OOS Combat Resolution (Was: OOS Missile firing test.)

[wyvern11]

any ideas to my previous questions about
- a rather spawn-free, empty unknown sector? although i scrap every ship in sector before each replay, there is a chance of respawns during testing

- which ship to test instead of colossus
(single gun bay, low damage high shields maybe, non capital because of minimal fightrank/fleetsize)?

@jlehtone

Interesting, same damage per hit, regardless how often you shoot?

i think it's one shot/hit per round - only round is longer
to my actual opinion fight is very much the same if you watch or not - only if you watch it is 6 times faster

unnoticed due to testing and playing i lost a raptor with 40 LX on board - you know what ? i didn't even care

[jlehtone]

any ideas to my previous questions about
- a rather spawn-free, empty unknown sector? although i scrap every ship in sector before each replay, there is a chance of respawns during testing

- which ship to test instead of colossus
(single gun bay, low damage high shields maybe, non capital because of minimal fightrank/fleetsize)?

Aren't there couple sectors off-map, used only in plot? If there are, is there any way to access them?

How about Teladi Falcon Sentinel. M3, 250 MJ shield. It has turret, but if you load it up without turret gun. Say 8 AIRE?


Some might consider 40 LX "valuable". They might learn to not worry.

[eladan]

fight.attack.object calls plugin.acp.fight.attack.object only if this ship is Fighter, Drone, M6, or M7. Never with M1 or M2. And skill is used only on plugin.acp.*. Thus, M1 and M2 behaviour is not affected by skill, not even in sector.

Ah - thanks jlehtone, been a while since I checked the scripts.

Still, possibly worth checking, if only to confirm that there's no hardcoded dependency in OOS combat.

[wyvern11]

here is an excerpt of hit-list of non-watched combat:

Code: Select all

N    t(s)      ship    hitpoints taken
0	32	 Xenon Colossus 	1428132
5	32	 Ihr Colossus 	1487128
10	32	 Ihr Colossus 	1597133
17	32	 Xenon Colossus 	2229240
17	62	 Ihr Colossus 	2253165
18	32	 Xenon Colossus 	2593710
18	62	 Ihr Colossus 	2676183
18	92	 Ihr Colossus 	2790038
23	32	 Ihr Colossus 	2866702
24	32	 Xenon Colossus 	3302703
27	32	 Xenon Colossus 	3388650
37	32	 Xenon Colossus 	3754400
37	62	 Xenon Colossus 	4006722
38	32	 Ihr Colossus 	4320483
38	62	 Xenon Colossus 	4658835
39	32	 Ihr Colossus 	5634264

i omitted the shield-reloads every three seconds in between - the 6200000+ hits (instant deaths) too

watching looks like:

Code: Select all

34	22	 Ihr Colossus 	360344
37	12	 Xenon Colossus 	404327
37	17	 Ihr Colossus 	427047
...
39	17	 Ihr Colossus 	2233110
3	12	 Ihr Colossus 	2239529
35	7	 Ihr Colossus 	2240525
...
8	7	 Ihr Colossus 	5835060
15	12	 Ihr Colossus 	5886496

you see, there's hits every 5sec instead of every 30, but amount about the same (somehow there are two seconnds offset)

[jlehtone]

Only three of those listed hits do less damage than a Torpedo (assuming a Torpedo makes 950.000 points) and average hit is way more. Thus, missiles would not help Capital ship.

The 2 second delay, I think I have seen it too. Could it be the couple 'wait' calls in the fight.attack.object before it reaches the "fire weapons" instruction? Similarly, I've seen a hit at ~13 seconds and then every 30 seconds. I assume that when I have given the attack command, exit that ship and open the Pirate Base station dialog, I have sector map open briefly. That lets "watched" hit at ~2, ~7 and ~12 seconds. From then on I'm watching the "nonwatched".

