Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Mechanics => Topic started by: Stormtrooper on February 14, 2021, 06:24:27 PM
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So today the time has come to try boarding combat for the first time (hint: it's super effective compared to fighting conventionally and have enemy shoot back at you) and, according to the rules, my boarding-capable marines on a shuttle roughly 3x faster than the enemy should mean each soldier has roughly 60% chance of surviving, getting to the hull and taking part in the firefight inside. And that seemed to be the case as I looked briefly at the casualties during boarding attempt, roughly 60% of the soldiers made it...
Except one thing. During each of two attempts done with 18 formations, 6 of them vanished without a trace.
How is that possible? I haven't found anything in the rules that'd justify this sudden evaporization of entire formations.
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Were they the ones that were lost during the boarding attempt? Have a look around outside for floating bodies.
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Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target? The game might be trying to be convenient and killing off formations one-by-one to simplify replacement.
Because if they are completely unscathed then you have a 66-67% survival rate, which is better than the expected.
To that end - what about the "12th" formation, is there one formation that took some casualties and the rest are untouched?
If they are scathed then it sounds like a bug to me - but I also know that the boarding capability for marines isn't completely broken as well and the 5x rule is defo in effect instead of the 10x.
Edit: Regardless it would be good if someone checked whether or not the boarding capability is actually being applied to troops that have them or if the game is just applying the 10x rule anyways.
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Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target? The game might be trying to be convenient and killing off formations one-by-one to simplify replacement.
Because if they are completely unscathed then you have a 66-67% survival rate, which is better than the expected.
To that end - what about the "12th" formation, is there one formation that took some casualties and the rest are untouched?
If they are scathed then it sounds like a bug to me - but I also know that the boarding capability for marines isn't completely broken as well and the 5x rule is defo in effect instead of the 10x.
Edit: Regardless it would be good if someone checked whether or not the boarding capability is actually being applied to troops that have them or if the game is just applying the 10x rule anyways.
Whenever I board with 250 tons of marines, I lose my HQ straight away every time. I am wondering, do I need an HQ for boarding?
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Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target?
And here's the problem. They were not. Out of every formation that made it to the hull roughly 40% of the soldiers died, which seemed correct according to the rules posted by Steve. However, according to those rules I should have 18 formations with 60% of initial numbers on boards of enemy ships, but instead I had 12 formations with 60% of initial numbers.
The remaining 6 just evaporated and I couldn't find them anywhere, on board of enemy ships, on board of my ships, nothing, no trace left.
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Seems like this is definitely a bug.
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Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target?
And here's the problem. They were not. Out of every formation that made it to the hull roughly 40% of the soldiers died, which seemed correct according to the rules posted by Steve. However, according to those rules I should have 18 formations with 60% of initial numbers on boards of enemy ships, but instead I had 12 formations with 60% of initial numbers.
The remaining 6 just evaporated and I couldn't find them anywhere, on board of enemy ships, on board of my ships, nothing, no trace left.
Then overall you have an overall 40% survival rate which is quite a bit lower than the expected but maybe not impossible.
If less than half of your total forces survived I can be made to believe that some formations get completely obliterated - are you able to do a repeat test? I hardly think Steve has implemented random seeds for aurora saves.
If you keep getting these low survival rates something is wrong with the boarding capability for your marines. Otherwise it could be a fluke.
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It does sound like you just got the sharp end to the rng.
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6 out of 18 formations consisting of like 60 troops wiped out with each soldier having 60% chance of surviving, meanwhile the remaining formations suffer casualties matching the statistic? How is that "sharp end to the rng"? On top of that it happened twice in a row during two boarding assaults for me.
Also, just calculated the probability of a 60-troop formation getting wiped out based on 60% survival chance for each soldier (though my ship goes slightly faster than 3x speed and I believe I have slightly more than 60).
The rounded value is 1,32923*10(-24)
And that's for just one formation.
Here we're talking six. Twice in a row.
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Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target?
And here's the problem. They were not. Out of every formation that made it to the hull roughly 40% of the soldiers died, which seemed correct according to the rules posted by Steve. However, according to those rules I should have 18 formations with 60% of initial numbers on boards of enemy ships, but instead I had 12 formations with 60% of initial numbers.
The remaining 6 just evaporated and I couldn't find them anywhere, on board of enemy ships, on board of my ships, nothing, no trace left.
Then overall you have an overall 40% survival rate which is quite a bit lower than the expected but maybe not impossible.
