[FEEDBACK] [7.5B7+] A problem: Stations, combat balance, and faction response

[adeine]

7.5 has made great strides towards making AI less suicidal when attacking stations. While it's still a bit of a dice roll, capital ships are doing much better at besieging stations than in previous versions. I've played a fair bit of the current betas and while welcome, these fixes miss the core problem at play, being:

What exactly are defence modules/defence stations supposed to be for?


THE ROLE OF DEFENCE STATIONS/STATION DEFENCE MODULES

Throughout the various versions of the game, defence stations have ranged from indestructible obstacles to completely pointless in low attention AI combat. 7.5 once again swings this pendulum into the latter category thanks to the capital ship AI improvements made.

The principal issue is that defence stations in their current form are nothing more than a stationary turret platform, using the same turrets available to mobile ships. This is a problem when capital ship primary weapons outrange turrets by a fair margin, and capital ship turrets can be modded to also do so (whereas station turrets cannot).

As a result, if the AI plays optimally, a single capital ship can demolish any station without taking so much as a scratch. This is what I've been seeing a lot of in faction vs faction wars in the recent 7.5 betas - station survivability for AI factions has taken a nosedive, with single ships taking out wharves, shipyards, and trade stations (let alone factories) unopposed.

Turrets on defence stations can only be effective against Xenon ships (no primary weapons and short-range turrets) as well as M and S ships - the latter of which is fairly superfluous as factions other than VIG don't field effective fighter swarms. Against L+ ships defence stations can only serve as a time sink, unless placed in such a way to circumvent this issue (direct gate defence).

I'm not clear as to what the role of defence stations is supposed to be, so potential solutions could come in different forms:


OPTION 1: (DEFENCE) STATIONS AS STAGING POINTS

If defence modules are not meant to be able to deal with capital ships, NPC stations should have subordinates assigned for defence. Generic faction response is currently generally poor, with fleets distracted elsewhere while critical infrastructure is chipped down by single capital ships. Given the time it takes for fleets to traverse territories, even if help is on the way, it is often too late. For less legitimate factions (SCA, especially) there is no response whatsoever.

Since it's probably impractical for every station to have their own complement of destroyers, a solution could be to either massively improve defence drones and make them fully simulated in low attention combat, or assign actual fighter/bomber swarms to each relevant station that can effectively disarm and/or destroy enemy capital ships. Alongside improvements to faction response (keep dedicated fleets in sectors with production infrastructure, attacks on relevant stations create override orders for said fleets) this could be one way of mitigating the issue.


OPTION 2: SELF-RELIANT DEFENCE STATIONS/MODULES

If stations should be able to somewhat effectively defend themselves without relying on faction response/fleet intervention, I can see two ways of fixing the issue:

The lazy way would be to make all NPC factions heavily prioritise long range missile turrets on defence modules (fixing engagement range for said turrets) and ensure the economy is such that stations can stay restocked. Crucially, this would also have to apply to the Xenon.

A better solution would be to more generally change L turrets on stations to XL turrets (or simply apply a range percentage increase to turrets mounted on stations if this proves difficult for compatibility reasons), increasing their effective range beyond that of capital ships. It doesn't make a lot of sense that mobile turrets/weaponry should be strictly superior to stationary defence modules. This would make defence stations very hard for the AI to deal with and also limit the player's ability to abuse the superior range provided by equipment mods.

Going down this route would likely have to come alongside improvements to faction AI when it comes to station assaults. Since there's no way to chip down stations without being in harm's way anymore, attacks against stations would require bigger fleets before initiation, with dedicated ships set to disarm station turrets for the destroyers to finish the job.

It'd also force the player to be a bit more tactical when it comes to attacking stations, instead of just holding down a mouse button for thirty minutes.

[CBJ]

The feedback is fine, but it doesn't really relate to the Public Beta specifically, so I've moved it over to the main forum.

[adeine]

The feedback is fine, but it doesn't really relate to the Public Beta specifically, so I've moved it over to the main forum.

It kind of does, as prior to the current beta, this behaviour is not the same.

In 7.1 capital ships just suicide into stations so you don't have the problem described in the OP. Single ships do not lay waste to factions in 7.1, which is something that you do see in 7.5 and I can only assume is not intended.

