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Posted: Mon, 9. Jul 07, 11:57
by jlehtone
What is fun is a personal opinion. However, what happens OOS can affect the "amount" of fun, one way or other.
wyvern11 wrote: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


and now some advice: do not take my experiments all too serious - they stem from testing series which i did my best to do as reproduceable as possible. there is no evidence based on hard facts for these theories - it might all be "bad luck" only
newdean wrote:1. As you acquire more M1s and M2s, OOS combat gets harder, and combinations that would have been easily defeated at an earlier time when you had fewer capital ships become steadlily more deadly to your OOS gatekeepers. This does not appear to happen to the same extent when you load up on M6s, M7s and TLs. Implication: (A) Don't add M1s and M2s unless you want to have the OOS landscape continue to become steadlily deadlier; (B) there is a point it might be wiser to stop at, before adding further capital ships; and (C) this enormously complicates cross-game comparisons of ideal OOS gate keeping forces: My Elephant plus Dragon plus LXs and Pirate Falcon Vanguards may be very successful holding forces in my game, but because you have more capital ships, might be a suicide squad in yours, gate keeping the exact same sector.

2. Hangared fighters appear to have no value OOS. Implications: (A) Don't waste your money on stuffing the hangar of your OOS Raptor or elephant (unless you deploy the fighters once it's at the sector its patrolling/protecting); (B) M2s are much more cost effective OOS killers than M1s, if you can deal with their sluggish speed.

3. Carried (cargo) but not installed weapons are not taken into account in OOS fighting, and have no value OOS unless then installed. Implication: Your raptor you have optimized to take out swarms of fighters IS with flaks probably ought to have those weapons swapped out with GPPCs before you send it to guard a sector OOS.

4. Missiles actually may have some utiltiy OOS, but only the most damage-causing ones.

5. OOS TL set on "attack all enemies" can do well against a popped cluster, but set on "attack [cluster]" flubs spectacularly, as it does not select a second target once the cluster pops. (This effect caused me to misunderstand the mechanics of what happens when you watch OOS combat--I thought it was watching that had nerfed my TL, but it was the attack command I'd given it.)

6. Watching or not watching has some effect on the timing of combat rounds, which has some impact on the durability of the losers (takes longer to die, if you're jumping in to save it.) Might have some impact on matchups of beams vs. shield regeneration but uncertain, and for the most part OOS is OOS, very similar whether you watch or not.
  • OOS means "Out of Sector". "Out of Sector" means all the other sectors than the one sector where the player ship is. No OOS sector is ever rendered in 3D.
  • Game engine has a variable: 'galaxy flight timestep'. It is 30 seconds for OOS sectors, unless the sector map of that OOS sector is open. In that case the timestep is 5 seconds. Ship positions and attacks are resolved only at every timestep. Shields, however, recharge every 3 seconds on all OOS sectors.
    • Shields have their internal maximum recharge rate. Most ships have shield generator stronger than needed to recharge all shields simultaneously. We have not actually tested whether shield regeneration follows exactly the same rule as in sector, but it seems to do so.
  • OOS combat resolution is as simple as possible. Any added complexity would decrease the performance notably.
  • OOS attacks cause random amount of damage. There appear to be modifiers to possible damage values, but they are difficult to determine due to the randomness.
    • Was it mere randomness, or does the same weaponry do the same average amount of damage on one "5 second" attack as it does on one "30 second" attack?
  • Only installed weapons cause damage.
  • Turrets do not have to run any command for the installed guns to do damage.
  • Ship with command 'None' positioned exactly on enemy will not do damage, even if it has installed weapons and its turrets are set to 'Attack all enemies'.
  • Larger weapons seem to do more damage than light weapons.
  • Larger ships (maybe weapon generator or ship class) seem to do more damage per hit of same gun than smaller ships.
  • In fleet engagement targeting plays important role. If ship fails to target (and kill) the greatest threat first, it will sustain more damage.
  • Missiles are consumed and do damage OOS.
  • Missile damage is probably not affect by the ship type.
  • Missiles cannot be targeted OOS, and thus there either is no missile defence, or it is a hardcoded modifier to the missile attack.
  • Swarm missile seems to do damage for one warhead only.
  • PSG, FAA, IonD do not do area attacks OOS. Thus, no "friendly fire incidents".
  • "Enemy" races seem to have slight advantage on combat resolution. "Friendly" races seem to have 50%-50% chance on one against one combat (of identical ships).
    • The number of player owned M1 and M2 seems to improve the advantage of the "enemy" race ships.
    • I had a Dragon with front guns installed but no active hardpoints in the selected weapon group. It seemed to kill a Pirate OOS. I do assume that weapon groups are ignored OOS. Needs verification.
    • Scene seen on OOS sector map: Caiman enters from Gate. Pirates are near and attack. Caiman releases Drones and continues its Task (dock at station). Caiman outruns the Pirates and survives. The Caiman might have been faster than the attackers, or something distracted the attackers.
  • Carriers do not launch their fighters OOS.
  • Docked fighters do not affect the combat of a Carrier OOS.
What else?