If less than half of your total forces survived I can be made to believe that some formations get completely obliterated - are you able to do a repeat test? I hardly think Steve has implemented random seeds for aurora saves.
If you keep getting these low survival rates something is wrong with the boarding capability for your marines. Otherwise it could be a fluke.
Um, I thought 3x speed+boarding capability means 60% (actually a bit higher than 3x in my case), not 40%, besides, even if it meant 40% that'd be still too damn high, just look at my reply above. So actually for most formations that didn't vanish more than half soldiers survived in most cases. I can attach my db if you want to take a look at the logs (I think I haven't deleted them yet so they should still exist in the db), though I didn't look at them carefully because there were so many and it took me a while to notice some of the ships weren't boarded at all even though my shuttles survived unscratched.
But again, for the remaining 12 formations the list of casualties and survivors seemed to be about right.
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6 out of 18 formations consisting of like 60 troops wiped out with each soldier having 60% chance of surviving, meanwhile the remaining formations suffer casualties matching the statistic? How is that "sharp end to the rng"? On top of that it happened twice in a row during two boarding assaults for me.
Also, just calculated the probability of a 60-troop formation getting wiped out based on 60% survival chance for each soldier (though my ship goes slightly faster than 3x speed and I believe I have slightly more than 60).
The rounded value is 1,32923*10(-24)
And that's for just one formation.
Here we're talking six. Twice in a row.
Twice in a row is painful, but also it still doesn't rule out the rng. Or are you saying you suffered the exact same losses on an exact same boarding attempt? If you had it all happen 10 times in a row then you can start to point fingers, otherwise it still could be the rng just giving you a hard time.
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Dude... Do you understand about what propability we're talking here? Do you acknowledge what a value 1,32923*10(-24) is? To give you some perspective, according to first google result the propability of getting hit by a lighting is 2*10(-6).
And the value I posted is for one formation getting wiped out given survival chances of my troops lol
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It is clear that something went wrong - I want to know if something similar happens when you do another boarding operation under similar circumstances cuz right now I couldn't tell you what exactly caused it.
I think of one last thing to ask - When your 18 formations arrived at the target to roll their chances, did any of the boarding shuttles carrying them get destroyed / lose their boarding bay? If yes, when did this happen during the boarding operation?
Because if somehow you lost 6 boarding shuttles were lost to weapons fire while the marines were breaching the armor then I think we've found the bug.
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Nope, all shuttles didn't get a single scratch and are as shiny as when they left docks...
Been a few days since I played aurora, but I guess that with Invaders around I'll have plenty of occasions to try more boarding because no matter the casualties among marines it's stupidly OP. Maybe then I'll have more info as I'll pay a closer look to all logs after giving order to board.
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Nope, all shuttles didn't get a single scratch and are as shiny as when they left docks...
Been a few days since I played aurora, but I guess that with Invaders around I'll have plenty of occasions to try more boarding because no matter the casualties among marines it's stupidly OP. Maybe then I'll have more info as I'll pay a closer look to all logs after giving order to board.
It'd be even better if you save the game before boarding starts as that would allow people like me to see what's going on better.
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Is this the same database where you've messed around before, deleting multiple NPRs and stuff? Because if it is, then that's a possible reason. Obviously, it's possible that there's an elusive bug in the boarding code somewhere but quite a number of people have performed boarding combat and nobody else has come across this.
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Yep, it's the same one, it's all the one and only aurora campaign I've ever played. 8)
Though the only db edit I did was to set npr as player race and delete it in-game through the race screen or set as a player race, delete some fleets that were causing massive slowdown and set it to npr once again, so I was literally changing one value in one column in one row in one table, apart from that I was only regularly clearing logs as this also improves performance.
If hihger marines casualties and some ships not getting boarded despite me ordering them to be is the only price to pay for it, it was still worth it, then. Even with those additional problems boarding is still stupidly OP compared to any other combat method I might use against Invaders.
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Is this the same database where you've messed around before, deleting multiple NPRs and stuff? Because if it is, then that's a possible reason. Obviously, it's possible that there's an elusive bug in the boarding code somewhere but quite a number of people have performed boarding combat and nobody else has come across this.
That's not it, I've done the same thing in my save and boarding combat has not been affected.
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Maybe, maybe not. It's impossible to know if Stormtrooper accidentally messed up something else without noticing while cleaning up his game. God knows I've done something like that in the past and it's the main reason why I don't dive into the DB.