It is true that the underlying issue has been with the game since 1.0. Either way, it is probably something that should be addressed before 7.5 is finalised.

[Raptor34]

What's the relevant numbers? L plasma vs. main batteries.

[adeine]

What's the relevant numbers? L plasma vs. main batteries.

Main batteries are roughly 10-11 km, the range for unmodded L plasma turrets is 7-9 km. Terrans are limited at 6 km, Xenon at 5 km.

[Raptor34]

That's a lot bigger than I was expecting. I wouldn't say TER and XEN are issues. TER is always full of ships anyway unless you've noticed issues with them in the beta? And XEN is precisely what player's want so...
For the rest I'll have to plug my cruise missile suggestion again. Maybe Egosoft could make the AI work out how to properly do missile defense.

[adeine]

That's a lot bigger than I was expecting. I wouldn't say TER and XEN are issues. TER is always full of ships anyway unless you've noticed issues with them in the beta? And XEN is precisely what player's want so...

Definitely issues.

If you trigger the TER/ANT war, you will see what I'm talking about. Their fleets only really hide the problem in the core sectors. And the only modicum of survivability that XEN have in 7.1 is that capital ships like to suicide into their stations. A single destroyer can now take out a Xenon shipyard, and while that used to apply to the player for years, it also now applies to the AI.

Once a pocket of Xenon loses their ships, or they are distracted elsewhere it is over.

[Raptor34]

I favor local defense fleets. But well...

Another one I favor is basically a drone expansion. If Egosoft does not want us to keep fighters at our stations for one reason or another, then drones can fill the gap because they do not have the same limitations. The only issue is that they are kinda weak. And also the whole system is very barebones, you use drones currently because you need them, like cargo drones whose only use are for trading with stations or construction drones.
So more drone variants for one. Rather than having a "defense drone". We can have Pulse Laser Drones, Plasma Cannon Drones, Beam Laser Drones, Missile Drones and so on. Missile drones would draw from the station for ammo of course.
Then in order to deal with launch and recovery, launch would have the current launch tube system, recovery would have an additional one where you'll basically have a recovery hole or something, where the drone just needs to fly into it then it scripts out the recovery instead of relying on the AI to land. Like imagine the drone flies in and a tractor beam drags it into the ship. You could also have new drone carriers, but for stations this would be a new defense module. If you don't have this module, you'll use current launch and recovery methods. This way you don't have to modify existing modules to make it work.

[LameFox]

I think the ideal situation WRT defence platforms would have been that ships fire at them and they fire back, and they have some kind of weakness to exploit that the defender then fills with their own ships. That way you get a fight where everything involved gets to act, nothing is rendered entirely useless.

Instead the station easily counters everything except being far away. And yes, you can fill that gap with ships, but if the station doesn't get to participate in the fight due to range, you're literally just fighting ships vs ships and may as well not have the station. Mostly this doesn't occur, because ships are catastrophically stupid. They simply bash against it in waves until they eventually wear it down or it kills them all. But as the ships are made less stupid, the problem becomes more apparent.



A thought: give each race a new defence module with unique, long range guns. These serve the purpose of targeting destroyers. You get only 2 per module, and they track slowly and fire infrequently, but the projectile moves fast and hits hard. Then, on conventional modules, reduce the number of L turrets. So maybe an Argon disc gets 4 above, 4 below. Maybe reduce M too but most of those are so weak, I don't know if it would be needed.

The idea here is that now, the primary threat to destroyers is these destroyer specific guns. They still need some L turrets to make it risky for the destroyers to fly under their tracking, but the idea is to make it more viable for fighters to assist in the battle by clearing these heavy guns, which themselves contribute almost nothing to killing fighters. If the fighters still suffer too much, we can also reduce the M turrets. This way on a conventional defence platform, there's a benefit to having ships to defend from fighters. The station itself provides them with artillery support against bigger ships.

This won't address player spam of course and isn't intended to. You could overwhelm the few big guns on an NPC defence platform, or overbuild your own stations as desired despite the limited slots. For ordinary stations though, it might make the fights more interesting, and perhaps even better performing, since you'd be condensing a lot of firepower into less projectile spam.

edit: as an aside, if the new module was only placed on defence platforms, that might also make them more functionally distinct from some random factory that happens to have a lot of bridges/discs on it.

