Splitting off damaged ships

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defaultuser
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Splitting off damaged ships

#1 Post by defaultuser »

One thing that has always annoyed me is when you split damaged ships from a fleet, the game sets the new fleet to "hidden". I don't want that. It's never useful, and is often detrimental. Most of the time I remember to change it, but if I don't it will usually cause a problem later. Why was this considered to be a good idea?

I looked through the files a bit to see if there was some way to customize that, but didn't find anything. Is this possible, short of changed base code and compiling?

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Dilvish
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#2 Post by Dilvish »

defaultuser wrote:It's never useful, ... Why was this considered to be a good idea?
I'm pretty sure that the idea is that the whole point of spitting off damaged ships was to facilitate getting repairs for those ships, and that the player would therefore most likely want them to avoid combat (to the extent possible) in the meantime. Apparently that doesn't fit your own playstyle so well, but I don't recall ever seeing this complaint before-- the current behavior seems to match most people's playstyle well. Letting that be a customizable setting sounds OK, but likely will need to wait until there is a programmer who personally wants the modification.
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defaultuser
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#3 Post by defaultuser »

I'd be surprised if my playing style was that much different than others.

An example., fleet moves into enemy system. Combat ensues, some ships are damaged. Troop ships will follow next turn. I often split the damaged ones and send them off to another system and leave the banged up ones to hold the system. But if you don't change the status first, then shields and weapons start regenerating and now the invasion can't take place.

Another situation, after an encounter with enemy ships at a neutral location, I want to send the undamaged ones on while the others do self-repair rather than going to look for a drydock. Now enemy scouts and troop ships can get past those, leaving me to chase them down.

For the most part, being hidden will only prevent combat with other similar entities. It's not going help if you encounter enemy warships. I really don't see that many situations where it actually helps. Possibly with players using stealth.

But, if you can't configure it you can't.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

There is a toggle to set new fleet aggression, between passive, agressive, or automatic-per-fleet.
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Dilvish
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#5 Post by Dilvish »

Geoff the Medio wrote:There is a toggle to set new fleet aggression, between passive, agressive, or automatic-per-fleet.
It's true that if he had accidentally changed that to 'always passive' it would cause him much trouble, but I don't think that's really his issue. The auto-splitting of damaged ships will always set that damaged-ship-fleet to passive, regardless of the general new fleet setting.
defaultuser wrote:An example., fleet moves into enemy system. Combat ensues, some ships are damaged. Troop ships will follow next turn. I often split the damaged ones and send them off to another system and leave the banged up ones to hold the system. But if you don't change the status first, then shields and weapons start regenerating and now the invasion can't take place.
As you noted above, it's only the new fleet, the damaged ships, that is set to peaceful; the presumably aggressive original battlefleet remainder will still be aggressive. If there aren't any undamaged ships, then you will have to manually pull out at least one of the lesser-damaged ships to remain, and when you do that then it is automatically put back to aggressive (unless you had changed the new fleet setting to always-passive, which does not sound like a move you'd make). So I am still not seeing the problematic result you describe here. (Also, note that I say "at least one" of the ships-- if there are a lot of enemy planets in the system then a single ship might not be enough to repress the regen on all of them; my recollection is that it has to actually hit them, though there has been some talk of changing that.)
Another situation, after an encounter with enemy ships at a neutral location, I want to send the undamaged ones on while the others do self-repair rather than going to look for a drydock. Now enemy scouts and troop ships can get past those, leaving me to chase them down.
Sure, sounds like a good tactic in at least some situations, depending on remaining health and nearby threats, but it doesn't seem to me to say much about what the default damaged-ship-aggression should be.
But, if you can't configure it you can't.
There are lots of convenience features/customizations that would be nice to add but are overall very low priority like this, until it either captures the imagination of (or just plain aggravates) one of the devs. That's the main perk of being a dev-- helping realize those features that matter to you most. Even if you don't know how to program now, it's never too late to learn!
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#6 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dilvish wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:There is a toggle to set new fleet aggression, between passive, agressive, or automatic-per-fleet.
The auto-splitting of damaged ships will always set that damaged-ship-fleet to passive, regardless of the general new fleet setting.
To me, that is a bug... I'd have the toggle always work, so that if it's set to aggressive or passive, it always creates aggressive or passive new fleets.