In any case, until someone with an untouched database can reproduce this issue, it can't be reported as a bug.
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ok here's the save just 5 secs before boarding attempt, this time it's 14 formations in NN 3009 system, the moment I pressed 5 secs button I got the following events I attach on a screenshot - note this time 13 formations went into boarding, but one vanished.
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ok here's the save just 5 secs before boarding attempt, this time it's 14 formations in NN 3009 system, the moment I pressed 5 secs button I got the following events I attach on a screenshot - note this time 13 formations went into boarding, but one vanished.
Alright I'll start asking:
1 - What is the name of the formation that vanished and which shuttle was it on board?
2 - What was the %chance for a marine to die?
3 - What was the overall survival rate of the formations that didn't vanish?
4 - What is the status of the boarding shuttles?
5 - Does each boarding shuttle carry only 1 formation?
That's all I can think of the top of my head.
Edit: I'm assuming "AS Pike 006" is one of your boarding shuttles - was it the only one that took any damage? If not, did any of the others lose a boarding bay by any chance?
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Ok now that I took a look here's the very interesting thing:
1.the vanished one was 329th - as you can see in the event window, remaining 13, ranging from 316 to 328, survived and proceeded to board. However, as you can see just at the very bottom of the screenshot I took showing casualties during boarding attempt, 329th survived according to these reports - it lists 21 riflemen dying from this formation and then states that 30 are remaining, yet 329th never appeared in any logs after this. The shuttle it was on was Gauntlet MkII 014 if I remember my setup correctly.
2.A little less than 40% for each soldier given my speed, their speed and boarding combat capability.
3.Well, looks like it was more or less 60%, aligning with their survival chance.
4.Not a single scratch on any of them.
5.yep, 1 shuttle - 1 formation, grouped in squadrons of 2 so when I give order to board with all formations on one fleet it's two shuttles using two formations.
Nope, Pikes are these things:
Pike class Assault Ship 16,370 tons 512 Crew 6,528 BP TCS 327 TH 1,260 EM 6,240
10996 km/s Armour 10-57 Shields 208-520 HTK 84 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 5 PPV 72
Maint Life 0.64 Years MSP 2,046 AFR 429% IFR 6.0% 1YR 3,204 5YR 48,054 Max Repair 1575 MSP
Captain Control Rating 2 BRG CIC
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Morale Check Required
Internal Fusion Drive EP1800.00 (2) Power 3600 Fuel Use 33.75% Signature 630.00 Explosion 15%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 32.6 billion km (34 days at full power)
Theta S208 / R520 Shields (1) Recharge Time 520 seconds (0.4 per second)
Particle Lance-18 (2) Range 320,000km TS: 10,996 km/s Power 55-4 ROF 70
Particle Beam-9 (4) Range 320,000km TS: 10,996 km/s Power 22-4 ROF 30
CIWS-320 (1x10) Range 1000 km TS: 32,000 km/s ROF 5
Beam Fire Control R450-TS16000 (50%) (2) Max Range: 450,000 km TS: 16,000 km/s 98 96 93 91 89 87 84 82 80 78
Tokamak Fusion Reactor R23 (1) Total Power Output 22.6 Exp 5%
Tokamak Fusion Reactor R5 (1) Total Power Output 5.2 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor AS3-R1 (50%) (4) GPS 5 Range 3.5m km MCR 314.7k km Resolution 1
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Gauntlets MkII are my shutttles. But my fleet didn't consist of them solely, there were also other ships and some happened to take damage ;)
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Ok now that I took a look here's the very interesting thing:
1.the vanished one was 329th - as you can see in the event window, remaining 13, ranging from 316 to 328, survived and proceeded to board. However, as you can see just at the very bottom of the screenshot I took showing casualties during boarding attempt, 329th survived according to these reports - it lists 21 riflemen dying from this formation and then states that 30 are remaining, yet 329th never appeared in any logs after this. The shuttle it was on was Gauntlet MkII 014 if I remember my setup correctly.
2.A little less than 40% for each soldier given my speed, their speed and boarding combat capability.
3.Well, looks like it was more or less 60%, aligning with their survival chance.
4.Not a single scratch on any of them.
5.yep, 1 shuttle - 1 formation, grouped in squadrons of 2 so when I give order to board with all formations on one fleet it's two shuttles using two formations.
