Combat in 1.3

I'm going to provide a general but detailed post on 1.3 when time permits, but I want to offer a quick post specific to combat.
Though my sample size is still small, I concede that the AI factions are designing better ships and performing at a higher level in combat.
First here is an early battle with ships of equal tech


The fleet strengths as you can see show an advantage to the Moltar, and though I did manage to beat them, I lost two of my own ships in the process, this is a marked improvement over earlier versions as I am no slouch in combat. To their credit, they targeted ships that were easier to kill rather than focusing on the largest hull present. They achieved their kills by using a favorite tactic of mine, an overwhelming missile barrage that could not be stopped.

The second shot shows a captured enemy ship. Here the AI had a significant tech advantage (class V shields to my Class II, and Wurzite armor to my Tungsten, their weapons however were equal to my own). Note that their Battleship is far better balanced than past versions, it mirrors my own ships, sporting both Missiles and heavy long range weapons. The only significant difference I see is the lack of PD weapons and reliance on ECM jammers instead. Still, this too is a marked improvement.


Keep in mind that these are low tech games, 25% rate for me, (20% bonus to the AI on top of their initial higher levels) so it may be effecting what they can do... but I doubt it. With the game settings I'm using, (more on that later), nothing really changes, it just gets delayed.

I continue to win battles as in the past (so far), but I'm taking steady losses while doing so, this is a clear improvement in an area that I considered to be the weakest part of the game.

 

I continued playing what turned out to be a very protracted “early game”, in the process many things caught my attention.

I’ve lost about a dozen ships so far, the AI has lost…significantly more, about a ten to one ratio. The ships I’m using are still first generation, and I think that is playing a role in the casualties I am taking. But let me gather my thoughts first and give a glimpse of what I’ve observed.

I saw the surrender pact in action when the poor Kaek were beaten by the demented Ewoks. Oddly enough, a few turns later the Kaek were attacked by the Moltar, and I felt that while this new pact is a welcome addition, it can be upgraded to something more engaging. Perhaps a player attacking a faction that has surrendered to another should incur a stiff diplomatic penalty with the latter? Maybe even risk open war breaking out? I don’t know, but it seems like there are additional opportunities to flesh this out.

I am also seeing the effect of setting a high aggression level for the AIs, it is a bit of a wash as they are just as likely to fight one another as they are to fight the player. In my case the Lobsters have declared war (and peace) five times so far. Each time they launch an invasion, get beaten back, ask for peace, only to attack a few turns later. Now our relations are so bad that the war seems permanent. The Nova were actually attacked by me when they encroached right at the edge of my borders. After a quick war, we made peace but they eventually broke it, now they too hate my faction. That’s too bad as they are certainly getting the worst of it. Overall, I neither like nor dislike this new mechanic.

Now back to the battles. The AI seemed a little full of itself. See the shot below. Here I was given a 32% chance of winning the battle so I tried an experiment and fought this engagement in three different manners. First I auto resolved and sure enough I was the loser. I then reloaded and let the AI play out both sides of the battle, again I lost. Finally I reloaded one last time and fought manually. The results were quite different. I get it that the AI ships had far superior shields and armor, with slightly better weapons, but I had a very capable Gaelen Ruiz leading my fleet, his presence was a factor, at least in the manual battle.




Next I want to show another captured ship design. This one is less impressive than the Lobster ship in the last post. The shields are not 360 and the lack of Missiles was prominent when I used it myself. On numerous occasions this ship started so far back from the battle line that it was a non-factor. At other times it managed to engage some targets but really lacked enough of a punch at range. This ship is not well balanced IMO.





The game continued and I was using the same designs for well over a 150 turns, I now believe that this was a big contributing factor to my losses. Take a look at the final shot. Here a small group of 2nd generation ships, (that would be early mid game at normal settings though this battle occurred on close to turn 300 in my game), I invaded and engaged a potent Nova force backed up by a Battlestation. The Nova held both a qualitative and quantitative advantage but they got slaughtered. I will have to see if this continues and perhaps isolate the reason why.

 

OK gents, I'm still gathering data but here is another, the opponent has better shielding and some ships are outfitted with far better weapons than my own. I can actually see a difference in combat from the AI. They are trying to protect themselves better to actually scoring some kills. It is an improvement, but nothing I can't handle. It would be so cool if I could actually play one of these battles as the opponent, that would give me tremendous insight as I think I could have won this as either side, the enemy ships were not bad.

 

This was in the latest release

I’m impressed.


The Cerrix (henceforth demented Ewoks), pulled off an operational maneuver that I wasn’t expecting. First they sprung their field and trapped one of my forces in place while sending a huge fleet to pull a surprise attack on one of my systems beyond our border. Were it not for my warp interdictors I don’t think I could have reacted quickly enough. As it was I was able to meet them with an almost equal force and did beat them soundly.


