Can we have VB6 missile behaviour back?

[Haji (OP)]

For the purpose of this post missile salvo refers to multiple missiles assigned to the same fire control, missile wave refers to multiple missile salvoes moving together.

Back in VB6 Aurora when you had missiles with active sensors and achieved overkill, it worked like this. The game would go through missile salvoes and would stop once a target was destroyed. So let's say you had X missile salvoes and the target required 4 to be destroyed. You would end up with X-4 salvoes looking for a new target. After five second interval they would start going after other ships in the same manner but this time without delay. So they would go for another ship and if it was destroyed they would go immediately after another and another until either the salvoes or the ships were gone.
In C# Aurora the game checks no the salvoes but the missile waves. So if you fire 20 salvoes at a target but only 4 are needed to destroy it, it won't matter, all twenty salvoes will be used. This means you have to very carefully set up your fire controls to prevent overkill.
In many ways that is fine and interesting and all. But what happens when you have a medium sized battle involving some nine hundred warships and sixteen hundred fighters? Many of which have multiple fire controls I might add. Yeah, setting up fire controls for all that crap ain't fun. In VB6 I would just use the "assign to fleet" order to set up fire control for one ship and then copy it to all the other ships of the same class, allowing me to set up the battle in a couple of minutes. But in C# Aurora that would lead to several ships being totally destroyed in a comical overkill leaving other warships intact. As such I'd like to ask for the old missile behaviour to be back.
In addition I'd like for the limitation on missile sensors be removed. Currently any sensor needs to be at least 0.25 msp large with additional space going to the reactor. The problem is that as the game progresses the antimissile interception chances are increasing significantly to the point where any missile larger than 1 is essentially useless.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In C# you can use the Auto Target MFC which will distribute your MFC evenly among all the enemy ships and then you can just adjust you fleet targets afterwards. This generally provide a good enough automation in my opinion in terms of micromanagement.

Missiles re-targeting should happen but should only do so in the next 5 second increment so enemy PD have a second change to fire at them. Every time the re-target another 5 second increment occurs giving another opportunity to shoot at them with beam weapons.

Personally I don't like missiles re-targeting without some penalties just because it "might" be a bit convenient from a player perspective.


Regarding sensor size it is fine as it is... the problem is agility and how it works. I always change the agility in the game database to be between 80-120 from lowest to highest technology so end game AMM still are reasonably effective in contrast to ASM. I would like for the agility and fire-control mechanic to be developed a bit further in the game to balance things a bit more at some point.

[Haji (OP)]

In C# you can use the Auto Target MFC which will distribute your MFC evenly among all the enemy ships and then you can just adjust you fleet targets afterwards. This generally provide a good enough automation in my opinion in terms of micromanagement.

I haven't checked the auto target in 1.12 but I did in 1.11 or 1.10 and It was useless. The command does not distribute fire controls it distributes ships. So if you have 10 ships with 5 fire controls and 50 enemies only 10 enemies will be targeted. In addition there is no differentiating between sizes. 5kT corvette will be targeted by the same number of missiles as 300kT carrier. In essence I would have to set up targeting manually anyway in any battle that involves ships of vastly different sizes.

[Droll]

In C# you can use the Auto Target MFC which will distribute your MFC evenly among all the enemy ships and then you can just adjust you fleet targets afterwards. This generally provide a good enough automation in my opinion in terms of micromanagement.

I haven't checked the auto target in 1.12 but I did in 1.11 or 1.10 and It was useless. The command does not distribute fire controls it distributes ships. So if you have 10 ships with 5 fire controls and 50 enemies only 10 enemies will be targeted. In addition there is no differentiating between sizes. 5kT corvette will be targeted by the same number of missiles as 300kT carrier. In essence I would have to set up targeting manually anyway in any battle that involves ships of vastly different sizes.

I care less for the ability to have ship size based targeting but absolutely agree that distributing targets by ships as opposed to firing controls is irritating for missile ships and even beam ships when fighting fighters.

[Iceranger]

Not sure about the salvo behavior part, but I'm pretty sure the on-board sensor and E-war change on the missile are part of the balance adjustment to nerf mini-missile spam.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In C# you can use the Auto Target MFC which will distribute your MFC evenly among all the enemy ships and then you can just adjust you fleet targets afterwards. This generally provide a good enough automation in my opinion in terms of micromanagement.

I haven't checked the auto target in 1.12 but I did in 1.11 or 1.10 and It was useless. The command does not distribute fire controls it distributes ships. So if you have 10 ships with 5 fire controls and 50 enemies only 10 enemies will be targeted. In addition there is no differentiating between sizes. 5kT corvette will be targeted by the same number of missiles as 300kT carrier. In essence I would have to set up targeting manually anyway in any battle that involves ships of vastly different sizes.

I don't remember how the auto targeting worked but for main ships I never really bothered using it and mainly used if for small ships/FAC or fighters that usually only had one fire-control.

