SE5 - Strategies

[Renegade 13]

People have mentioned retreat being an option. While I like this idea, there is one problem. Does anyone else remember how retreat is SEIII worked? Often, an enemy colony ship or transport could run off the end of the map every single time you attacked it. This became annoying, because the only way to destroy that ship was to push it into the corner of the system map, and block (with other ships) the 3 possible escape routes, so they could not retreat from the combat.

If there is to be a retreat option in combat, my request would be to have it so situations such as the one described above can not occur. Unfortunately, I'm not at all sure how that would be implemented!

[Fyron]

Make it so that you can only retreat if either:

1) You move faster than all of the enemy warships. You should always be able to run away if you are faster.

2) You mill about at the edge of the map for 10 turns without being fired at. If you are slower, but the enemy is not chasing you down, why can you not just continue on your merry way? Or, if your warships set out to engage the enemy warships so that the non-combatants can get away, why should this not be allowable? There are many realistic situations in which this occurs. Naturally, this option will require making the AI smart enough to send at least one warship against each fleeing enemy non-combatant if there are no enemy warships, or only sending ships after fleeing non-combatants if there are enough warships to devote to crushing the enemy fleet.

[Thermodyne]

"People have mentioned retreat being an option. While I like this idea, there is one problem. Does anyone else remember how retreat is SEIII worked?"

It was a good option for getting past warp point defences too

[Sinapus]

The ability to pick a formation for each fleet and place the ships however you want them is a good idea. Designating escorts that will interpose themselves between enemy ships and the escorted ship would also be nice.

Having ships stay near planets so they can get covering fire from any planetary defenses would also be neat. Divvying up fighters and satellites into small Groups instead of one huge stack would also be effective.

[se5a]

currently hte "he who fires first wins" is annoying. so is the "winer gets almost no damage" but if battles are going to be in real time then those should not be a problem anymore.


subgroops or squads within fleets is a great idea.

I would love to see scripted stratergies, dont worry about the non coders, somone will pogram a simple checkbox type app to create a script for you.

more options as to what ships should target is a must, ie - fire on ships with shields only, fire on ships with most shields, fire on ships with most armor. fire on ships with most suply storage if its not to far away, fire on ships with most repair capabilitys. etc.

now for a new idea:
how about formations which can change during battle, ie. ships at the front will begin to move to the back as there shields go down, ships at the back will begin to move foward to take the place of the ships with there shields lowerd.

and an option for a ship to change its individual stratergy if somehting occurs during combat, like its shields drop past X amount then it should change to run away

a stratergy wich will have ships attempt to stay behind other ships in a fleet, but not run away would be good to.

[davewski]

I'm brand new to this game but I see here that people are requesting scripting for choreographing combats. My only request would be to keep the emphasis on human interaction. Too many games get ruined because the combat systems or PvP interactions devolve into whose uber script can defeat another's by spamming various commands. Then it simply becomes a push button system with little or no human strategy guiding it.

[FLX]

Compiling those scripts before using them will prevent the players to do those "uber scripts", you can limit the number of lines of code or limiting the times that you command the same, and of course, it IS a push button system if you dont use tactical combat. I think it really is backwards, i mean, scripting the strategies would give deepness to the game, and a more customized behavoir of the ships. If you want fully human interface, use tactical combat, but you can't choose in pbw games.

[davewski]

The one mini example I saw posted consisted of a nested series of IF:THEN statements involving IF the opponent has these ship types, THEN choose this tactic. IF they have THAT, then do that tactic. What kind of decision making is involved with something like that? It seems to try and become a one-size-fits-all methodology that takes much of the decision making out of ship design, fleet design, formations, and choice of tactics. I am referring specifically to the strategic combat system as I won't be playing many games against computer opponents.

Now, it is quite possible with new game ignorance that I simply don't appreciate what people are referring to regarding these scripts. If this is true then I'll shut up now. If not, then I'd like my opinion voiced as a person most likely to purchase the new game when it comes out.

[Master Belisarius]

Don't undersand very well, those complaints about ONLY the "uber" programers or more experienced players, would be able to do the best scripts.

To me is pretty obvious that would be allowed to save those scripts, and post them as part of more AI scripts or saved as strategies scripts itself or something like that.
Then, every human player would be able to use combat scripts done by others.

Given the opportunity to the fans to customize more things, the game would be better and better.
We had a taste comparing the TDM AIs vs the Stock AIs. But if we could start to use better scripts/tools, then, for sure the game will be a lot more interesting for SP, but also for MP games.

[tesco samoa]

plus the se universe has a good habit of sharing and explaining. I think our track record at this site shows that.