Follow orders - please follow **** orders

[pref]

Finally i finished my current work things, so i had time to look into the scripts in a bit more detail (2.0).

First issue is that nearly all orders have the "attacked" handler attached - behaviours as well (wait, the move.seekenemies which is called from many fight behaviour scripts, but non-combat ones as well). That one issues an attack order which overrides any player orders.
It has limited awareness of context, will never check if the ship had orders which would confine it to a certain area, or the player had any other orders for the ship.

Second is that behaviours like defend pos script for ex (but most other orders as well) will issue commands which override player ones (immediate = true in parameters) - on a timer in cases.
I don't know if these get suspended instantly when a player command is created, but i suspect they also have a window of opportunity at least to override.


Think the big problem is the approach itself, an immediate flag is not sufficient to handle the queue properly. If player could issue immediate commands to get priority over AI ones with a modifier key it would still not work out well either as it reverses the queue order (always adds to top of queue).
There should be a distinction between ships left for AI behaviour, and between ones that are under personal command. And since most ships will have a set behaviour as that is more convenient, the distinction should not be whether a behaviour is set or not, but whether a ship has a manual command running or not.

The queue should contain AI and player issued orders separately (just sort on source), and/or only issue/execute AI generated ones when there is no active player order.
When receiving a player order all AI generated ones should be suspended, and generally reevaluated if after player orders have completed they still make sense to execute.
This reevaluation would also have to happen on much more events regardless how queue is handled - attack order has to check if the target ship moved too far and cancel itself if yes, trade orders have to check if trade is still valid and restart on sell possibly if it has stuck cargo etc..

The immediate flag should still exist, but only within the player/AI domain, so if AI issues an immediate order it should only go above AI orders in the queue, never player ones.

Another approach could be that AI never issues any orders when a player order is executing. But that alone will not help much as player still has to do extra UI work just to make a ship obey, and AI commands could pop in while the player is creating a new order which would again result in disobey.
And it would need checks in lots of places in the code to avoid overriding player commands which are being executed.

Think it's way easier to flag any player issued commands and order the queue on that flag first.

It's much more clear and less frustrating to keep responsibility for manually controlled ships with the player, and let auto behaviour only work for AI managed ships.
Even with flee - it happens way too often that i order a ship to escape in the best direction, and later on it decides to flee in a really wrong one. Same can happen with autoattack. Then this whole current system becomes a fight against AI..

[CaptainSim]

Finally i finished my current work things, so i had time to look into the scripts in a bit more detail (2.0).

First issue is that nearly all orders have the "attacked" handler attached - behaviours as well (wait, the move.seekenemies which is called from many fight behaviour scripts, but non-combat ones as well). That one issues an attack order which overrides any player orders.
It has limited awareness of context, will never check if the ship had orders which would confine it to a certain area, or the player had any other orders for the ship.

Second is that behaviours like defend pos script for ex (but most other orders as well) will issue commands which override player ones (immediate = true in parameters) - on a timer in cases.
I don't know if these get suspended instantly when a player command is created, but i suspect they also have a window of opportunity at least to override.


Think the big problem is the approach itself, an immediate flag is not sufficient to handle the queue properly. If player could issue immediate commands to get priority over AI ones with a modifier key it would still not work out well either as it reverses the queue order (always adds to top of queue).
There should be a distinction between ships left for AI behaviour, and between ones that are under personal command. And since most ships will have a set behaviour as that is more convenient, the distinction should not be whether a behaviour is set or not, but whether a ship has a manual command running or not.

The queue should contain AI and player issued orders separately (just sort on source), and/or only issue/execute AI generated ones when there is no active player order.
When receiving a player order all AI generated ones should be suspended, and generally reevaluated if after player orders have completed they still make sense to execute.
This reevaluation would also have to happen on much more events regardless how queue is handled - attack order has to check if the target ship moved too far and cancel itself if yes, trade orders have to check if trade is still valid and restart on sell possibly if it has stuck cargo etc..

The immediate flag should still exist, but only within the player/AI domain, so if AI issues an immediate order it should only go above AI orders in the queue, never player ones.

Another approach could be that AI never issues any orders when a player order is executing. But that alone will not help much as player still has to do extra UI work just to make a ship obey, and AI commands could pop in while the player is creating a new order which would again result in disobey.
And it would need checks in lots of places in the code to avoid overriding player commands which are being executed.

Think it's way easier to flag any player issued commands and order the queue on that flag first.