[wyvern11]

Average Hit was about 2.5mio points, thus you are correct that in a one on one situation missiles might be in worst case useless and in best case just tip the scales. in fact in a larger number of tests rate of shots below 1GJ is 0,13

but in all sensible cases player should have at least 4:1 superiority in arms thus up to four firestorms might defintely lead to another outcome

[googlemeier]

Now 472 is black again - lost 10 K, 10 P, 20 LX, 40 L and four sats.
And the firestorms, the Ks were loaded with...

[zazie]

fight.attack.object calls plugin.acp.fight.attack.object only if this ship is Fighter, Drone, M6, or M7. Never with M1 or M2. And skill is used only on plugin.acp.*. Thus, M1 and M2 behaviour is not affected by skill, not even in sector.

Very interesting, could explain partially my observations (didn't know about the veterancy (sp?)/ fighskill ranking) - my "solid standing" patrols were rather experienced (280 or more flying hours without docking at a station, continuous/regular combat situation).

Another observation I don't know if it is known or not:
The engine seems to treat "Clusters" as own objects and does not 'switch' to Fighter/Scout or some commands are more efficient than others.

Yesterday while building a complex I sent an Orca to Kingdom End's shipyard. Weapon setup:
F: 2*bHEPT
TR: 1 aHEPT , 1 aPBE
TL: 1 aHEPT , 1 aPBE
B: 2*bHEPT

When I quickly checked the sector I saw a Kha'ak-Cluster. I gave the "Attack ..."-order to my Orca and watched on the sector map (sometimes with SETA):
The Cluster split (it was a big one) but to my surprise the Orca did not kill one single Scout though the shields went down considerably and I got the "Attention, one of your ships is under attack"-message several times. I am sure: no kill at all.

I decided then that the Orca should dock at the shipyard and was about to jump into the sector after Orca's docking to clean up the situation.
But as soon as the Orca had a new command it was instantly able to kill the Kha'ak-ships following and attacking him. The Orca killed all (at a very regular rhythm) but two that were in a dog-fight with two smaller Boron ships.

Possible explanations:
1. "Attack Cluster" does not switch to "Attack next target" : probable but not useful. The ship should defend itself.
2. Order DOES switch but "Attack next target" is highly less efficient than "Defend ship".

This last point is the very reason why I post it here. You probably know more.

[jlehtone]

You gave "Attack ..". That command completes when the target dies/vanishes. Then ship will "run" 'None'. It won't react to attacks on 'None'. It might be that it does react when it runs any command. Some commands (e.g. 'Idle', 'Standby', 'Attack all') definitely do react to attacks.

The XaiCorp Group Management System script offers "default command". The leader will automatically start "Attack all enemies" when its previous command completes. Much better than 'None' in combat situation, but not necessarily optimal action in station hauler TL.

[zazie]

OK thanks.

So it does not give any input to the topics of this thread - sorry.

[jlehtone]

I saw a bit baffling OOS fight. My patrol Hydra (6 BHEPT, 2 BPBE, and AHEPT on Tur.M.Def) against swarm of KM5. One KM5 had shield damage. It was recharging, but occasionally it was hit a bit. At the same time, other KM5's were vanishing from the list, one by one. Almost like the main guns of the Hydra would have done one-hit-kills while the turret was tickling one KM5. But that turret is AHEPT. One would expect to see average hit more than what the KM5 can take. I guess that there were local police, although I did not see their icon on the stack.

[wyvern11]

yesterday i ran the script to check if player capital-fleet affects OOS-fights

i used the stupid-looking-argon-freigher pilot starting with a freighter and a disco - did nothing significant to player ranks, flight time was 57minutes
then

i did the following : 30 replays of colossus vs. colossus (falcon and P took too long because of pathetic damage-to-shield-ratio), then script three player-K, rerun...etc

these are the results:

Code: Select all

# K      player : xenon
  0        14   :   16
  3        10   :   20
  6         6   :   24
  9         5   :   25
 12         9   :   21
 15         7   :   23
 18         7   :   23
 21         5   :   25

from this i would draw the conclusion that having more than say a handful of capital ships definitely makes xenon angry and i looks like it does not make a large difference if its 10 or 20

[jlehtone]

from this i would draw the conclusion that having more than say a handful of capital ships definitely makes xenon angry and i looks like it does not make a large difference if its 10 or 20

Indeed. I wonder what 1, 2, 4, and 5 would yield, particularly 4 and 5?