Posted: Mon, 9. Jul 07, 16:26
by zazie
jlehtone wrote:
  • Scene seen on OOS sector map: Caiman enters from Gate. Pirates are near and attack. Caiman releases Drones and continues its Task (dock at station). Caiman outruns the Pirates and survives. The Caiman might have been faster than the attackers, or something distracted the attackers.
It's impossible to proof but it is an explanation I have from 'watching' OOS-combats between Caimans and Pirates: the Drones can distract the pirates effectively thus giving the Caiman the time to jump away or to reach the station if within a pirate sector (or not --- boooom :D).

After an "Attention one of your ships is under attack"-message I have seen several times (e.g. in Brennan's Triumph) a pack of pirates at the gate fighting with 8 - 12 Drones (vanishing ...) and the Caiman was already some distance away, its shields eventually partially damaged. After a while the pirates started to attack the Caiman again (before the last few Drones were killed).

As a quick thought: it could be that the pirates attack the Caiman again as soon as the number of drones is smaller than the sum of firepower needed to kill one of the pirate's m4 or m5.

btw. newdean, wyvern11, jlehtone: thanks a lot for excellent work. This is a thrilling thread !

Posted: Mon, 9. Jul 07, 18:33
by wyvern11
after a long series of test i'm quite sure that there

- is no steep decrease in success-rate around 4-6 M1/M2
- if so, there is a slow whittling away of chances at best which might or might not have the same quality we suppose fight rank to have
- chances are good, that M7 do not "count" - but who would hope to stop a K with hyperions
- random number generator might possibly have same seed for each reload and might have a short period (- sometimes it looked like completely different outcome for same experiment after reloading save and longer experiments looked like having "waves")

to pirate attacks

if i failed to look soon at the caiman fleeing, i often noticed
the caiman en route to a station, a falcon and a nova a half sector away - nothing in between

this lets me think of two scenarios
- meanwile all drones destroyed and pirates trying to catch caiman (but standing no chance due to lack of speed)
- only attacker having been in range and fast enough was weak M4 or M5 and is dead already

Posted: Mon, 6. Aug 07, 14:51
by zazie
Just met some new info (?!) about the fact that patrols in some games have higher survival-probabilities than in other games (as discussed earlier in this thread), *bump*-worth I hope.

I found this post in the X-Universe-forums. I have no idea where KaZuma got his knowledge from but in my case strangely enough it could be an explanation: I play X3 on a AMD 64 3700+ San Diego -system.

Posted: Wed, 4. Jun 08, 16:30
by aska
First sorry for my english.
Second as jlehtone know i've got a Khaak sector, with a complex inside... Wel not really Got. That's because my 5 squads set to "defence positon" (every squad 10 Teladi Phoenix) every some "X-Time" lost some M2.
The hardest problem in OOS control of the sector, IMHO, are: 1 SETA when you running with SETA your Cap ships have more truble especialy against the little M3-M4-M5 but nobody talking about here 2-3 When i start the constuction of Fab from my TL or When I jumpdrive trought a gate the probability of loosing a ship increase much.

Some opinion about it?

Thanks,

a.

Posted: Wed, 4. Jun 08, 17:30
by Gazz
OOS your Phoenix' GPPC travel as fast as a Kyon beam.
IS the Khaak cap ships have about 30 sec during which they can't possibly be hit.
That's a nice headstart.

Well, and a Phoenix is a bloody huge target. =)

Posted: Wed, 4. Jun 08, 18:30
by jlehtone
aska wrote:The hardest problem in OOS control of the sector, IMHO, are: 1 SETA when you running with SETA your Cap ships have more truble especialy against the little M3-M4-M5 but nobody talking about here 2-3 When i start the constuction of Fab from my TL or When I jumpdrive trought a gate the probability of loosing a ship increase much.
All three (SETA active, the station build cutscene, and sector load) probably demand a bit more from CPU than just "business as usual". There are essentially two ways to run a simulation:
(1) you do complete every step, even though the computation of one "nanosecond" would take a month.
(2) you jump over some steps in order to maintain the "realtime" pace. That unavoidably requires some approximations, although OOS is already simplified to begin with.

It is possible that some part of the observed pattern can be contributed to the Random Number Generator, and to the human mind tends to see patterns. But the SETA/build/load has plausible reasons to be a villain. :wink:

Posted: Thu, 5. Jun 08, 13:19
by aska
Thanks :D
I know i'm doing a little bit off topic, but you know or you have heard some system to block or prevent the respawn on the khaak sectors? I clear out every khaak station in every khaak sectors, but they still respawn (from where? 8) ). I search to found the position or better a series of position where they respawn, but i think that series of position simple sims don't exist.
So:( , some suggestion :o ?



a.

Posted: Thu, 5. Jun 08, 20:45
by jlehtone
The Scripting&Modding has reputedly things like "Sector Takeover". I suppose it will prevent the respawns or something. But that really is unrelated to how combat is resolved OOS, so visit the S&M Forums to learn more.

Posted: Thu, 5. Jun 08, 21:04
by aska
jlehtone wrote:The Scripting&Modding has reputedly things like "Sector Takeover". I suppose it will prevent the respawns or something. But that really is unrelated to how combat is resolved OOS, so visit the S&M Forums to learn more.
Thanks but i'm serching a solution for the vanilla version like my friend Marvho have do in X2 :roll:
So compat in OOS i think it's a part of the solution. If the solution exist.:o

a.