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Old September 29th, 2006, 05:28 PM
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Default Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships

Quote:
Phoenix-D said:
I'm not seeing the "Drone bait" problem with the default strategies. Are you using custom ones?
I did change the default strategy for "max range," because the default strategy was faulty. Instead of staying at max range for every enemy ship (if they could), missile ships were only staying at max range for the ship they were currently attacking. So, of course, once that ship's engines got damaged and it fell behind the rest of its fleet, the missile ships would allow themselves to come within range of the (undamaged) untargetted enemy ships. And they would quickly get destroyed. (The problem is quite similar to the "drone bait" problem.)

But, if I remember correctly, all I did was switch the order of preferred targets to put "nearest enemy" at the top of the list, and had them "break formation immediately." This causes ships with long-range weapons to stay out of range of everyone else (assuming equal engine technology). It doesn't work perfectly for larger vessels because (like all SEV ships on autopilot) they fail to account for the time it will take them to turn tail and run after coming within range. Therefore they start their turn too late and this allows the enemy to get off a shot or two at extreme range. But it works much better than the disastrous default "max range" setting. In practice, it makes ships with longer-range weapons almost invincible to other ships with the same engine tech.
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