But there is a lot to take in here. First I like how they executed this, I’m not yanking anyone’s chain by saying I never expected this level of operational sophistication, and it could have been disastrous if not for my penchant of keeping my own forces in mutually supporting positions.

But… And I will keep repeating this until I’m blue in the face…oh wait.

The tactical aspect… it should have come out better than this for them. They had excellent shielding, combat jumps, shield piercing phasors and good armor. Still, even though their ships had better tech (a lot of which is mine now), the configuration left them more vulnerable than they should have. I will explain this in detail soon.

Edit
In the meantime if anyone wants to try their hand at this battle, let me know, I will hold the auto-saves for a while.

 

When I get home I will send it to you, privately if it can be done. If not, I'll have to include a post as I do not want anyone analyzing it and drawing the wrong conclusions.

 

Unfortunate, I can't send it to you privately so I'm going to attach the save here, before I do so, some words on the subject.
You will note that while my ships have good shielding (stolen from an AI faction in previous battles), and very good armor, I am still using particle accelerators and Polaris missiles as main weapons. Using these I was able to defeat the AI fleet which had more advanced weaponry.
This does not mean that these early weapons are OP, and I would really hate for anyone to come up with such a simplistic conclusion.
Note how three of my fleets converged on the system in question, note how I have three leaders present, the AI brought none. Try to not get anyone killed if you can, I managed to keep them all alive.
I am also sending you the turn right after the battle, so you can see the results for yourself and attempt a second one. See Gniri, I trapped some enemy forces there and sent Constantine with some ships to clear them out, unfortunately I messed up and sent him with a severely inferior force. I won that one too but there were casualties.


Just split off the same number of ships and give it a try if you wish.

I am not going to discuss specific tactics right now because I am very interested to see how you do, (and I do not mean that in any negative way), I think that even though my ship designs may be strange to you, victory will be yours.

Edit
By the way, in the big battle I actually forgot to use my fighters and bombers, though I doubt that made much difference

 

Excellent @PlotinusRedux that's some fine work there.

I did, and I can't. The not going first isn't as huge an issue as you think, it's the not going first combined with their combat jump displacement that caused me grief without leaders. I killed less of their ships but did manage to preserve both of my Titans


I only ran it once this way, I'm sure I can do better if I give it a few more attempts, but not dramatically so.

Bringing ship leaders to such a huge fight should be automatic, the AI needs work here. However, if the AI doesn't learn to level up their command rating, it won't change much. Imagine if they had a leader assigned...to a Destroyer. I would have made certain to take that ship out on turn one, and it wouldn't have been difficult.

So yes, I agree with you, one easy fix for getting better fights out of the AI is to have them start using ship leaders as... ship leaders. But there is a qualifier. My ships are hurt by the absence of leaders more than the AI would have been helped by having one. My weapons lose accuracy and punch. In fights where we both had some present (hasn't happened in this session yet), they still lost badly.

 

Ok, I played it a second (grueling) time with no leaders. I payed better attention and did the following. The ships that jumped close to me received massive attention, I manually fired each individual weapon, down to the PDs. I concentrated fire at times, and split at others. My heavy ships mostly held their positions though there was rotation involved to get a better firing solution or show a better shield to the enemy. My smaller ships attempted to get behind enemy vessels that lacked a rear shield, close to point blank and unleash their missiles and direct fire weapons at vulnerable areas. You can see the effects depicted in the results. I killed fewer ships as they fled before I could finish them off but my own casualties were less severe, especially in the all important heavy ships which are harder to replace.
So no, I can't replicate the results I had when leaders were present, but I still did well.

 

That answer I have already. The AI can design great ships when it comes to defensive systems, but offensive systems require more nuance and synergy. Do you study history? I liken my fights with the AI to US engagements with Native Americans or British engagements with Zulu. (Mind you, I am not glorifying colonialism and genocide, just noting the similarity in tactics)
In both those cases, one combatant sought to retain and engage at distance while the other sought to close. You saw my ships. The particle accelerators were your Henri-Martini riffles, the Missiles your artillery. You were able to (in many cases) hit the enemy before they could get at you. Additionally, you had enough Missile power that you could concentrate on any target to bring it down quickly. Your ships all had PD, if you go with manual use, the enemy missiles were a non-factor.
In this area the AI could improve thus.
Research Missile tech, the space cost is the same for all Missiles now, making it a good option. (But, if you use missiles, than all your ships must have them so you overwhelm PD as in real life)
All missiles must be fast
All missiles must have ECCM
MIRV or multiple banks is must, one or the other is fine.
Stay away from weaponry that suffers at distance unless you use jump displacement, This can't be a 50/50 thing. (Imagine if all those Cerixx ships had jumped close instead of just a percentage, we would have been slaughtered.)
A heavy main gun is a big asset. You hit at distance, otherwise you need to close before firing it. Enemy ships that have only direct fire weapons are easy to take down if the guns only have normal range.
The AI has to select a tactic and then design exclusively for it. Too many times they field a montage of ships that are not suited for what they are trying to do, and are not complementary to one another (as our ships at Kroma were)

Agree 100%, it's a no-brainer. I'm glad it's coming from you.