It's much more clear and less frustrating to keep responsibility for manually controlled ships with the player, and let auto behaviour only work for AI managed ships.
Even with flee - it happens way too often that i order a ship to escape in the best direction, and later on it decides to flee in a really wrong one. Same can happen with autoattack. Then this whole current system becomes a fight against AI..

I see. Well at least you seem to know what you're talking about. Hopefully the developers see this and make the appropriate changes. Your analysis could help make the game better. Until now the issues were speculatively bugs, but you appear to have shown they are not. I'm surprised such basic scripting issues were overlooked here, given the experience of Egosoft. Oh well, it's a small team and they only have so much time I guess.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Ships in a wing need special consideration.

This is another of those AI controlled situations that is so complex that a single solution does not fit all.

• The wing commander should be just that, a commander. Individual members of a wing should not just peel off and attack targets.
• The wing should fly in formation. If an enemy is spotted the commander makes a decision over engagement. (Player should be able to decide what targets can be attacked by this wing.)
• If the commander decides to engage then the wing flies in formation to the target, until they reach engagement distance. (Player should be able to decide what this distance is.)
• When at engagement distance the wing starts attack. (Player should be able to decide whether the ships engage individual targets or attack the commanders target.)
• If the engagement is going badly then the commander should make a decision to flee. (Player to decide the conditions under which commander disengages.)

There is obviously more but this is just a start.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

@Roger well, yea, order execution is also not great, but they’re working on it, from what I see in beta patch notes. Glad we’re on the same page about “response” orders. They really mess up ship management in combat sometimes. But “immediate order check box” is still something that I’d very much appreciate if they implement. Leave the order queue as it is, just add some functionality that lets me place my order to the top of queue, for a group of ships, quickly, and I’ll be happy. Make it stay at the top and not get overridden by something else, and I’ll be very happy. Pulling a group of drones from an enemy station won’t be a frustration fest anymore!

Adding an immediate option would not address the complaint though since the fault is with "reactionary behaviours" which should always take precedent by default because they address emerging circumstances. Greater control of the reactionary behaviours is what is needed (currently this seems to be hard scripted as essentially Tight - react to being fired upon) - the ability to disable/modify reactive behaviours on a per entity/global basis (at a minimum) is what would actually address the situation you are talking about, maybe in addition to the immediate order option but that is already supported after a fashion due the ability to either Remove all orders or explicitly edit the order queue.

[sh1pman]

Adding an immediate option would not address the complaint though since the fault is with "reactionary behaviours" which should always take precedent by default because they address emerging circumstances. Greater control of the reactionary behaviours is what is needed (currently this seems to be hard scripted as essentially Tight - react to being fired upon) - the ability to disable/modify reactive behaviours on a per entity/global basis (at a minimum) is what would actually address the situation you are talking about, maybe in addition to the immediate order option but that is already supported after a fashion due the ability to either Remove all orders or explicitly edit the order queue.

Explicitly editing the order queue of 30 ships at a time is something that I had to do on several occasions, and I don't want to do it ever again.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Ships in a wing need special consideration.

This is another of those AI controlled situations that is so complex that a single solution does not fit all.

• The wing commander should be just that, a commander. Individual members of a wing should not just peel off and attack targets.
• The wing should fly in formation. If an enemy is spotted the commander makes a decision over engagement. (Player should be able to decide what targets can be attacked by this wing.)
• If the commander decides to engage then the wing flies in formation to the target, until they reach engagement distance. (Player should be able to decide what this distance is.)
• When at engagement distance the wing starts attack. (Player should be able to decide whether the ships engage individual targets or attack the commanders target.)
• If the engagement is going badly then the commander should make a decision to flee. (Player to decide the conditions under which commander disengages.)

There is obviously more but this is just a start.

What you are proposing sounds good in theory but in practice is flawed in a big picture sense.

Wings can be nested, which is where things start going awry with your stated proposal. It is also largely unrelated to the topic at hand as far as I can tell.

Essentially the logic should be as follows:-

1. Leader has a particular set of orders which nominally get cascaded down to immediate subordinates
2. Subordinates (which can also be leaders themselves) will only obey (and forward) cascaded leader orders if they have an empty order queue
3. When subordinates are executing cascaded orders then they should fly in formation with their respective leader
4. Leaders will not automatically organise subordinates into sub-wings with the sole exception of the case of stations being leaders, which will organise ships into wing trees as they see fit.
5. Handling of Remove all orders (and immediate orders should they be implemented) would need to be handled with care but automatic cascade/override would not go amiss

Reactionary orders are more complicated in such a case but if a leader is engaging in a reactionary order then at least their immediate subordinates with no orders should to.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Adding an immediate option would not address the complaint though since the fault is with "reactionary behaviours" which should always take precedent by default because they address emerging circumstances. Greater control of the reactionary behaviours is what is needed (currently this seems to be hard scripted as essentially Tight - react to being fired upon) - the ability to disable/modify reactive behaviours on a per entity/global basis (at a minimum) is what would actually address the situation you are talking about, maybe in addition to the immediate order option but that is already supported after a fashion due the ability to either Remove all orders or explicitly edit the order queue.