[capitalduty]

Only in sector this "problem" exist, OOS combat is where really the entire universe is simulated, if you view one destroyer performing well, you only see a really tiny portion of how faction wars is really happening. I for one prefer to have destroyers in demolition duty and the faction attacked is to defend its assets.

[adeine]

Only in sector this "problem" exist, OOS combat is where really the entire universe is simulated, if you view one destroyer performing well, you only see a really tiny portion of how faction wars is really happening. I for one prefer to have destroyers in demolition duty and the faction attacked is to defend its assets.

This is not true, I've seen the HOP shipyard and wharf, the ANT shipyard, TER defence stations in the ANT/TER war, the entirety of TEM's stations, SCA's headquarters, and one of my stations (unless I intervene) being destroyed by single capital ships. (All OOS)

[LameFox]

I've also noted a few Xenon wharfs and shipyards dying that way.

OOS is different in some ways, like a station can be a lot more lethal without obstructing its own guns, but destroyers do still try to keep range.

[Tamina]

I agree with that the gameplay could use a full rework. As of now, it is like watching a very boring loading bar. I fear this is not going to happen til X5 which we will not see in the next couple of years.

The gameplay is flawed. Stations are overpowered and either shred everything in seconds. Or the capital ship sits in a safe range slowly destroying the station.

Even in players hand, there is no strategy involved. You get to close, dead. No weapon, equipment, strategy or maneuvers will safe you.

I don't see the problem with the patch. It is a general problem of the game.

[adeine]

I think the ideal situation WRT defence platforms would have been that ships fire at them and they fire back, and they have some kind of weakness to exploit that the defender then fills with their own ships. That way you get a fight where everything involved gets to act, nothing is rendered entirely useless.

Instead the station easily counters everything except being far away. And yes, you can fill that gap with ships, but if the station doesn't get to participate in the fight due to range, you're literally just fighting ships vs ships and may as well not have the station. Mostly this doesn't occur, because ships are catastrophically stupid. They simply bash against it in waves until they eventually wear it down or it kills them all. But as the ships are made less stupid, the problem becomes more apparent.

A thought: give each race a new defence module with unique, long range guns. These serve the purpose of targeting destroyers. You get only 2 per module, and they track slowly and fire infrequently, but the projectile moves fast and hits hard. Then, on conventional modules, reduce the number of L turrets. So maybe an Argon disc gets 4 above, 4 below. Maybe reduce M too but most of those are so weak, I don't know if it would be needed.

The idea here is that now, the primary threat to destroyers is these destroyer specific guns. They still need some L turrets to make it risky for the destroyers to fly under their tracking, but the idea is to make it more viable for fighters to assist in the battle by clearing these heavy guns, which themselves contribute almost nothing to killing fighters. If the fighters still suffer too much, we can also reduce the M turrets. This way on a conventional defence platform, there's a benefit to having ships to defend from fighters. The station itself provides them with artillery support against bigger ships.

This won't address player spam of course and isn't intended to. You could overwhelm the few big guns on an NPC defence platform, or overbuild your own stations as desired despite the limited slots. For ordinary stations though, it might make the fights more interesting, and perhaps even better performing, since you'd be condensing a lot of firepower into less projectile spam.

edit: as an aside, if the new module was only placed on defence platforms, that might also make them more functionally distinct from some random factory that happens to have a lot of bridges/discs on it.

I think Egosoft's idea of more interesting station combat is already in the game. We have turret hacking, and missions indicate that physically destroying turrets on stations should be strategically valuable/worthwhile. But because of the range discrepancy there is no point to either.

I don't think introducing a new module is necessary or the right solution - if defence stations are meant to be effective, this is what defence modules with L turrets are already supposed to achieve (I would assume). They're ineffective against small ships, especially with the flight model update. So what are they for, exactly?

I've also noted a few Xenon wharfs and shipyards dying that way.

OOS is different in some ways, like a station can be a lot more lethal without obstructing its own guns, but destroyers do still try to keep range.

I haven't been able to fully test just how badly Xenon are affected as they've perished in my current main game despite my best efforts. But I imagine it's even worse than other factions since their effective range is even shorter.