Yes you can, hover over the ship, it's been a while but I don't think a scan is needed. You have hit on something here though, I don't think any sort of scan should tell you where the leader is... or what color underwear someone is wearing.

 

@PlotinusRedux
I engaged in a very early battle with an AI faction, they brought a leader. To my delight, there was no way to determine the location of the enemy leader in battle, not even with a scan. However, (you knew this was coming yes?), prior to the battle, when the screen displays the opposing forces and asks the player to select how the battle will be fought (manual, auto, etc), I could clearly see the enemy leader was on a Destroyer, (even though there were Cruisers and a single Battleship available). As the enemy force consisted of five ships total, only one of which was a Destroyer...
Obviously this won't always be the case but it does illustrate how the AI tends to neglect leveling up command rating and how the enemy leaders are vulnerable as I easily understood where to concentrate fire. My own leader was on the largest hull available to me, a Cruiser. He survived the encounter, the enemy did not.

 

Here is another for you @PlotinusRedux
The enemy had two leaders present, I had one. As a result the initiative was theirs and they got to go first. However, my leader was on my Titan, they had theirs on a Frigate and a Destroyer, completely unacceptable for turn 437.
My ships had the better armor. The opponent had better shields and weapons. This is the manual result.


Auto resolve gave me this


That is a significant difference in performance don't you think? True, having leaders present helped the AI, and attempts should be made to ensure that they do so in big battles, (low hanging fruit and all that), but I think more can be done.

 

No I could not, I paid no attention to where they might be as the combat was intense.

I don't think either of these cases hold true. My Kinetics, with only a single improvement in targetting algorithms were missing quite a lot, especially with all those Destroyers and Frigates I had to counter. As for the leaders, I explained they had the initiative and I'm sure their other stats were buffed, except command rating. Here is a shot of who was there.

Anthony Yang on my side had leveled up many times, but I spent most of that getting his command rating up from 0 to 8. His attack and defense bonuses were quite low. I don't know what the two enemy leaders looked like, but as I already stated, the initiative was theirs.

It's possible, but the Sulak were more aggressive than I was in this game, having gone to war with all their neighbors during the game. They had three races surrender to them by this time and had reduced the Moltar considerably as well. This latter case is important as the Moltar were the number two power for quite some time. The opportunity for those enemy leaders to be in battle was there, I can't imagine that after 437 turns they didn't level up at least a handful of times.

I'm sorry I should have been clearer.

I did not and could not target their leader ships. Watching the AI play it out I saw quite a lot of differences in how it handled my ships. The most obvious deficiency is that it wasted firepower by not taking advantage of target selection. I manually handled the weapons fire to avoid this and not waste shots. It also wasn't very consistent in attacking ships, where I would make sure to finish off a crippled ship, it switched target. This allowed some enemy ships to repair and either rejoin the fray or escape. It was also unable to use my ships to support one another. The enemy, just like myself, used intense missile barrages, by working together my ships were able to down some of those missiles and lessen the damage they took. The AI only used the PD weapons of the ship targeted, they were easily overwhelmed. In particular, it used my Titan very poorly, it's designed to be able to handle multiple targets if need be. Once I destroyed the enemy Titan, my own started targeting multiple ships, the AI did not and wasted some opportunities.

The main issue here is that the AI controlling both sides gave me a Pyrrhic victory that was just as crippling as defeat, manual control gave me a clear and decisive victory.
Manually I lost 3 ships and destroyed 19
The AI lost me 9 ships (including both BBs) and destroyed 13 ships. That is a swing of 12 ships.

Edit
Many of the AI ships were using crew stunning weapons, this gave me a problem due to their very large overall numbers. I countered that better than the AI, by destroying ships faster. Again this required manual handling of weapons to do so.

 

Here @PlotinusRedux




Yes he has leveled up a lot, but his command and operations started at 0, they received a lot of attention that could have gone elsewhere.

But this misses the point.

In both versions of the battle at Juy, the opposing forces and leaders were exactly the same, the results on the other hand were night and day. Yes both versions gave me the win, but the AI win was just as bad as a defeat. The disparity in results then cannot be attributed to leader skills or even the ships themselves.