I do agree that distribution should be per fire-control and not per ship as that make very little sense if that is how it works.

I still think the current auto fire-control settings will lessen the work and you will have to adjust it afterword to account for ship size or class. In general I actually never bothered much as I like to control which ships I shoot at anyway, something the auto targeting never would be able to solve for me anyway.

[drejr]

Sub-fleets are a good way to manage fire controls of lots of ships.

[Haji (OP)]

I still think the current auto fire-control settings will lessen the work and you will have to adjust it afterword to account for ship size or class. In general I actually never bothered much as I like to control which ships I shoot at anyway, something the auto targeting never would be able to solve for me anyway.

In small scale battles I agree that this would work, but this is why I specified that I had a battle of nine hundred warships in VB6. That's several thousand fire controls with ships ranging from 500T fighters through corvettes, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battleships and ending with 300kT carriers. That's not some random scenario I made up, this is the battle that ended my campaign in VB6 Aurora as initial missile exchange took over two days to compute. I want to try and re-create that campaign in C# aurora but there is no way I'm setting up several thousand fire controls by hand on a per battle basis. That's why the micromanagement aspect of the current missile behaviour is so important to me.

[QuakeIV]

Pretending that adding micromanagement is somehow a balancing factor is absurd anyhow.  It will just benefit purely the people willing to sit for hours hand configuring stuff that by all rights should probably be automatic.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I still think the current auto fire-control settings will lessen the work and you will have to adjust it afterword to account for ship size or class. In general I actually never bothered much as I like to control which ships I shoot at anyway, something the auto targeting never would be able to solve for me anyway.

In small scale battles I agree that this would work, but this is why I specified that I had a battle of nine hundred warships in VB6. That's several thousand fire controls with ships ranging from 500T fighters through corvettes, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battleships and ending with 300kT carriers. That's not some random scenario I made up, this is the battle that ended my campaign in VB6 Aurora as initial missile exchange took over two days to compute. I want to try and re-create that campaign in C# aurora but there is no way I'm setting up several thousand fire controls by hand on a per battle basis. That's why the micromanagement aspect of the current missile behaviour is so important to me.

I don't think there is an easy solution in terms of auto-targeting as there are too many factors that can be involved.

As for re-targeting I do think it should come at a cost in terms of time for missiles to re-target if their primary target is killed. I have no problems otherwise if missile re-target if the primary objective is gone.

I'm less concerned about efficiency or some very obscure scenario involving a thousand ships in a single battle. I like mechanics to make sense first and worry about busywork second. Even if making things easy on the player is important it is still secondary in my opinion.

[Haji (OP)]

I'm less concerned about efficiency or some very obscure scenario involving a thousand ships in a single battle. I like mechanics to make sense first and worry about busywork second. Even if making things easy on the player is important it is still secondary in my opinion.

I'm not sure what do you mean by making sense. Mechanically I can do everything missile retargeting did in VB6 Aurora, I just need to spend ungodly amount of time calculating how many missiles I want to fire at the target and then set it up manually. Also when you come dawn to it, if Steve could develop perfect auto targeting routine it would be accomplishing the exact same thing VB6 Aurora retargeting did, just in a different way.
Technobubble wise there is no reason why I should be doing the targeting at all. I'm assuming that with all the space travel the ships would have datalinks capable of perfectly distributing fire according to simple guildlines from the operators, for example "I want to target x missiles per 1000 tonnes of target" or even better, if there is enough intel on the enemy the system would be like "hey, we know exactly what to do to destroy the maximum number of enemy ships with minimum usage of ammunition, here is the firing solution". For that matter the VB6 retargeting also makes sense. Computers can react in microseconds and all battles happen in 5 sec intervals. It would be easy to see missiles communicating and be like "Hey, my target was destroyed 0.0003 seconds ago, I need to find a new one, like this one, took me 0.0004 seconds, but it's gone now, let's get this one, took me 0.0003 seconds to find it, ah, but it's gone too...".
So yes, I think in both mechanical and technobubble sense the old VB6 retargeting made a great deal of sense.

As for obscurity, I always thought that those who play Aurora hope to get to the Starfire point of having campaigns across hundreds of systems with hundreds if not thousands of ships. I guess that's just me.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I'm less concerned about efficiency or some very obscure scenario involving a thousand ships in a single battle. I like mechanics to make sense first and worry about busywork second. Even if making things easy on the player is important it is still secondary in my opinion.