I agree with that the gameplay could use a full rework. As of now, it is like watching a very boring loading bar. I fear this is not going to happen til X5 which we will not see in the next couple of years.

The gameplay is flawed. Stations are overpowered and either shred everything in seconds. Or the capital ship sits in a safe range slowly destroying the station.

Even in players hand, there is no strategy involved. You get to close, dead. No weapon, equipment, strategy or maneuvers will safe you.

I don't see the problem with the patch. It is a general problem of the game.

Yes. The particular problem with 7.5 is that this current iteration makes stations largely helpless against attack.

This leads to worse outcomes in terms of game state than ships throwing themselves against defence stations as in prior patches. By doing so, the core issue was somewhat mitigated - defence stations could fight back, and could still sometimes be destroyed through overwhelming force (XEN especially). Sitting at a safe distance and slowly chipping away was largely confined to the player's hands, hence the great frustration in trying to get your ships to attack stations in the same manner.

With this behaviour increasingly fixed, fights between NPC factions are often now the same 'loading bar' situation, and with NPC fleet response being slow at best and non-existent at worst (hello pirate factions) this means an entire faction can essentially be disabled by one stray destroyer if unlucky.

[LameFox]

I think Egosoft's idea of more interesting station combat is already in the game. We have turret hacking, and missions indicate that physically destroying turrets on stations should be strategically valuable/worthwhile. But because of the range discrepancy there is no point to either.

I don't think introducing a new module is necessary or the right solution - if defence stations are meant to be effective, this is what defence modules with L turrets are already supposed to achieve (I would assume). They're ineffective against small ships, especially with the flight model update. So what are they for, exactly?

Well you could also do it by buffing L turret range or nerfing destroyer main gun range. However in that case the sheer volume of the relevant L turrets is going to make strategically destroying them harder. There are so many of them to target. You'd just end up with a game world where all destroyers are in the same situation as Rattlesnakes are, and stations pretty much counter everything except raw numbers or player intervention (hacking, personal turret removal).

The idea behind adding a new module is that it's limited to one role, and with only a few big turrets it's more realistic for AI controlled ships to kill them. Like maybe your average defence platform has only 8 of these turrets in total. With fewer L turrets on top of that, you create a more exploitable weakness for fighters or players intentionally flying "under" the big guns due to low tracking. Currently if you want to send fighters against a station, even with good surface-clearing weapons, it always seems to be a massacre.

And while improved drones or having assigned fighters to roam out and attack capitals could work in theory, it's still going to create a fight where if the AI doesn't screw up, a big portion of one side's stuff is just idle.

[Buzz2005]

so finally players got what they want, destroyer just sitting there firing guns, I knew from the start that this would happen, always said that its good that destroyers get stupid and kill themselves on stations since now imo this is a much bigger problem, a single destroyer

guess Ego dont really bother with combat and balance in this game since there is constantly some big issue

[LameFox]

I wouldn't say it was "good". More like it was bad balancing using bad AI as a crutch. Having your ships faceplant due to weird AI behavioural reasons that make no sense to a human player was always going to be an extremely frustrating experience. Players generally want their losses to feel legitimate.

[Buzz2005]

still this problem again makes no sense to a human player, its even worse imo bc whats the workaround ?

[GCU Grey Area]

so finally players got what they want, destroyer just sitting there firing guns, I knew from the start that this would happen, always said that its good that destroyers get stupid and kill themselves on stations since now imo this is a much bigger problem, a single destroyer

Tend to agree. Wasn't as though it was difficult to mitigate over-enthusiastic destroyers, simply by paying close attention to the siege, giving new move & attack orders at appropriate intervals to ensure they wouldn't fly too close. Thoroughly doing enjoyed that, felt I had an important command & control role in the fleet. It was satisfying to demolish stations without casualties knowing that without my intervention that may not have been the case. However the mob demanded fire & forget station demolition without risk & this is where we ended up.

[LameFox]

still this problem again makes no sense to a human player, its even worse imo bc whats the workaround ?

This isn't really an issue players need to work around, you aren't going to get sieged down or anything. We can already build defence platforms very close to gates, support them with ships, or straight up produce a whole fleet for each gate instead.