Initial planet combat takes too long

[BadgerBadger]

This would ordinarily go on Mantis, but I keep seeing errors like "SYSTEM WARNING: 'session_start(): open(/var/cpanel/php/sessions/ea-php56/sess_2omi35fuevb08l96j68c322gq2, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13)' in '/home/arcengames/public_html/mantisbt/core/session_api.php' line 121" when I log into mantis so I'm putting it here.

I modded the game to boost my Ark's strength for laziness sake, but even with that it took about 3 minutes to conquer my first planet. I took my whole fleetball and put it right next to the AI turrets and there would be seconds at a time with no shots on the screen. I think the recent changes overly diminished the time it takes for ships to shoot, so that it looks boring and combat takes too long. Here's a picture from about 2 minutes in where it looks like no ships are shooting. It just feels too peaceful for my taste.

[x4000]

Keith and I both made some changes to the ship shooting logic, and that may have double-slowed it.  I didn't have his changes until this morning, and wasn't testing on fresh combat, but rather on the huge slowdown battle, so slowness in that wouldn't have been noticed.  It still shouldn't have affected the overall balance of the speed of combat... except that his fixing of the bug probably did. 

So there's probably a matter of both speeding up the reload a little, and actually making the firepower baseline a little higher to make it both look more active and also deal more damage.  I'm going to let him take care of that bit, since that's more his area.  In terms of the shots moving faster and thus having fewer in the air at once, that's a chance of mine that also contributes to this, and probably stacks with the other issues.  To some extent that's a great thing, but that means even more that the time between salvos can be lower.

[keith.lamothe]

Badger, can you tweak this line in your constants file:

balance_seconds_per_fight="20"

to some lower value, and retest? If the problem is purely one of battles not being decided quickly enough, there should be a value of that which solves the problem, and we could integrate that into the next version to see what people think.

[BadgerBadger]

I started a new game with a modded ark (extra strong, lots of metal/fuel/power, extra fast build speed). I set my ships on FRD and let the fight begin after tweaking the balance_seconds_per_fight = 10. It took 2 minutes to clear the start planet. I think it was running about 3-3.5 min before. This feels a bit slow and the combat feels less quick-paced (perhaps just because there are fewer shots on the map, so it feels like your ships spend more time just chilling and less time firing at things).

That said, my opninions are definitely colored by all the time I spent in the previous, bullet-hell incarnation of the game.

[keith.lamothe]

You could also try changing balance_seconds_per_shot="4" to 3, or back to the original 2.

[x4000]

* Changed balance_seconds_per_fight to 15 from 20, and balance_seconds_per_shot to 2 from 4, massively speeding up the feeling of combat from what it felt like in the prior version.  It's now much more like what it was in past versions, without having such bullet spam in giant battles that there's a bunch of slowdown.

Thanks!

[TheVampire100]

Here my thoughts ont his.
The initial planet conquest makes up for a good lore point. Something like "Commander, we breached the AI borderline and AI drones are engaging us", somethign along that line.
From a gameplay point of view this gets dull pretty fast. Always having to capture your first planet on every game is kind of annyoing, it would be good if we had an option that says "Captures planet you start on" or like that for people that want to start immediatly and not waste time fighting AI ships.
Or, as an alternative, this would make up for a good tutorial starting point, where people get introduced to the standard combat of the game.
"We reached the AI planet, use your units to destroy the enemy ships, click on ships to select them and rightclick on enemies to order attacks" and so on. Something like that.

[x4000]

I like those thoughts.  It's also useful for quick testing, heh.  But indeed, having an option on that would be nice.