FreeOrion

In my most recent combat log, it looks like my ships only had three targets, despite having more weapons than that. I suspect it has to do with the flak cannon.

I've attached a JPG of the first two rounds of the combat log.
I have 4 ships (sea-green). 3 enemy AI ships (light blue).
My ships have 3 plasma cannons and one flak gun apiece.

First round is normal. My ships do 39 points of damage (3 plasma cannons with 13 points apiece).
AI launches fighters.

Second round, my ships only shoot at 3 targets. In most cases, 3 fighters for 1 point apiece (flak gun), although the last ship hit 2 fighters (1 point apiece) and one ship (13 points).
I would have expected up to 6 targets (3 fighters from the flak gun, and 3 plasma cannons firing at ships or fighters).
Or at the least, have the 3 plasma cannons destroy a fighter apiece instead of the 1 point x3 from the flak gun.

EDIT: MatGB's comment had me look in more detail. I was mistaken; these were older ships that had 3 lasers apiece, so the number of targets is accurate. Sorry about the confusion.

Click an arrow for a ship you're worried about, it expands to give you a full breakdown of each shot, if that's still a problem there may be a bug.

MatGB wrote:Click an arrow for a ship you're worried about, it expands to give you a full breakdown of each shot, if that's still a problem there may be a bug.

Thanks for the suggestion. I found out that I was looking at the wrong battle. These were older ships that had 3 lasers apiece. (Also explains why they got whipped so easily.)
I found another battle where my ships had the expected 3 plasma cannons + flak gun, and those were targeting 6 enemies. So false alarm on my part.

I guess I was getting confused that the fighters were being damaged for 1 point, regardless of the strength of the weapon. (Which destroys them, but that isn't done until the end of a combat round after both sides have attacked.)

Yeah, one of the objectives of fighters is to slow down combat so that it's more likely both sides have survivors from big fights: that's not there yet but that they act as decoys and soak up main gun hits is intentional. Whether the balance on it will ever be right is of course a different question and we'll need to tweak things and address them over time.

For what it's worth, the two premade robotic hull Destroyers are close to my preferred battleship design in the early to mid game, really need to get some Carriers in there ASAP.

I think Protoplasmic hull needs to be addressed this release.
It takes two future "tiers" to detect, which is problematic with a pure fighter design.
I've played a couple of games with this design, effectively squashing all AI opponents without taking any planets.

Design:
Protoplasmic hull (35 stealth, 3 x internal, 2 x external)
1 x Electromagnetic Damper (+20 stealth) = 55 stealth
2 x Bomber hangar
2 x Fighter bay

As long as this ship is in supply range, it will pick off ships without fear of retaliation, at least until enemy has Sensors tech (or Neutron Scanner + special).
Especially bad vs AI, as it does not seem to realize why it is losing ships.
Small camouflage asteroid, mini asteroid swarm, and spatial flux hulls are only other hulls near this tech bracket with 35 stealth (later only when stationary).
The first has one internal and one external, mini and spatial flux have 2 external and no internal, so none are suitable for same setup.
I think Bio-Adaptive (35) and Sentient hulls (45) are far enough in the tech tree not to be a huge concern this release.

Quick fix might be to reduce the stealth by 5+.

As long as this ship is in supply range, it will pick off ships without fear of retaliation,

Ah, the fighters themselves would get flagged as visible when they attack the target, but a carrier set to passive (or maybe even just not having direct fire weapons) would not break stealth. I kind of recall MatGB mentioning something about the idea of stealth carriers, but this seems a bit overpowered -- seems to me that the launching of fighters(/bombers/interceptors) ought to make the carrier visible to other enemies present (so the carrier could be attacked on rounds 2 and 3)

Pondering a "Battle Scanner" ship part that decreases the effective stealth of enemy ships in battles incrementally...

Gives +10 on the first round, letting stuff with 1-10 extra stealth be attacked on rounds 2-3...
Gives +20 on the second round, letting stuff with 1-20 extra stealth be attacked on round 3...

... even if not revealed by firing a direct weapon.

Now pondering making weapons fire and launching fighters revealing ships more complicated... Each shot or launch reduces a ship's stealth during battle by some amount, so having fewer weapons on a ship can let it stay stealthier, and having lots of weapons means it will reveal itself quickly.

Perhaps weapons have a "noisiness" stat, that determines how much they reduce a ship's stealth in combat when fired / launched. Could balance fighters and direct fire weapons by adjust how much they reduce stealth when fired / launched.