So 6 M2 + 1 M1 is already "much". Maphys (IIRC) wailed in another thread that did he make a mistake by buying fleet of M2's and if M7 fleet would work better? So is it just M2 that triggers the enemy "boost"? One repeat with 21 M1 or M7 should say something about that.

[wyvern11]

so you agree with me on the fact that there is some singularity around 4-6 M2 in player-ownership?

lets see this in details
now that i am this far, it is no problem to test this for m7 / m6 as well

do you perchance know how to script fight / traderank (to test influences of these?)

so these are some of the results we think we found so far from my point of view
(to be continued or disagreed if necessary )

- OOS combat comes in two slightly different flavors - watchin sector-map
and not-watching sectormap. if sectormatch is watched, then combat timestep is 5 seconds. if not, it is 30 seconds

- although it looked otherwise on first notion, it makes no difference to combat outcome if one watches via map or not. the same combat with same damage-rates seems to take 6 times longer

- independently every 3 seconds shield recharge is calculated from shield generator strength after known rules and added to overall shield

- missile usage and damage is taken into account. for capital ships only torpedoes might affect the outcome, but in 1:1 situations are easily overpowered by heavy guns

- player possession of larger numbers of capital ships seem to affect strength of hostile races. it looks as if scale is tipped such that losses occur almost twice as often. how this is achieved by game remains unclear yet

[BrigandPhantos]

jlehtone


(snipped and removed)


I didn't realize how much there was to this thread, I spoke too quick. Sorry.

[zazie]

do you perchance know how to script fight / traderank (to test influences of these?)

I have never used it but it may be helpful: King Luis Trainer

[googlemeier]

player possession of larger numbers of capital ships seem to affect strength of hostile races. it looks as if scale is tipped such that losses occur almost twice as often. how this is achieved by game remains unclear yet

Most likely. My whole fleet was shred to bits in about three to four hours.
I even noticed that one X-K (though heavily damaged after the first one) took out two of my Ks including a P, some LX and Ls.
Great. More than 40 hours spent on the fleet and there it goes.

[wyvern11]

an addition to result-list:

- in my tests i could *not* confirm that carriers with docked fighters are OOS superior to same carrier empty - it looks like firepower of fighters is not added to strength

i did quite an amount of testing yesterday how many capital ships the AI tends to ignore but these gave such strange results, that i intend to do a complete overhaul of my testing script (results differed greatly depending on which ship i used as combatant for both player and xenon, player-dragon vs. xenon-dragon 38:22 - player-K vs. Xenon-K 10:40, although every other parameter was the same)

[zazie]

in my tests i could *not* confirm that carriers with docked fighters are OOS superior to same carrier empty - it looks like firepower of fighters is not added to strength

Good to know. Therefore the AI is acting on a 'realistic' basis:
- docked fighters are not pushing fighting power
- unmounted weapons/shields (in docking bay) are not pushing fighting power

[Carlo the Curious]

I saw a bit baffling OOS fight. My patrol Hydra (6 BHEPT, 2 BPBE, and AHEPT on Tur.M.Def) against swarm of KM5. One KM5 had shield damage. It was recharging, but occasionally it was hit a bit. At the same time, other KM5's were vanishing from the list, one by one. Almost like the main guns of the Hydra would have done one-hit-kills while the turret was tickling one KM5. But that turret is AHEPT. One would expect to see average hit more than what the KM5 can take. I guess that there were local police, although I did not see their icon on the stack.

In itself that's interesting. I was under the impression that OOS one ship would only attack one target, regardless of the number of turrets.