A question about ship braking and turning

[Aragon Speed]

I need some info about how ships react to Tship settings specifically the M6 class.

The M6 class is not powerful enough to fulfil it's role IMO. They don't have a chance against a wing of M3 or a M7. The first tests done which set six M6 against M7's (All AI controlled) have shown there are indeed M6, like the Centaur, which can pack a punch and survive. They CAN destroy a M7, but the reason lies in their flight behaviour. They have enough laser energy and (more importantly) time to shoot effectively at a M7. Faster M6, like dragons, don't have enough time to release all of their laser energy.

The obvious solution is to make them slower until they roughly match the Centaur standard. But that would mean a very slow speed, which won't please the player if he flies a M6 like a Dragon. They have to take wider turns, due to their speed, making them vulnerable. I'm pretty sure there is a balance between speed and acceleration to yaw/pitch/roll and angular acceleration which can be found. This is something for testing...

To get better results, I need to know about the "brakes". I talked about that already with sartorie, but any additional input is welcome. How is the slow down generated? Just negative acceleration? Are there any additional factors influencing this process on NPC ships?

If I know about that, it would be much easier to tweak the classes to a better behaviour in the hands of the player and under control of the AI, like the heavy centaur and the pirate centaur are showing. I'm especially interested in the behaviour of the M6 class. I don't need clear values, just some hints about the slow down.

The background is... Ships are always braking before turning. If a ship hits a specific speed, it begins to turn. Some earlier, some later, no clear pattern visible. M6 are behaving like fighters in this case. A turn for a fighter/M6 consists of a the braking phase AND the turning phase. The earlier a ship begins to turn, the safer it is when the enemy is shooting with heavy weapons. Also, the earlier the COMPLETE turn is finished, the longer the ship can fire on its next approach, like the heavy Centaurs are showing.
Currently I can influence the turning phase, but not the braking phase which still is the point where M6 are lost in a battle against bigger ships.

If I try to get the same result on faster ships like the dragon, I get to insanely high stats, which are then near the fighter class.

[s9ilent]

Firstly, on breaking/acceleration -Probably irrelevant to your question-
Ships will always tend towards a forward facing vector, with a magnitude of their current set speed level.
i.e. If a ship is traveling "backwards" (from a fixed frame of reference) at 100ms, and then instantaneously turns around and is facing "forwards" (from same said frame of reference), it will begin to change from 100ms backwards, to 100ms' forwards.
Even if you did the turn and set your speed to 0, it will accelerate to 0ms' forwards.
So if it had an acceleration of 10, it would take 10 seconds to come to a halt.
As for angular acceleration in Tships... I have no idea what that is used for... as ships tend towards their forward velocity with their normal acceleration values. Maybe its a strafe drive thing?
So rather then thinking of it as negative acceleration as you put it your post, its better to think of it as, accelerating to the forward direction, with velocity xxx. Hrm.. this would probably be easier to explain with a picture.
-end of irrelevant bits-



Why does this happen?
The reason why ships break before they turn is because essentially, all the ships are executing strafing runs. Charge, proximity (collision) alert, stop, turn, fly away and reset for next run. The main difference is that fighters can pretty much turn and avoid an object with our noticeable breaking, but an M6's slow down is noticeable, and its collision avoidance kicks in sooner.
(Big ships use size *2, where as little ships use size)
So rather then doing a continuous fly in fly out, it flies in, does a collision avoidence stop, and flies out. This could probably be rectified by forcing a turn earlier, or a less collision prone turn.
An idea I had was to just force the ships to circle their target, such that the collision avoidance wouldn't be a consideration any more. Thou I haven't had time to do this



Now for discussion on the M6 it self
Like any thing that is designed to be between two roles (fighter, big ship), they are typically bad at both. Having said that, they are good at other things that you could not do in either a fighter or a capitol ship.