Explicitly editing the order queue of 30 ships at a time is something that I had to do on several occasions, and I don't want to do it ever again.

You have the option of multi-select and remove all orders, manual editing of individual order queues is not required.

[sh1pman]

Adding an immediate option would not address the complaint though since the fault is with "reactionary behaviours" which should always take precedent by default because they address emerging circumstances. Greater control of the reactionary behaviours is what is needed (currently this seems to be hard scripted as essentially Tight - react to being fired upon) - the ability to disable/modify reactive behaviours on a per entity/global basis (at a minimum) is what would actually address the situation you are talking about, maybe in addition to the immediate order option but that is already supported after a fashion due the ability to either Remove all orders or explicitly edit the order queue.

Explicitly editing the order queue of 30 ships at a time is something that I had to do on several occasions, and I don't want to do it ever again.

You have the option of multi-select and remove all orders, manual editing of individual order queues is not required.

It was unavoidable because remove all orders removed default behavior as well, and that was undesirable. Other time it was when ships got distracted by some xenon build storage on their way to equipment dock.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Explicitly editing the order queue of 30 ships at a time is something that I had to do on several occasions, and I don't want to do it ever again.

You have the option of multi-select and remove all orders, manual editing of individual order queues is not required.

It was unavoidable because remove all orders removed default behavior as well, and that was undesirable. Other time it was when ships got distracted by some xenon build storage on their way to equipment dock.

How are the current orders relevant in such a situation? If things have gone sufficiently awry (or circumstances have sufficiently changed) with as many entities seemingly executing a similar order then the original queued orders are on the most part irrelevant in the immediate context. If any of the queued orders are the result of true default behaviours then they will be re-worked by the default behaviour logic after completion of your corrective manually injected order.

If the current default behaviour is getting a given collection of ships into trouble often then it sounds like the problem is fundamentally with the strategic decisions of the player in question. In such a case, it may be necessary to review the approach and modify it to be more practical if the player in question does not wish to keep intervening in regards to their assets.

Default behaviours are in the main merely a tool of strategic convenience, the only time where removing queued orders resulting from default behaviours would be problematic as such would be in the case of queued trading orders but even then it is not the end of the world. Certainly doing a clear all orders and wait, issuing a movement order, then issuing a manual trade order is less hassle than trying to mess with the order queue.

The effect of "remove all orders" and "remove all orders and wait" is just on the current queue state, it does not clear the default behaviour setting nor does it affect the ship assignment. The usage of "remove all orders and wait" followed by a movement order for example will result in new orders being generated by the default behaviour logic upon completion of the movement order.

[letsplay]

When you have something set to patrol Bright Promise and it ends up in Matrix #79B doing the constant 'attack' until destroyed (while also neglecting its duties), then the need for change is clear.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

When you have something set to patrol Bright Promise and it ends up in Matrix #79B doing the constant 'attack' until destroyed (while also neglecting its duties), then the need for change is clear.

I believe that was supposed to have been fixed in V2.0, as were a few other things. The V2.20 Beta seems to addressing this issue even further.

[nilofeliu]

When you have something set to patrol Bright Promise and it ends up in Matrix #79B doing the constant 'attack' until destroyed (while also neglecting its duties), then the need for change is clear.

I believe that was supposed to have been fixed in V2.0, as were a few other things. The V2.20 Beta seems to addressing this issue even further.

I am playing with the Beta version install and I just found a Patrol Ship supposed to defend a station in Grand Exchange I going all the way to Xenon territory near HOP and getting blown up. Sadly I only found out about it after looking at the log. The ship seemed to have followed a Xenon vessel all the way from Grand Exchange I to Xenon sector.