I'm not sure what do you mean by making sense. Mechanically I can do everything missile retargeting did in VB6 Aurora, I just need to spend ungodly amount of time calculating how many missiles I want to fire at the target and then set it up manually. Also when you come dawn to it, if Steve could develop perfect auto targeting routine it would be accomplishing the exact same thing VB6 Aurora retargeting did, just in a different way.
Technobubble wise there is no reason why I should be doing the targeting at all. I'm assuming that with all the space travel the ships would have datalinks capable of perfectly distributing fire according to simple guildlines from the operators, for example "I want to target x missiles per 1000 tonnes of target" or even better, if there is enough intel on the enemy the system would be like "hey, we know exactly what to do to destroy the maximum number of enemy ships with minimum usage of ammunition, here is the firing solution". For that matter the VB6 retargeting also makes sense. Computers can react in microseconds and all battles happen in 5 sec intervals. It would be easy to see missiles communicating and be like "Hey, my target was destroyed 0.0003 seconds ago, I need to find a new one, like this one, took me 0.0004 seconds, but it's gone now, let's get this one, took me 0.0003 seconds to find it, ah, but it's gone too...".
So yes, I think in both mechanical and technobubble sense the old VB6 retargeting made a great deal of sense.

As for obscurity, I always thought that those who play Aurora hope to get to the Starfire point of having campaigns across hundreds of systems with hundreds if not thousands of ships. I guess that's just me.

It is extremely unrealistic to know if a target is destroyed in a few seconds or not... there will not be time to assess if the target was actually destroyed or just damaged in that time. Realistically you probably would need allot more data before you know if a target is destroyed or not.

To be honest I don't think that missiles in the same salvo should be able to re-target at all as the data needed to assess if a target is destroyed or not will take way more time than 5 seconds anyway no matter how fast a computer can react or think.

I'm perfectly fine with the notion that only following salvos will re-target to a new target and any missiles in the same salvo is simply wasted. Forcing you to fire multiple salvos or risk wasting allot of ammunition.

In my opinion it is part of the game that you waste missiles.

I would not be against some better auto-targeting criteria, but I still think that it will be hard to account for every type of scenario. But distributing per tonnage seem like a decent way... but work really bad if the enemy task-force have both commercial and military designs for example.

In general I think that in many situations I will need to do it manually anyway no matter how complicated the auto allocation feature gets. But a few more settings for it would be fine. It certainly should distribute per fire-control or per ship... your choice. It also could distribute per enemy ship or per tonnage. These four options in combination should cover allot of ground and from there you could do it manually.

[Iceranger]

In C# Aurora the game checks no the salvoes but the missile waves. So if you fire 20 salvoes at a target but only 4 are needed to destroy it, it won't matter, all twenty salvoes will be used. This means you have to very carefully set up your fire controls to prevent overkill.

Read your post again and this part definitely sounds like a bug, as this is sensor missile retargeting not working. I recall so far sensor missiles redirecting isn't working quite well in C# since release. Mines do not work, and regular sensor missiles may or may not work based on many reports.

[Droll]

In C# Aurora the game checks no the salvoes but the missile waves. So if you fire 20 salvoes at a target but only 4 are needed to destroy it, it won't matter, all twenty salvoes will be used. This means you have to very carefully set up your fire controls to prevent overkill.

Read your post again and this part definitely sounds like a bug, as this is sensor missile retargeting not working. I recall so far sensor missiles redirecting isn't working quite well in C# since release. Mines do not work, and regular sensor missiles may or may not work based on many reports.

I thought that was a mechanical change but I stopped adding sensors to my missiles because of this. Sensor missiles will no longer retarget in C#

[Malorn]

I don't think there is an easy solution in terms of auto-targeting as there are too many factors that can be involved.

As for re-targeting I do think it should come at a cost in terms of time for missiles to re-target if their primary target is killed. I have no problems otherwise if missile re-target if the primary objective is gone.

I'm less concerned about efficiency or some very obscure scenario involving a thousand ships in a single battle. I like mechanics to make sense first and worry about busywork second. Even if making things easy on the player is important it is still secondary in my opinion.

I think that requiring time to re-target is an excellent compromise. It encourages spreading out fire to a degree, but still allows for re-targeting to be possible.

I agree that mechanics should make sense, but I do think that busywork is important to control as well. Certainly too much automation is not fun, but robust automatic systems allow the player to focus on what they WANT to focus on. But from a realism perspective, each of those ships has a captain and many crewmembers who would realistically be able to handle some targeting priorities. That is something that should be considered.

Perhaps a reaction roll, or crew training could be involved with retargeting as well? There are, after all, instant links to these missiles via TN, so a good tac officer should be 'playing' the missiles all the way to the target. In fact, I think crew/officer skills should be more involved in missiles in general, changing how effective ECM/ECCM is for example. A good crew with excellent officers should be able to significantly increase combat power in a way that isn't currently modeled with missiles, apart from fire rate.

In theory, if the fire control is in range, it ought to be possible to retarget missiles from incoming salvos to new targets...which...might already be possible in c#? I dunno, I've honestly not had it come up in most of my combats. But certainly missiles are by default controlled from the ship, since if the fire control goes down, they self-destruct lacking sensors. So in theory, shouldn't that control work in our favor as well?