Nope, Pikes are these things:
Pike class Assault Ship 16,370 tons 512 Crew 6,528 BP TCS 327 TH 1,260 EM 6,240
10996 km/s Armour 10-57 Shields 208-520 HTK 84 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 5 PPV 72
Maint Life 0.64 Years MSP 2,046 AFR 429% IFR 6.0% 1YR 3,204 5YR 48,054 Max Repair 1575 MSP
Captain Control Rating 2 BRG CIC
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Morale Check Required
Internal Fusion Drive EP1800.00 (2) Power 3600 Fuel Use 33.75% Signature 630.00 Explosion 15%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 32.6 billion km (34 days at full power)
Theta S208 / R520 Shields (1) Recharge Time 520 seconds (0.4 per second)
Particle Lance-18 (2) Range 320,000km TS: 10,996 km/s Power 55-4 ROF 70
Particle Beam-9 (4) Range 320,000km TS: 10,996 km/s Power 22-4 ROF 30
CIWS-320 (1x10) Range 1000 km TS: 32,000 km/s ROF 5
Beam Fire Control R450-TS16000 (50%) (2) Max Range: 450,000 km TS: 16,000 km/s 98 96 93 91 89 87 84 82 80 78
Tokamak Fusion Reactor R23 (1) Total Power Output 22.6 Exp 5%
Tokamak Fusion Reactor R5 (1) Total Power Output 5.2 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor AS3-R1 (50%) (4) GPS 5 Range 3.5m km MCR 314.7k km Resolution 1
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Gauntlets MkII are my shutttles. But my fleet didn't consist of them solely, there were also other ships and some happened to take damage ;)
Was gauntlet 014 empty after the marines arrived at the target? Did something weird happen where the 329th launched but somehow didn't?
Otherwise I'm at a bit of a loss, especially since the game is recognizing that the formation survived with expected casualties but also banishing the survivors to the shadow realm.
The only thing of note that I can think of is that somehow the last formation is being "forgotten" because 329th is the highest numbered formation so it would most likely be processed last. However that does not explain why I have never encountered this problem (tbf my boarding operations are done on either slow or immobilized ships so 100% survival chance). It also doesn't explain why in your first scenario you lost 6 out of 18 formations and not just one.
Edit: Based on your screenshot I now notice that the formation disappears at the breaching phase - the last entry there is the 328th. Does the vanishing happen on ships that have not had their armor breached yet? If you have the save point from before the boarding I would appreciate if you could breach the targets armor before landing the marines to confirm.
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Well, something weird must have happenned indeed, but nothing I can point out - all the shuttles were empty, the marines from the damned 329th squad appeared in the log displayed on main game screen I attached and that was the last time and place I saw info about them.
Doubt it's related to them being "last" formation, previously 6 out of 18 formations suffered from this twice in a row, and they were selected randomly rather than from the end.
As for the ship armor-related stuff, so far all my attempts were launched at shiny, unscratched enemy ships, so can't say what would happen if I attempted to board a pre-penetrated one. And the save you're asking for is already there - db I attached together with screenshot is from a state where I had set orders to board and 5 sec increment is all it takes for them to get processed.
Based on your screenshot I now notice that the formation disappears at the breaching phase
Exactly what I noticed earlier ;)
P.S. Maybe it isn't that bad of a bug/weird stuff happening, after all? Boarding seems to be ridiculously OP anyways and I guess I could incorporate it into my AAR, those are Invaders, after all 8)
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Boarding parties disappearing sounds a lot like this bug I reported in 1.11 way back in October.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11565.msg141316#msg141316
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Here's a question. What is the size of the vessel you're boarding? Any idea the complement it supports? I'm wondering if you're "Overcrowding" the ship and the new joiners are being ejected, or the first to board are being ejected as new units arrive.
Only thing I could think of, if you're receiving the same results each time.
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Here's a question. What is the size of the vessel you're boarding? Any idea the complement it supports? I'm wondering if you're "Overcrowding" the ship and the new joiners are being ejected, or the first to board are being ejected as new units arrive.
Only thing I could think of, if you're receiving the same results each time.
This should not be happening as troops weirdly enough don't add strain to life support in any situation. If for some reason this is the case then there is another bug at play too.
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Only thing I could think of, if you're receiving the same results each time.
Results are completely random each time. After several more boardings sometimes, weridly enough, the problem did not occur at all, most of the time it did, though.
Another interesting example is that in one case all soldiers made it, however two of the captured ships were of different class than the ones I wanted to board. Maybe it's my mistake, but I remember double-checking after giving orders, so this should not be happening.