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Oberlus
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#7 Post by Oberlus »

defaultuser wrote:I'd be surprised if my playing style was that much different than others.
To open a poll on this may be interesting.

Current implementation doesn't usually match my playstyle.

As defaultuser described, there are some situations in which one would prefer to keep combat behaviour instead of hiding, and it seems to me like it's more frequent the case where you prefer to keep combat behaviour.
The only case in which I want to keep stealthy after splitting damaged ships is when the enemy has less detection than I have stealth, and that is seldom the case.

Geoff the Medio wrote:To me, that is a bug... I'd have the toggle always work, so that if it's set to aggressive or passive, it always creates aggressive or passive new fleets.
Agree.

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EricF
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#8 Post by EricF »

Dilvish wrote:It's true that if he had accidentally changed that to 'always passive' it would cause him much trouble, but I don't think that's really his issue. The auto-splitting of damaged ships will always set that damaged-ship-fleet to passive, regardless of the general new fleet setting.
That's odd because I just tried this in a current game. I split off just the damaged ships in a fleet and created a new fleet. The split fleet was not set to 'Hide', but to 'Control System'. Just like the original fleet. The new fleet selection toggle is set to 'Auto'.
Am I misunderstanding the problem?

Using latest test build.

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Dilvish
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#9 Post by Dilvish »

Geoff the Medio wrote:To me, that is a bug... I'd have the toggle always work, so that if it's set to aggressive or passive, it always creates aggressive or passive new fleets.
Hmm, well, this split-damaged-ships feature was added several months after after the new-fleet-aggresssion-toggle was added, and the apparent author of them both clearly intended this handling (also see here.)
apparently Geoff the Medio wrote:// damaged ships want to avoid fighting more

So, it might be a design decision that you might no longer agree with, but I don't think that would make it a bug.

But I don't have a strong opinion on how it needs to be going forward, and it looks like you have the interest and history to deal with it so I'll leave it to you.

EricF wrote:That's odd because I just tried this in a current game. I split off just the damaged ships in a fleet and created a new fleet. The split fleet was not set to 'Hide', but to 'Control System'. Just like the original fleet. The new fleet selection toggle is set to 'Auto'. Am I misunderstanding the problem? Using latest test build.
I expect that you are misunderstanding, and that you manually split off the damaged ship from the fleet via dragging to the New Fleet bar rather than split it using the 'Split Damaged Ships from Fleet' command from the right-click menu. Please verify?
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MatGB
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#10 Post by MatGB »

I prefer having them be non aggressive immediately on for a slightly different reason: I'm generally having multiple fleets in the same system (normally organised by speed) and if I want to split of damaged ships after a battle I go through my fleets, when I get to the ones marked non aggressive containing warships I know they're the newly created fleets and start giving them move orders.

The UI across the board isn't great in this area but it's a fairly important player decision, relatively focal to the game, so more work could likely be done with it, I think the current default that a damaged ship is set to hide is slightly more intuitive/realistic and would be more obviously usable if avoiding combat became a more important strategic choice (with stealth being usable, etc).

It's definitely not a bug, I dislike a tendency we seem to be developing where a deliberate change from a working feature gets marked as a bug when it was instead a balance tweak or a changed mind on approach, it's been workign this way for as long as I remember and I'm very used to it being this way, it makes sense to me: yes, I sometimes forget to retoggle fleets but I do that both ways sometimes and, especially with the new(ish) supply rules, having ships not trying to hold a supply route makes more sense.
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EricF
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Re: Splitting off damaged ships

#11 Post by EricF »

Dilvish wrote:
EricF wrote:That's odd because I just tried this in a current game. I split off just the damaged ships in a fleet and created a new fleet. The split fleet was not set to 'Hide', but to 'Control System'. Just like the original fleet. The new fleet selection toggle is set to 'Auto'. Am I misunderstanding the problem? Using latest test build.
I expect that you are misunderstanding, and that you manually split off the damaged ship from the fleet via dragging to the New Fleet bar rather than split it using the 'Split Damaged Ships from Fleet' command from the right-click menu. Please verify?
Yes, you were right. I didn't even know about the ability to automatically split off damaged ships. When done that way it indeed does switch to 'Hide'. Sorry for the noise.

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