M6's will typically loose out to fighters on a buck for buck level, typically because the guns on the M6 aren't anti fighter orientated. (i.e. Limited/no instant hit weapons, flak, psg, pbe, iond's). However, they have enough forward fire and shields power to deter a head on fight, and with about 80% the speed of an M3 but with turrets, can deter M3's from chasing. So for an anti fighter role, they are relegated mostly to fire support or interdiction. This makes them useful when used with friendly fighters, as when an enemy moves to engage them, they will typically be easy pickings for friendly fighters. Having said that thou, I find the M6 pretty bad for this task too.

Now against an M7, they are a smaller ship and expectedly, should have difficulties defeating one (or even going toe to toe with one). The main advantage is of course their speed, size (smaller) and the fact that they do have turrets.
This makes the M6 more of a harassing type of unit. As the ship it is up against gets bigger, it becomes easier to hit, but consequently, harder to bring down, and it will fight back harder. Of course, the AI doesn't really use M6's battles of attrition, but rather, just throws them into strafing runs like fighters.

[someone else]

so you are trying to modify M6 in Tships to suit the dumb AI right?

in that case the best approach would be slow, very manouverable, heavy shielding imho. But that defiles the M6 to wingman role

An example of "good" M6 in AI terms is the Vidar, not very fast, very manouverable, heavy shielding... actually performs quite good compared to Vanilla M6 (in the hands of AI)

in my mod i tried that approach, they perform better than Vanilla, but they are still quite rubbish in AI hands... hope you get far than me...

I think that if the problem is the AI it is the AI that must be fixed... but I have no idea on where these dumb behaviours are coded.

another mod on M6, just to check it out: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=249760

[ezra-r]

have you tried increasing their speed and AGILITY at the same time instead of reducing their speed and make them bull's eye for most powerful weapons of cap ships and also easy targets for smaller ships?



I also think making all M6's have a bit more shields is not a bad idea either.

[Aragon Speed]

have you tried increasing their speed and AGILITY at the same time instead of reducing their speed and make them bull's eye for most powerful weapons of cap ships and also easy targets for smaller ships?

If I try to get the same result on faster ships like the dragon, I get to insanely high stats, which are then near the fighter class.

As for angular acceleration in Tships... I have no idea what that is used for...

Angular acceleration controls how fast a ship will hit it's Max turning speed.

i.e. if a ship has a max turning speed of say 15, a ship with a low angular acceleration will take longer to reach it's max tuning speed of 15 when it starts to turn, than a ship with a higher angular acceleration.

[ezra-r]

have you tried increasing their speed and AGILITY at the same time instead of reducing their speed and make them bull's eye for most powerful weapons of cap ships and also easy targets for smaller ships?

If I try to get the same result on faster ships like the dragon, I get to insanely high stats, which are then near the fighter class.

I saw that, but you dont need to go that far, half as agile as M3 is very agile and a realistic agility for an M6 to be able to do work right.

That's what I did in my mod with better results

[xiriod]

I experimented with increasing speed and agility for M6 in the mod I am working on, but I decided to leave it.

There was no noticeable effect from this, at all. And I spawned ships and made 107 (yes, to the number) assaults checking how M6's would behave.

They just flew dumb straight in to the fire, strafing runs, but as their model is bigger it didn't really matter with speed and agility as they got hit easy and never evaded.

For the player, it was ok I guess, but for the AI they didn't do so well. Actually default M6 did better, I only did 38 tries with default but they didn't do worse.

[ezra-r]

now that you mention the issue about eating all fire in a straight line, In the modifications I made I changed all M6's to turn more like a P and in dog fighting they behave much better but tt is very true most M6's love to do this and die in many ocasions when approaching to fire their target, even when they can turn when being fired upon

It seems when ship have the order approach or follow or whatever script they are using when getting close to a ship they just wont/cant avoid fire interrupting their approach, just that is more noticable in M6 since they are less agile, and that's why increasing their agility may give better results

I dont know if his issue is only a matter of changing stats as well as changing combat behaviour in the scripts that do the attacking to some extent but in that area Im clueless.

