Author Topic: Interception  (Read 2044 times)

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Offline Ashery (OP)

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Interception
« on: August 15, 2011, 04:29:30 AM »
Motivated by the discussion that was recently on the mechanics forum.  (Linking doesn't work? Found a link in the tutorial section that apparently worked, copied it directly from the quoted text and yet it still didn't work. )

I'll summarize my problem as well, as it's fairly straight forward: While experimenting with some non-traditional techniques, I figured I'd try out some fighters equipped with miniaturized gauss cannons to compliment my more traditional PD.  Looked good on paper, but after testing them in a practice game using SM mode, they ended up being completely useless due to the sequence of play.  Whenever I advance time by five seconds, my fighters move to the point where the missiles were before the advance.  But the missiles have yet to move at this point, so once the sequence of play finishes, the missiles are now sitting well out of range of my fighters.

The only solution currently available it to manually calculate/visually estimate where the missiles will be and hope you're close enough to engage the missiles (Not exactly easy with gauss weapons).

The easiest solution, at least to me, would be to provide an "Intercept" command that will calculate, based on current sensor data, where the target will be in five seconds and send your task group there.  A slightly more advanced order could allow for the player to input the intercept time and show how far apart the two fleets would be after that time period.  As this extrapolates on current sensor data, the calculation is by no means a guarantee, but it'd still be helpful in other situations besides the initial motivating one.

Could also be possible to display some level of prediction on the system map, but that wouldn't really address my issue with the fighters (Well, I could manually add a waypoint every five seconds, but that's not much of a solution, heh).
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Interception
« Reply #1 on: August 15, 2011, 06:05:25 AM »
I think a better solution would be to alter the sequence of play so that instead of system bodies move, ships move, fighters move, missiles move everything moves on a single initiative.  You'd probably still want system bodies to move first, so maybe set their initiative to 99999.  Missiles could have their initiative set to (100 + Agility).

With this system, 'Follow' and 'Move to' orders would work properly regardless of which type of contact they target.
 

Offline Ashery (OP)

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Re: Interception
« Reply #2 on: August 15, 2011, 03:23:16 PM »
Err, doesn't initiative work in such a manner that the lowest initiative moves first?

The thing is, why should missiles be unable to be intercepted just because of their high agility? One can manually plot a course to intercept where they'll be in five seconds, but it's a pain in the ass to do, so I figured one should be able to have the game calculate where to go for them.  The game already presents the player with all the information the game would need (Heading and speed of the missiles) to make the calculation, so why not take it one step further?
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Interception
« Reply #3 on: August 15, 2011, 06:39:31 PM »
Err, doesn't initiative work in such a manner that the lowest initiative moves first?

Err, maybe.  *shrug* If so, set system bodies to 0.

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The thing is, why should missiles be unable to be intercepted just because of their high agility?

They shouldn't.  They should be harder tp intercept the higher their agility is; hence the bonus to initiative.

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One can manually plot a course to intercept where they'll be in five seconds, but it's a pain in the ass to do, so I figured one should be able to have the game calculate where to go for them.  The game already presents the player with all the information the game would need (Heading and speed of the missiles) to make the calculation, so why not take it one step further?

Because it's poor programming practice to write an exception.  It's also extra work.  The 'move an object' code already exists; the problem is that it moves all the system bodies first, then all the ships, all the fighters, and finally all the missiles.  The artificial rule 'this class moves before that class' leads to all sorts of problems, not just the particular case of 'I want to hunt down missile salvoes with my fighters.'

Anyways, it wouldn't work the way your asking for because Aurora doesn't know how long the next increment is going to be until you push the button to advance time - you'd need a separate input box where you tell Aurora how much the next time advance is going to be (which Aurora needs to remember if you have 'Automated Turns' checked) and uses that information to calculate where to put the waypoint it then tells your fighter squadron to move to . . . AND Aurora would need to keep track of that information in case an interruption occurred during the specified time, and then recalculate all the values with respect to the subpulses that had already been carried out - PLUS write a whole bunch of error-catching code in case the salvo being followed ran out of endurance, lost guidance and self destructed, was shot down, passed through a jump gate or black hole or hyper limit, or worst of all, split up.  (If the salvo you're following divides itself to go after four cruisers, what should your fighters do?  What happens if there aren't enough fighter to follow every mini-salvo?)

Your problem is "The Follow (and Move To) action is broken because of the sequence of play; fighters always move before missiles and thus can't be made to Follow a missile salvo at a range shorter than (missile speed x 5 seconds)."  The solution is not 'write a new order that does what Follow does but only for fighters chasing missiles' (as Steve pointed out elsewhere, there is already 145 different fleet orders) but rather 'fix Follow (and incidentally Move To) so that it does what it's supposed to do for any class of unit following any other class of unit'.

