Author Topic: Guiding and directing allies  (Read 1280 times)

Offline Vacuity

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Guiding and directing allies
« on: June 17, 2014, 01:14:00 pm »
Prior to the addition of of Warp Relays this never really bothered me much, but now it's a serious annoyance causing endless faffing around.  Friendly Dysons, zombie ships and minor faction allies like the resistance ships and nebula ally ships have a tendency wheile they're flying around to poke their noses into AI-controlled adjacent planets.  This causes a low level, but constant generation of threat on these planets.  While 12-18 spare threat ships is no real issue by itself, or even much of a threat when/if it joins up, it builds warp relays, which *is* a threat.  And needs to be constantly wiped out.  Worse still, when I eliminate the threat on a world, but later another 12 ships get activated into threat, they *sometimes* seem to start building the warp relay from the same point that it was at when I last knocked it over.  This is even more hazardous as it means I'm much more likely to not spot a warning in time.

Is there a way to stop my allies from stepping onto AI worlds?  If not, is my only real solution to turn off warp relays?  They're a nice mechanic in general, but this is kind of annoying.

Offline Aklyon

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #1 on: June 17, 2014, 01:26:28 pm »
Zombie ships on either side have no controls. They go wherever they go.

Offline The Hunter

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #2 on: June 17, 2014, 01:37:48 pm »
Maybe would be a good idea to put a str cap on start of relay build, 10 random ships triggering relay is a bit silly(Unless those are starships?).

Offline Draco18s

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #3 on: June 17, 2014, 01:58:59 pm »
Zombie ships on either side have no controls. They go wherever they go.

Dynson gatlings aren't zombies.

Offline Aklyon

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #4 on: June 17, 2014, 02:05:29 pm »
Zombie ships on either side have no controls. They go wherever they go.

Dynson gatlings aren't zombies.
I wasn't talking about the dysons?

Offline tadrinth

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #5 on: June 17, 2014, 03:03:47 pm »
You could always turn on Roaming Enclaves and give them the chat commands to tell them to attack independently.  They're quite fond of cleaning up threat on your behalf. Of course, this might generate more threat than it cleans up... =P Also, since they act as a fleet, they can only clean up one planet at a time. 

Warp relays should probably have a minimum strength required before construction begins, and if you reduce below this level it should trigger the rapid progress loss back down to zero. 

The minor factions should also (if they don't already) have a threat threshold below which they don't bother charging into AI systems.  That should probably be the same as the minimum warp relay threshold, so that the minor factions will attempt to clear out any threat which would cause a warp relay to begin construction, but ignore any threat that isn't building warp relays. 

Offline Wingflier

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #6 on: June 17, 2014, 05:25:44 pm »
Would be an interesting feature of the expansion, and highly requested from what I've seen, to have UI controls which allowed you to govern what your AI-driven allies were doing to a certain extent.
"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Offline Vacuity

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #7 on: June 18, 2014, 01:11:03 am »
I'm quite willing to accept that zombie ships are uncontrollable and might cause some trouble, but the minor faction ships causing trouble really makes no sense. Essentially, they all get picked off, one by one, until they're all wiped out (except the dysons, which get replaced), freeing threat as they do so. This surely wasn't the intended design?  Is there really no way to direct these ships in any way?

Tadrinth's suggestions get a thumbs up from me.

Offline PokerChen

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #8 on: June 18, 2014, 02:28:04 am »
 When the zombies and minor factions never attacked, the net result was that someone complained that there were too many zombies on their planets slowing down game performance. :P In hindsight, zombie carriers could have been a viable option.

 It's generally intended that ships will help out each other, and the AI behaviour of the base game relies upon individual ships and task forces performing this action, rather than the fleet as a whole (Enclaves). The suiciding patrol behaviour happens in a similar way to the special forces on the AI side when you attack their planets (it also makes no sense for them to throw units in small batches), with the exception that they will not step on your planets (ala the old zombie behaviour).

 Do you aggressively neuter enemy guardposts? Although, without superweapons it's difficult to take down the wormhole ones. In any case, the control UI has been on the desirable list since the chat commands were added... :P

Offline Vacuity

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #9 on: June 18, 2014, 04:37:38 am »
Hmm, that performance problem may have been before my time.  I'm pretty sure the minor factions have always committed suicide one by one since I started playing.  As I said, I just kinda lived with it, though I did think it was pretty stupid to watch a lone resistance fighter go onto a planet with maybe 2-300 threat.  Yes, that makes lots of sense.

I'm fairly aggressive about neutering guardposts, but not as much as I used to be.  I've come to the conclusion that having as many alerted MkI and II worlds in the galaxy, with as many guardposts as possible is not a bad thing at all.  MkIII and IV worlds get emptied as a matter of course.  Out of curiosity, what bearing does this have on the topic?  I don't see a direct connection.

The Special Forces caused me major problems in my last game as I turned the Hunter plot to 10/10.  Somewhere less than an hour into the game my fleet bumped into the SF, which consisted of a small handful of ships.  Every one of them a mark III+ hunter-killer.  I was busy doing other stuff with my enclaves assuming my fleet was happily neutering the piddly MkI planet and only discovered the problem when I saw my space docks churning out ships.  They'd already chewed through most of my fleet by that point.  Completely my fault for being blasé and careless.

Offline PokerChen

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #10 on: June 18, 2014, 06:25:12 am »
There has been performance improvements as well, in the mean time.

The neutering has some bearing, as it affects the behaviour of AI ships when the zombie pokes inside. Namely:
- When the strength of enemy ships on this planet is >X% of mine, activate all ships from every guardpost in the system.
 So if you don't neuter completely, and just clear out the immediate vicinity of the wormhole, then a few stray ships are much less likely to turn the defenders into threat (just the ones that are in firing range of the offending ship, hence clearing the immediate vicinity).

Offline Vacuity

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #11 on: June 18, 2014, 07:27:29 am »
Interesting, that might explain how it seems to have snowballed somewhat. I'd tried to avoid doing anything much more than knocking out the warp gates on the lower mark planets next to mine, but over time, as I've gone in and taken out the threat, some guardposts have been taken out in collateral fire. Enclaves aren't a scalpel strike.  And over time it seemed that threat was getting generated more and more easily.

If there's any kind of consensus about this, I could open a mantis report. Maybe two. Or three. One asking for allies to not poke their noses into AI planets without backup, basically, smarter behaviour.  A second to ask that when threat building a warp relay gets eliminated, the construction timer gets reset to zero.  A third to ask for a minimum strength threshold before a warp relay starts being built. Half a dozen starships or guardians, fine.  Half a dozen fighters and bombers, not so fine.

Offline The Hunter

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #12 on: June 18, 2014, 10:22:29 am »
Smarter resistance/nebula allies would be good, so i'd second that. Smarter dysons would be near-OP, and probably not in-line with dyson behavior anyways(Unless all of it gets changed for neutral and AI dysons too), and smarter zombies make no sense.

Offline TechSY730

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Re: Guiding and directing allies
« Reply #13 on: June 18, 2014, 11:50:59 am »
I have made several posts about allied minor faction behavior in the past, I will see if I can dig it up and link it here.

Also, in addition to a minimum strength threshold to trigger warp relay, I think there should also be a minimum unit count. This should keep things like single high mark starships from starting construction on their own.

Offline TechSY730

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