[ezra-r]

Also Aragon, I do not think making M3's and M6 "closer" in speed and agility is that bad.

M6's cost more and are bigger and easier to hit, they should have ways to evade fire to some extent, while if they get close to a cap ship they will get hit hard also but that way they would not be too weak against wings of smaller fighters.

[xiriod]

I made I changed all M6's to turn more like a P and in dog fighting they behave much better but tt is very true most M6's love to do this and die in many ocasions when approaching to fire their target, even when they can turn when being fired upon.

I let the M6's in my test turn like P's too, even used stock P's to compare. And there was no difference. The M6's have too big model to use agility effectively, it's like a placebo effect which sounds good on paper but in reality won't do much unless the player is flying the M6 and use strafing. But the player doesn't need any more advantages really

Take for example the Pike, or Solano for that matter. They're making good use of their excellent agility with good shielding for their class and small model.

I saw a Pike evade fire for over an hour, I just had to watch as I got fascinated, from a Panther. It wasn't until some border patrol M3 Mambas entered that the Pike was blown out of the sky.

[ezra-r]

I let the M6's in my test turn like P's too, even used stock P's to compare. And there was no difference. The M6's have too big model to use agility effectively, it's like a placebo effect which sounds good on paper but in reality won't do much unless the player is flying the M6 and use strafing. But the player doesn't need any more advantages really

Won't M6 have a much better chance of success fighting smaller fighter wings as they can turn and shoot with main guns more often than with their actual turning rate?

In my game I saw a Pirate M6 with the increased turning rate killing fighters and turning in a way that almost made my skin crawl

Still it was big and hit often but it got some kills contrary to what I'm used to see.

[xiriod]

Won't M6 have a much better chance of success fighting smaller fighter wings as they can turn and shoot with main guns more often than with their actual turning rate?

In my game I saw a Pirate M6 with the increased turning rate killing fighters and turning in a way that almost made my skin crawl

Still it was big and hit often but it got some kills contrary to what I'm used to see.

They may, but I never tested them against fighters but at M7 ->

An M6 shouldn't be able to catch fighters, in my mind at least. Even if it was a heavy fighter class, heavy fighters are slow and cumbersome with more armour and shielding usually. Light fighters and interceptors should be fast and manoeuvrable (M5 -> M3) M3+ is more like a heavy fighter in that respect.

But if people want to mod M6s to be anti-fighter corvettes with the agility and all then sure, what floats your boat and so on

[ezra-r]

There is a good debate here and from this we could get some neat ideas on what the actual M6 is missing.

So what is the role of M6:

* Anti-cap but weak to fighters? (Actual M6 +/-)
* Anti-cap and strong vs fighters? (Faster M6 + big agility)
* Slow and dumb moving? but strong weaponry/shields (I dont see this as anti-cap then, since cap ships have heavy slow guns that will take down those shields very fast if th ship cant manuver.

And also, there should be a clear difference between light M6's and Heavy ones, shouldn't it?

We also must consider what are good stats and what's inevitable due to, for example, "dumb AI".

We also should consider:

Most basic M6 have limited turrets (except Osprey and Centaur) that make them very weak against fighters and anything else in the universe, and if we want to make them better against fighters they need to be adjusted in speed and agility, so they have means to defend theirselves. A big block with heavy weapon energy and one rear turret and limited shields cant do much against a cap ship or fighters (ex: Dragon)

That is why, and sorry to refer to it again, in my M6 Mod I increased speed and agility of basic M6's so they are different and useful vs fighters while heavy M6's left with vanilla stats, have heavier weapon loadout and are more dedicated to heavy fighting.

What then should be the role of each type of M6 and their ideal stats according to role (not inevitable issues like dumb AI usage like going straight to die and not avoid fire)?

