Strong/Weak vs data... How IS it calculated?

[RogueThunder]

Oi, so my recent.... very short game brought this question to me. How is said data calculated?


Cus. I just had a Mk1-3 Teleport station swarm. (Max all 3 tech levels.) get handily slaughtered by 250 space tanks mkI putting no more than a 70 tank dent in them at most... Tele stations are described as strong vs space tanks atm. So this seems rather wrong if shipcaps are taken into account at all. (space tanks are a x1 shipcap[198], Teleport Stations a x.25[49?])

Actually couldn't stop them with the 50 MkI and 50 MkII bombers I had in time either, though they certainly did FAR better, gnawing away at them and taking minimal losses.

Lesson Learned? 250 MkI space tanks before you can quite start taking your first systems, is pure ridiculous pain.
(For those curious, game was Dif 8...)

[Sizzle]

Try here:

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Strong_Vs_Weak


The very first section explains how they come up with the values.
Hope that helps.

[RogueThunder]

XD Okay. Yeah. I figgured it was supposed to be something along those lines...

Wern't the values just recalculated? If so... Methinks there may be some errors cus yeouch. Tele stations get cuddly hugged  by space tanks.

[lanstro]

I understand the rationale behind doing the strong/weak tooltips in that way, but I do have one complaint.  The data is not very useful when it comes to starships and very strong ships that aren't weak against much if anything.  Then you just get a list of what that ship is strong against but no indication of what counters it.

Yes I know fighters are generally ok against starships, but I have no idea how well my bombers or my tanks or x ship will do relative to the fighters.

I don't have a neat solution to it though.

[superking]

space tanks are a glass cannon unit though; either they are almost unkillable or they die in a few shots, depending of wether the weapon can penetrate the shielding

[lanstro]

Chris' thread about wanting to get to 1000 ships got me thinking again on this strong/weak data stuff.  With that many ships, the current interface for showing that data would be inadequate.  Currently the interface just shows a list of ships which your ship is strong or weak against, half of which aren't even in the game, and doesn't show the data for half the ships that -are- in the game.

So I've got 2 alternate proposals, one much easier to implement than the other.

The first is to introduce an option for 'contextual strong/weak data'.  This will look a lot like how it currently is, except that the data will only show the data for ships that are in play in the current game, and will force show the data for the ships that are in play.  What is 'in play'?  Whatever the humans have seen from the AI - I'm guessing you'll need to code a new list of units that the humans have 'seen' - that shouldn't be too hard right?

The second proposal is more work but should be neater overall.  What if the data was represented graphically instead of using words?  I'm thinking some sort of pop-up graph with the x axes being time or log(time) and y axes being %, running from -100% to +100%.  The graph then uses the data in the strong/weak tables to plot each opponent ship on it, using the in-game icon of that ship.  This would probably have to be 'contextual' as well to show only the units in play, or else it'd look cluttered.  You could maybe integrate this into the existing game graphs function.

This way, at a glance, I'll know that the ships up the top left of the graph are the ones that my ships crush, the ones on the bottom left are the ones that crush me, the ones on the bottom right will eventually crush me but will take so long that I don't need to care that much, and everything sitting around the middle is a break-even proposition.

[x4000]

Chris' thread about wanting to get to 1000 ships got me thinking again on this strong/weak data stuff.  With that many ships, the current interface for showing that data would be inadequate.  Currently the interface just shows a list of ships which your ship is strong or weak against, half of which aren't even in the game, and doesn't show the data for half the ships that -are- in the game.

This is incorrect.  It shows the data for only the ships that are in the game, though it only includes data for the regular military ship classes (not all the various starships, etc, though you can look those up on the starships themselves).  The contextual strong/weak is already the case, otherwise you'd have vastly to much data visible as it already is.