Would make stealth and detection mechanics a bit more interesting at least.

You could perhaps have carriers that launch fighters and remain stealthed during battle, but they'd have to be relatively weak fighters, and not very many per battle per ship.

Geoff the Medio wrote:Perhaps weapons have a "noisiness" stat, that determines how much they reduce a ship's stealth in combat when fired / launched. Could balance fighters and direct fire weapons by adjust how much they reduce stealth when fired / launched.

Now that sounds like a brilliant idea... it would open a whole new level of differentiating weapons: e.g. allowing us to create "high stealth"/low damage weapons. And make siginificant headway towards stealth as a viable strategy.

dbenage-cx wrote: As long as this ship is in supply range, it will pick off ships without fear of retaliation, at least until enemy has Sensors tech (or Neutron Scanner + special).
Especially bad vs AI, as it does not seem to realize why it is losing ships.

It's powerful ambush strategy, but it's easily countered at same tech level by Interstellar Lighthouse (later, distortion modulator) and/or having a lot of flak cannons. And stealth bombers based on protoplasmic hulls are very fragile.
Maybe teach AI to counter instead? Should everything be nerfed until it's pure stealth vs detection?

Also, as I mentioned otherwhere, DM might be moved closer to beginning of tech tree.

MatGB wrote: that they act as decoys and soak up main gun hits is intentional.

Well that doesn't really make sense. Imagine you're battleship pilot, you see some enemy carrior releasing fighters. Your battleship has death rays so you can one-shot this carrier. Just how stupid pilot must be to aim at fighters instead? Utterly stupid. Any sane pilot will one-shot this carrier, getting rid of fighters thst way.
As far as we don't need to simulate reality, at least some common sense must be present.
So, please make direct weapons attack actual ships as highest priority, but maybe with small chance to hit fighter instead. But this chance has to be small (i.e. 20% per fighter, so 20 fighters are need to be released to block one ship completely). This will also buff fighters which are now somewhat underpowered if compared to bombers.

Protoplasmic is supposed to be stealth 25, I'm on phone can you check? Symbiotic 15, proto 25 and Bio adaptive 35 was what I balanced it at.

I have played Organic Stealth Carriers to death this cycle, it's one of the reasons I pushed for the AI to up detection techs in priority, which was done. I also want to redo the stealth numbers and have refinements next cycle.

I don't think it's game breaking but it is powerful, but stopped by a single tech advance and very fragile.

Vezzra wrote:

Geoff the Medio wrote:Perhaps weapons have a "noisiness" stat, that determines how much they reduce a ship's stealth in combat when fired / launched. Could balance fighters and direct fire weapons by adjust how much they reduce stealth when fired / launched.

Now that sounds like a brilliant idea... it would open a whole new level of differentiating weapons: e.g. allowing us to create "high stealth"/low damage weapons. And make siginificant headway towards stealth as a viable strategy.

I also like this idea. I was planning on existing scanner parts gaining a post battle stealth reduction effect alongside refinements and spreading the numbers out, this could make it very interesting.

35 iirc.
This is sometimes game-breaking. We had a game when I was at center and 5 enemy empires (3 players and 2 AI) attacked me from all sides. I did pretty well and even managed to expand my borders, but suddenly one player secretly built stealth bombers and it was over for me. I needed 10 turns for scanners, he took kobuntura away from me, destroyed all my fleet in single battle, disrupted supply in most of my empire. It was OVER immediately after he unleashed stealth bombers. There must be more ways to counter stealth bombers rush than to research expensive tech. Sonetimes there's just no time for that.

MatGB wrote:Protoplasmic is supposed to be stealth 25, I'm on phone can you check? Symbiotic 15, proto 25 and Bio adaptive 35 was what I balanced it at.

Stealth stats of the organic line hulls:

Stealth 5: Organic, Endomorphic, Static Multicellular, Ravenous
Stealth 25: Symbiontic, Endosymbiontic, Sentient
Stealth 35: Protoplasmic, Bioadaptive

No strong opinion here, but reducing Protoplasmic to 25 stealth sounds reasonable to me. 35 strikes me as a bit high...

@afwbkbc: The entire stealth stuff is more or less broken currently and needs to be fixed. IMO we need to rethink the how and what of stealth from scratch, the current approach simply does not work. There are so many ideas flying around concerning stealth, and no real attempt has been made yet to integrate/harmonize all these ideas. But we're going to clean up that mess, the question is just when we'll get to it (as with so much other stuff... ).