[xiriod]

What then should be the role of each type of M6 and their ideal stats according to role (not inevitable issues like dumb AI usage like going straight to die and not avoid fire)?

There is no clear point on this, as it varies greatly from person to persons likes and dislikes really. You probably need 3-4 mods, all doing it differently, to satisfy all

[ezra-r]

What then should be the role of each type of M6 and their ideal stats according to role (not inevitable issues like dumb AI usage like going straight to die and not avoid fire)?

There is no clear point on this, as it varies greatly from person to persons likes and dislikes really. You probably need 3-4 mods, all doing it differently, to satisfy all

Im sure there could be consensus on the basic ideal roles based on egosoft intention.

I just have the feeling Heavy M6's were introduced from XTM without making necessary adjustments to basic M6's leaving those pretty much obsolete, not considering most M6 like hydra, nemesis, etc were not already very used as a centaur or osprey would always be a better choice due to bigger number of turrets and ship defenses

[xiriod]

Im sure there could be consensus on the basic ideal roles based on egosoft intention.

Good luck with that!

I just have the feeling Heavy M6's were introduced from XTM without making necessary adjustments to basic M6's leaving those pretty much obsolete, not considering most M6 like hydra, nemesis, etc were not already very used as a centaur or osprey would always be a better choice due to bigger number of turrets and ship defenses

M6's are the bastard child in many aspects. They're basically great for the player, especially early on to board other ships, but the AI doesn't use it for that purpose. They could be great for killing M7's, especially if you have 3 of them.

Then M7's could be great for killing M1/M2's, especially if you have 3 of them

This is how I look at it.

[Scoob]

Hi,

Interesting topic.

I've always been more than a little disappointed with M6's performance in AI hands myself.

In an attempt to rectify this - within the limits of the engine - I've had good results from the following:

All normal M6's get x4 rudder so they have more chance of bringing their main guns to bare - their only effective weapon really.

I've given each normal M6 a second gun in their rear (or where ever their single turret is - easy to do as 'model' is twin barrelled) as a deterent & so they can still hurt a single figher while they turn to engage with main guns.

I've also given normal M6's a weapons recharge boost.

The above items make the normal M6 into a good heavy fighter in AI hands, not great, but good.

For Heavy M6's I just gave them a 2x rudder boost as they have more turreted weapons. With this in mind I also gave them a good weapon recharge boost (50%) to they can fire their turreted weapons pretty much indefinately.

The slow, heavily shielded but manuverable M6 makes a good anti-fighter platform, but these same attibutes mean they only last seconds against a larger ship. They fly straight & slow at a large target & get taken out by it's long-range weapons before it can get a shot off for the most part.

As a general change in my game I also boosted shot speed, but reduced ROF as shots hit more often. I also gave ALL shields a good recharge boost, 200mj shields now charge fast enough that an M6 will recover from an M3's strafing run.

This is a difficult thing to 'fix' as what we really need is a change in AI behaviour, however the minor changes I've done have made a difference in my game & made the M6 class more dangerous to fighters, if still totally owned by larger ships.

Thought: If an M6's typically 8 front guns were turned into an 8 gun front turret it'd be one mean fighter killer.

Personally I consider the M6 class as very much the Heavy Fighter, not something (in AI hands at least) that you'd ever send against a larger ship - unless you had significant numers on your side & didn't mind losing a few! The ideal set up in my view is an M6 with figher escort.

Sorry for my ramblings, while my tweaking results are ok I'm still not fully satisfied with m6's performance in AI hands. With my ROF & shield mods I can no longer easily take down an M6 in even a good M3. Also, if while in my M3, an M6 gets his sights on me it WILL hurt - shot speed increase means the player-only strafe 'cheat' is ineffective against figher class weapons. So, in summary, it took a wider range of 'rebalance' type changes to make the M6 effective in any AI controlled role.

Cheers,

Scoob.