Yup, pretty much, i neglected the possibility of preforming multiple attack - retreat - revanish - reattack runs in my original planning. . . Mainly because in order to pull it off you need to either: A be a LOT faster then your opponent, to run out of their detection range, in less then a full game turn (in which case there are other valid strategies you could use), or your having parts of your fleet pull mid-battle retreats . . . . which strikes me as militarily unsound since whatever force you leave behind is going to get it's hulls handed too them on a stream of enemy fire. Since opening shots are just as powerful as mid-fight shots your better off keeping in the dogfight rather then dividing yourself so they can conquer you.Bigjoe5 wrote: By combat do you mean when ships are actually shooting at each other, or all parts of a battle where you are in the battle map and are controlling ships? Regardless, stealth still gives a bonus for combat comparable to a "first strike" bonus. It also allows ships an advantage in slipping out of "combat" only to reenter with a surprise attack.
Good point, but i didn't want the user to be cut out of the battle to the extent which they would be if execution plans where un-changeable. (we could give a small list of possible execution plans to choose from, and allow very modest adaption of one of them . . .)Bigjoe5 wrote: I am of the opinion that when the AI battles for a human player against another human player, it should be as strong an AI as we can make it, not one that improves with experience and tries to be smarter in "choosing" a battle plan than the human would be. If you can change the execution plans, what's the point of having "suggested" execution plans at all? That'll just weigh the player down...
This point could do with some more thinking on my part. . .
The AI should of course be always as strong as the AI intelligence settings. But if we instill some form of Limitation on the human that same limitation would be placed on the AI, in so far as possible.
The craft in question would appear to be controlled by the opposing party, the first investigation weather this was true or not would not change that status. ship will not shoot intentionally on their own crafts till they are proven to be enemies, so both users and AI will be faced with the same difficulty of both detecting, then proving the 'enemy' status of an 'enemy' vessel.Bigjoe5 wrote: Stolen passcodes...? As an in-game excuse for some more direct function I assume? And ignored by whom? Not by a human player, certainly. I would prefer if ship experience worked equally well against human and AI players.
the implementation is unclear, i admit, but it's an Idea for now...
I would instead focus on how much more powerful the new crafts are, any experience is good, it's just a question of how much better the new ship is.Bigjoe5 wrote:Or, because everyones technology level is higher now, their experience is no longer very valuable. Furthermore, if you had a lot of missile cruisers, they probably weren't your largest ship type so their experience wasn't very valuable in the first place.
[/quote][/quote]Bigjoe5 wrote: With this knowledge, the player will choose whether or not to replace them based on the comparative value of a beam destroyer and a missile cruiser as well as the cost of the replacement. As experience gradually becomes unimportant for smaller ships, it fades out of the player's decision making process. There's no need for a decay in experience if experience itself becomes less valuable over time for a given ship.
Again i would not quite agree. . . even the smallest ships for me(or at least i would have the ...) have late game value, and thus the experience levels on them is also important.
In general:
The decay system definitely is simpler. I'll grant it that. I just find it too simple, and unnecessarily so. The amount of micromanagement risk in my proposed system is minimal, non zero perhaps . . . but minimal, IMHO I would prefer that minimal risk to a system which is as simple, and somewhat counter-intuitive as i see the decay system as being, but that's me.
Best wishes all
Robbie Price