Another issue I had today and it relates directly to the "attack" order being placed before all other orders, AI or player, a Manorina vessels (miner) was returning from a sector and was attacked by the Xenon that were invading said sector. Instead of fleeing the miner ship decided to fight back a Xenon K (very smart indeed). I caught it in time and ordered it to fly and wait to a distant point. However, as the miner was beginning to execute the order, it was hit again, and an "attack" order was placed first in the queue once more. Every time I would tell it to fly, and the "attack" order would come back as soon as the ship was hit. End of the story, it got blown up by the K. I believe this is one of the situations where player order MUST be placed above all AI orders, otherwise, what is the point of it?

I hope Egosoft will take care of this issue soon, or someone will come with a mod that will block this type of behavior.

[blin25]

When you have something set to patrol Bright Promise and it ends up in Matrix #79B doing the constant 'attack' until destroyed (while also neglecting its duties), then the need for change is clear.

I believe that was supposed to have been fixed in V2.0, as were a few other things. The V2.20 Beta seems to addressing this issue even further.

I am playing with the Beta version install and I just found a Patrol Ship supposed to defend a station in Grand Exchange I going all the way to Xenon territory near HOP and getting blown up. Sadly I only found out about it after looking at the log. The ship seemed to have followed a Xenon vessel all the way from Grand Exchange I to Xenon sector.

Another issue I had today and it relates directly to the "attack" order being placed before all other orders, AI or player, a Manorina vessels (miner) was returning from a sector and was attacked by the Xenon that were invading said sector. Instead of fleeing the miner ship decided to fight back a Xenon K (very smart indeed). I caught it in time and ordered it to fly and wait to a distant point. However, as the miner was beginning to execute the order, it was hit again, and an "attack" order was placed first in the queue once more. Every time I would tell it to fly, and the "attack" order would come back as soon as the ship was hit. End of the story, it got blown up by the K. I believe this is one of the situations where player order MUST be placed above all AI orders, otherwise, what is the point of it?

I hope Egosoft will take care of this issue soon, or someone will come with a mod that will block this type of behavior.

There is a way to solve this situation.
1 Pause the game.
2 Manually remove the order of the attack of the ship to be escaped.
3 Give the order to dock. Or an order to attack another object far from the place of the current battle. The ship will ignore the current attacks.
4 Or you can just wait for a sufficient amount of damage the ship will try to autoescape from the battlefield (but they will not always succeed).

[Scarecrow]

Have you looked at the global settings on the miner? There is a default "attack" command that can be changed to "escape".
Seemed to help with my guys.

[pvarn]

I can see in the patch notes they have revisited the orders code many times and by 2.20 it's getting incrementally better. I think once they get the fleet code more restrictive the current problems will settle down for most of us.
Sticking my neck out a bit, I think most of us see a hex/sector as the current theater of operations in a battle but maybe the AI does not. I also recall in patch notes the ships are smart enough to go looking for rearming when they need to.
I would guess most of us want a fleet to move together as much as the different ship capabilities and pilot skill allow. Toward this thinking I try to make my lead ships the slowest and dumbest which seems to help. Like others I seem to have to use the stop all orders command way too much.

I'm also trying to understand what affect formation types have on fleet maneuvers and it seems I need to leave this feature alone as follows and arrivals seems to get worse the more I experiment. For me, once I've assembled a fleet (even if it's only me and an escort/wingmate) in a hex/sector to do battle, I want everyone to stay in that hex/battle until I give them leave. If EgoSoft can make that happen with some predictability, I would be able to stop thinking about rouge ships and think more about the strategy of the battle. Maybe EgoSoft wants some poor rating ships in a wing to go rouge or chicken out? At the same time they do what all other game AI do- fight to the death while complaining about it.

There needs to be a bit more balance between the AI independence and the ability to micromanage. Right now I FEEL like I need to stop piloting my ship to micromanage a little bit too often to enjoy the space flight immersion possibilities of the game as fully as the game hints it's capable of. This is not a rant. I'm also enjoying the game and the direction the devs are taking it.
-Pv-

[Sir Warwick]

I tried to make 'fleet' commands work. In the end I have completely give up. A combination of factors have forced me into playing this entire game from the map screen OOS in the manner of a very early and primitive RTS type game. Ie select a bunch of ships from the side menu (which is incredibly hard on its own with them jumping around in the list all the time and that the selection logic seems to be permanently out of sync with the list you can actually see). The I issue the remove orders and wait - the wait is important because that puts them into wait mode instead of following whatever random default they would otherwise follow. Now I can order that bunch of ships to do something - usually attack a specific target in the case of destroyer (as anything seems utterly broken). Then I will select a bunch of other ships - usually me corvettes setup for anti S/M ship combat and tell them to stop and wait, then attack area (to hopefully provide anti-S/M coverage).