All of this, of course, is assuming Steve even wants it to be possible for fighters to move after missiles.  I don't remember his reasoning for setting up the Sequence of Play the way he did - I'm not sure he ever considered the logistics of fighters chasing missiles - but I seem to recall something about ships moving towards missiles not triggering point defense properly.  Basically, ships could inadvertently 'ram' missiles, and doing so not only negated point defense but upped the missiles hit chance significantly.
 

Offline Ashery (OP)

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Re: Interception
« Reply #4 on: August 15, 2011, 08:59:15 PM »
Ahh, there's that juicy, juicy meat that I was looking for.

Re: Agility.

I suppose we have to first define what agility actually is in order to make any headway here.  I've taken it to mean the capacity for a missile to quickly change direction in response to a wide variety of factors (The abstracted evasive maneuvers that ships are assumed to be taking, for instance).  Going by that, it doesn't make much sense that some fighters moving to intercept a missile with high agility won't be able to calculate where it'll be five seconds from now and move there instead of towards the location the missile is currently at.  Their high agility won't change the fact that they're flying to their target in a straight line (Assuming a stationary target, if there's movement there are some potential issues, but I'll be going into those later).

I'm in complete agreement that writing an exception is poor programming practice, but that's not what I'm looking for.  I don't want the missiles to move first when I have fighters set to intercept; I want the game to run a calculation based upon information that I already have access to and send my fighters towards the point where I *expect* the missiles to be at the end of the five second increment (or, if it's done in such a manner, whatever time frame the player decides to input).

As Aurora doesn't know the increment until the player presses the button, wouldn't that be more of an argument for the more advanced function (The player inputting the time) rather than one against the concept altogether? I'm not even sure if it would be necessary for the game to do anything extra during the movement phase as the calculation can be done as the order is set.  After inputting the time, the location where the object will likely be based upon current sensor data is calculated and a waypoint placed.  If it just so happens that the object you were attempting to intercept changed heading, then the interception would simply fail and your fleet would be off the mark.  The only real addition would be that the arrival of your fleet at the interception point would cause an interruption.

Your list of potential issues are largely caught by my recent statements, but the last one could be a problem.  The question is, though, just how often will a rocket's submunitions go off in four separate headings? Regardless, though, it seems as though this is also caught by my earlier statement: The interception order plots a waypoint where your target is expected to be in 'x' amount of time based upon current sensor data and if the situation changes during the movement phase, then your interception has simply failed.

You got my exact problem down, though.  Perhaps the "Follow" command could simply be expanded to have the increased versatility of "Intercept. "
 

Offline Erik L

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Re: Interception
« Reply #5 on: August 15, 2011, 10:06:36 PM »
One point, if there is missile combat (or any combat) the game drops to 5 second increments.

Offline jseah

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Re: Interception
« Reply #6 on: August 15, 2011, 11:06:37 PM »
If you're using the initiative thing, that would mean that fleets with higher initiative would be able to more easily follow fleets that have lower initiative.  This would make a difference only in beam combat.  (eg. a meson armed higher initiative fleet able to close to firing range within 5 seconds would be able to fire on a laser armed lower initiative fleet that tries to stay away)

If so, I'm all for it. 
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Interception
« Reply #7 on: August 16, 2011, 10:28:57 AM »
The question is, though, just how often will a rocket's submunitions go off in four separate headings?

Any time the original target is destroyed, or the firing ship is destroyed, or something else causes the salvo to look for a new target with its onboard sensors.  I do not believe they will all choose the same new target (and if they do, there are plenty of people on this board who will object to that behaviour and request independent targetting).

One of the common anti-Swarm tactics is to just blast a massive cloud of missiles with onboard sensors at them and let the targetting computer sort it out.  You don't want 200 missiles massively overkilling one Swarm soldier, you want the salvo to divide as evenly as possible amongst all the soldiers.
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Interception
« Reply #8 on: August 16, 2011, 10:34:34 AM »
One point, if there is missile combat (or any combat) the game drops to 5 second increments.

Not always - or rather, it doesn't necessarily stay there.  If you launch six salvoes at your enemy from an hour away, you don't want to spend 720 increments waiting for them to hit - you force Aurora to advance in 5 or 20 minute chunks, and then back to 5 or 30 second increments once interception becomes likely.  This is the sort of situation you're likely to find yourself in if you launch fighters to go out an intercept the incoming missiles - longer than five second increments during the twenty minute flight time to get there.
 

Offline ollobrains

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Re: Interception
« Reply #9 on: August 19, 2011, 08:11:22 AM »
How about a technology and the ability to group missiles into slightly larger groups of missiles each with their own tracking id. could reduce lag to on the combat turns