for when you have two ammo-using weapons, of which you want to use one but not the other. Often is sci-fi, the choice of whether to use the nukes (or equivalent strategically significant weapon) is dramtic and important during a battle. It's probably not enough to be able to choose whether or not to build such weapons.

Note was made that ships could circle-strafe around their target to avoid defenders coming from the sides, but can anything be added to the orders about how attacking ships should react to defenders that are between the attacker and the target, or any other arrangement where moving closer to the target would have benefits unrelated to getting the attacker's weapons into range to fire on the target?

Is it necessary to build in the assumption that all LR weapons consume ammo? Regardless of whether authorization can be given for specific weapons, the save ammo behaviour could just modify whatever it does by considering only the ranges of weapons that use no ammo.

If a ship with no LR weapons that is ordered to stand off acts like it was ordered to assault, then is there any need to specifically mention "LR" weapons in the definition of stand off? Instead, you could just have a ship close to within 95% of its longest-ranged weapon, regardless of what type of weapon that is. The LR or SR classification seems irrelivant.

Alternatively, the specific mention of LR and SR could be kept and be make useful for behaviour. Ships with no LR that are ordered to stand off would not move in closer. This might be useful (or annoying?) when ordering a mixed group of ships to attack a target all at once...

I'm not fond of assumption 5, though it would certainly simplify things...

I'm wary of having the emperor of an interstellar empire control individual weapon systems. I'm even wary of her controlling whether to save ammo or not, but I think realistically not having that feature would increase player frustration. That question aside, I'd like to defer decisions about nukes, planetary bombs, bioweapons, or any other specific weapon of special importance until they are introduced into the game.


Like what? Can you give an example? The "what" here is very important imo, because I'm trying to keep the number of missions small, the complexity of the missions braindead-simple, and leave the sophisticated actions to human decisionmaking. If it's not simple and essential, I'm trying to leave it out of the automation.


I didn't think that was an assuption. I thought LR was synonymous with missiles. If it isn't then I can change things a bit I guess.


My idea is that you would give the same order to a bunch of ships all at once. If that order is STANDOFF, that tells them to get within weapon range, whether LR or SR. This means you don't have to tell your SR ships to close in with one order, and then tell you LR ships to move in with another order. I'm assuming here that the most common use case is that most of my LR-capable ships have little or no SR.

But back to your specific comment, say STANDOFF picked the range of the longest-ranged weapon. Say that weapon was LR, with a range of 10. If it has 5 other LR weapons with a range of 8, you have to tweak manually. So my conception was to divide weapons into groups based on LR/SR status, so that you can get into "LR range" or "SR range", and that will allow you to use enough weapons (i.e. all your LR or SR weapons) to avoid the need to micromanage range.

I thought that ASSAULT was redundant at some point too. It is necessary, though, because some ships may have LR and SR weapons. Without ASSAULT, one could not choose among "LR range", "SR range", and "point-blank range".


I think that is a very low-utiliy mission. If you want to keep some ship(s) out of the fight, just tell them MOVE_TO, then HOLD_POSITION. Alternatively, you could order those non-LR ships to DEFEND_THIS on the LR ships.


As you know, I'm trying to simplify things as much as possible. I think adding range-based damage modifiers is an unneccessary complication. I'm open to arguments for how it would improve the tactical game.

r.e. assumption 5, I think that damage decreasing with range is kind of a risk vs. reward kind of thing. In the current missions, for example, there's almost no difference between assault and brawl, because PD weapons are almost useless against other ships. The main difference is that the rest of your enemies ships behind the one you chose to "brawl" are more able to hit you. If damage decreases with greater range, then brawl would be a valid tactic for ships with heavier armor and higher range dissipation weapons, whereas more lightly armored ships would want to stay out of the enemy range with SR weapons that are more effective at a distance. However, a similar result might be obtained through accuracy penalties that increase with range, though I think the damage that a weapon does should be fairly predictable based on range. IMO, misses should not be too common at any range, as they make battles a bit too random for my tastes.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Unlike unit movement in games like Starcraft and Warcraft, having a gaggle of randomly selected ships assault should be (and is in reality) suicide. From a gameplay perspective, something similar to MOO3's fleets (but *much* more forgiving and customizable) would 1. make combat make a lot more sense and 2. make it easier for players to control 'epic' numbers of ships without all semblance of tactics going out the window. Without fleets, we have Starcraft micro going on, which should be the responsibility of the ship's captain and fleet admiral, NOT the ruler of a galactic empire.

One suggestion which I feel would be very valuable in terms of mission selection UI: if we use a system based on sub-menus there should be something like:

...the options listed below make some sense and could be used as behavioral flags to make coding AI simpler. It would seamlessly alter the style of control used per fleet to minimize micromanagement and maximize an overview of the battle, with any luck. NOTE: I assume combat to be turn based, but to speed things up, ships would 'remember' their order-flags. So rather than giving an entirely new set each turn, you give the battle an overview and make any changes you need, then ok it. Would MASSIVELY cut turn lag down in battles.

Notice the "missions" button in the center. Originally, when you click on something you pick "Defend" "Attack or "Move" and it'll automatically start to do it, and then you have the option (but not necessity) of narrowing your control down a little further with the other options. Move starts you moving, attack starts firing, defend sets defensive posture (perhaps lowering damage done to recharge shields faster or somesuch)

I apologize for the disjointedness of this, but the primary benefit would be that your fleet would START doing the general sort of thing you wanted it to immediately, and after you get that you can tune the specifics. Listing a bunch of missions will get frustrating very rapidly. So while a list might take 3 clicks, a much simpler system that took 3 or 4 to get the exact behavior you wanted is going to make it less stressful on players. It's even better if combat was realtime, because it would start the fleet doing the basic sort of thing you wanted them to do while you refined their orders.


If you click one, the name shifts to the center and the sub-options appear around it.

Posture
Aggressive -- Fires all weapons at target regardless of other factors
Defensive -- Fires only primary capitol ship weapons at target
Passive -- No weapons fire

Movement
Hold Position -- Doesn't move, or stops movement if moving.
Movement based on a target
Standoff -- Maintains long range to target as able
Close -- Moves toward target
Normal -- Select n' click + movement via way-points.

Weapons
Normal -- Uses ammunition normally
Conserve Ammo -- Fires half as often, stops firing when ammo =< 50% (customizable?)
Use No Ammo -- Stops firing weapons which consume ammunition

Tactics -- Note that there would need to be a LONG timer to shift between the two for balance reasons, and not a terribly short one. Intended use: if the enemy has a large number of weak ships or you know they rely on missiles or torpedoes, or if your enemy has ships that dodge enemy fire easily or are few but very potent. Player decision, but not something intended as something that would be advantageous to micromanage. Perhaps include a system for customized tactics of some sort. That would be interesting!

Rapidfire (Increases firing rate at the cost of damage and/or accuracy)
Aimed Shots (Increases accuracy at a significant cost to firing rate)
Normal

Targeting
Attack Closest -- Closest enemy
Attack Weakest -- Ship most likely to be quickly destroyed
Attack Custom Target -- Whatever you click on
Charge this target, firing at it.
Direct all weapons fire at this target with no change to movement orders.
Attack this target, then continue to attack the same type of target if in range.

Recall
Recall Fleet -- Fleet moves to the rear for damage control. Rear defined as the nearest fleet defined as "supply" or somesuch.
Retreat Fleet -- Fleet avoids contact with enemies and automatically retreats to nearest friendly or neutral starlane.
General Retreat -- All fleets immediately break contact and flee.
General Retreat