It is very very tedious and very very ****** up and TBH is getting to the point where i just cannot be bothered anymore.

With X3-TC and AP there were some actually very good fleet management mods (within the horrible limitations of the scripting system). What I cannot understand is how over the years of developing this game Egosoft have apparently learned absolutelky nothing about fleets. FFS - 10min google modern US navl fleet composition and battlegroup tactics should give them more than enough instruction and inspriation on how a combined fleet *should* work.

Instead - with every iteration of these games all the manage to do is strip all the great work of the comunity back down to AI = 'artificial idiot'. This is probably not helped at all with the previous stated views of the game's creator over his obsession with creating a horrible micro-mangement intensive user experience.


Who in the right mind for eg thought it was a good ideal to continually popup a friggin commnications dialog in the middle of the screen during solo combat every time you get close to an enemy such that you can no longer see what you are trying to shoot at? And personal wing commands? What was somneone thinking when they require you to switch to map mode, select you own ship so you can get its context menu so you can issue a wing order? This is terribly broken at design level, never mind the massively overwhelming number of bugs.


The other issue that has forced me into map mode is when discovering the map I started laying down satellites - alot of them. It turns out the rela time map reveal that these do turns the game into an utter lag fest on what should be a pretty decent computer (4.2Ghz i7700k, M2 SSD, 16G 3200, Radeon 580 nitro etc). I actually had to go around the map destroying my satelites in oprde to make the game semi-playable again.


It seems there is no way to actually assign keys to operation in mods in this version, so forever gone are the possibilities of in future adding F-keys for wing attack, withdraw, protect me etc and all the stuff with had in previous games.

X4 is a terrible step backwards in so many ways. It is not a bad as X-afterbirth as aty least now we have some semblence of X back, but its seems that so much that should have been learned from the previous games was ignored and/or forgetten.


How hard really is it to make ship only attack what is in thei class to deal with? I can remember a really good fleet mod for X3 TC or AP (cant remember which) which added these kind fo simple things and much more - ie you could set the targetting priorities of each ship class and each wing and whether it would be involved directly in an attack or hang back (keeping carrier and aux ships out of trouble). For eg, some fighters and frigates stay on carrier protection including anti-missile whether missile frigates and battleships go against capital and/or station targets while other wings can be assigned to close support etc. It would even allow for some wings to be assigned fleet picket duty (long range early warning) and thus position them at considerable distance from the core fleet formation. This stuff wasn't hard, and yet in every iteration all these learning are forgotten to the point that the core engine make it difficult to implement them again so they never make the cut.

Also this whole fleet concept now seems forever lost now that military consumables are no longer transportable wares and can only be replenished by ship service docks on stations. Maybe this is why resupply ships never made it in as usuable ships as perhaps someone realized just how badly they had messed up and pulled them, or more likely Mr i-love-extreme-micro-management stepped in and pulled anything that could make the user experience remotely decent.

Orders are just a part of so many things that are badly wrong with this iteration. Something really needs to be done about the impact of satellite coverage. Perhaps this explains why the area of coverage of each satellite type is so tiny - instead of fixing the problem they poorly attempt to make it more unpleasant for us to cause the problem by forcing us to deploy 20x more satellite to get decent coverage only to find out they cause the lag fest and require even more effort to remove them.

I really wanted to like this version but continuing to try to play this in its current state is just an exercise in frustration in so many ways. There is a lot of good is this iteration too but it is so deeply overshadowed by the bad.

[Sir Warwick]

Have you looked at the global settings on the miner? There is a default "attack" command that can be changed to "escape".
Seemed to help with my guys.

I understand this and use it for ships where I want to set a long term default, so it makes sense for miner, traders and permanent fixed position defence ships etc.

But within this horrible menu system is it such a complete pain in the heat of a sector invasion to keep changing these settings for a wing lead bearing in mind you usually have to also select all the wing members and remove orders from them in order to get them to accept the new wing order.

For sector invasions I usually go through cycles of staging (to gather my forces), protect position (to establish a beach head), and select block of ships from the menus and assign each selection to a specific task after also removing their orders and telling them to wait which usually results in them stopped in space for at least a few second and often alot longer (due to lack of sync in ship list between what is displayed what you actually select) in a rapidly changing sector ship list getting shot at for free.

It is just too much trouble to use the ideal wing defaults setting alot of the time - they are simply in the wrong place and the lack of assigned hot key or some kind of favourites selections system makes it all unusuable in the heat of battle.