NPR Designs and Compositions

[Xkill (OP)]

Straight to the point: what sort of ship designs and fleet compositions and deployment strengths have other people witnessed from NPRs? I guess this can involve ground forces as well: what sort of troops did they have? How were they structured? How was the experience of invading their homeworld/colony, etc? Have anyone's colonies been invaded by non-spoilers yet?

Ever since the start of the C# project and Steve's "Update on Progress" posts I have been extremely interested in the new NPR AI. How they are supposed to build and develop according to semi-unique themes sounded veeery nice to me. Sure hope this has been expanded upon since release. I try to play similarly to NPRs to keep things equal and engaging. One "theme" for my empire from which I do not deviate, no matter what. It is rather difficult sometimes to get a good picture of how the AI is coming about in practice, yourself - NPR generation is relatively simple but still a rare ocurrence for me, despite pumping the numbers up.

As an aside, could we get a "Spoiler Generation Chance Setting", similar to NPRs? Would like to see more Precs and Swarm.

[nuclearslurpee]

I can summarize "a few" key points - obvious NPR spoilers ahead, reader be warned!

NPR ships and fleets:

• NPR ships are based on a random nominal tonnage mark between 6,000 and 9,000. Small ships usually in the destroyer classes are 1x this mark, medium ships in the cruiser classes are 2x this mark (12k to 18k), and capital ships are 3x this mark (18k to 27k). I believe that one spoiler race uses dreadnoughts in the 4x mark range (24k to 36k) but I've never seen an NPR use this large of a warship. Of course, another certain spoiler race uses rather esoteric ship sizes but you're not asking about spoilers.
• This tonnage is, again, nominal, and actual NPR ships vary somewhat in tonnage from this mark.
• NPR ships choose an engine size based on a nominal fraction of their total tonnage, which can vary from 30% to 42% based on a random factor as well as choice of beams or missiles as primary armament. A single size of engine is used for all ships, I think in 2x/4x/6x configurations.
• NPRs select a ship design philosophy from a predefined listing which determines things like primary weapon (missiles, beams, or mixed), point defense weapon (usually Gauss, can be railguns), and shield usage (I think 3 out of 27 philosophies use shields).
• NPR sensor resolutions are 1, 5, 20, and a random value over 100 which may be restricted to prime numbers, I'm not certain. Active sensor sizes are sizes 6 and 9, size 1 are not used on military ships and I think they get size 3 designs that they don't use. I've yet to see a military ship with an active sensor smaller than size 6.
• Ship classes in each size category nominally break out as:
• • Destroyers (6k to 9k): escort (DE) armed with the PD weapon and offensive (DD/DDG) variants armed with the primary weapons. There will be three DD/DDG types which vary only in the resolution of their active sensors (5, 20, and >100).
  • Cruisers (12k to 18k): escort (CLE) armed with the PD weapon and/or AMMs, offensive cruiser (CA) armed with the primary or secondary offensive weapon (e.g., in a missiles/lasers race, these will be laser-armed and the DDGs/BCs will be missile-armed), and a jump cruiser (CJ) which is unarmed except for CIWS. I have noticed that in some cases races will spawn with CJs that lack a jump drive, which have no use except as heavily-armored damage sponges - this is almost certainly a bug.
  • Battlecruisers/Strike cruisers (18k to 27k) are armed with the primary weapon. I believe I have seen a NPR with multiple classes of this size but I am unsure what the variants are.
  • Orbital defense platforms are usually cruiser-sized, and come in at least AMM and beam PD variants. I can't remember if I've seen a regular NPR use offensive missile or beam bases (of course, Precursors use ASM bases). I think usually the beam weapon role is fulfilled by STOs. Note that since NPRs cannot use tugs, you will only see these bases in orbit of the home planet - and if you don't see these bases, the planet might not be the home world (occasionally useful information in those >100-year conventional start games).
• NPR fleets are organized into prescribed groupings based on nominal mission types. For example, you might see a five-ship jump point stabilization task force consisting of a STB, CLE, CJ, DE, and one of the DDG classes. NPRs are broadly unable to use any fleet groupings outside of these prescribed groups, for example this means they will not detach a DD from a battle fleet to do reconnaissance. Fleet groupings might operate in concert with each other, albeit often rather poorly-coordinated.
• The NPR battle fleet template looks something like: 3-5x BC/SC, 3-4x CJ, 2-4x CA, 3-4x CLE, 3-5x DE, 4-6x DD/DDG, usually with one each of the RES-5 and RES-20 sensor classes and the rest RES-100+. Nominally this comes out to the typical 200k to 300k tons that is usually cited.
• NPRs typically start with enough ships to compose about 4-6 main battle fleets plus numerous smaller fleets (usually heavy on the escort classes). This amounts to several times the typical starting BP for a player race, which I think confuses some new players who don't yet know how bad the NPRs are at tactics and thus why they need so many ships just to have a fighting chance.
• Scouts, survey ships, and diplomatic ships are roughly destroyer-sized, which particularly makes the latter easily to accidentally massacre if things get... tense. I think it is possible that the GSVs are larger than the GEVs in some cases but I'm unclear on this.
• Commercial ships are harder to pin down as I haven't made a habit of capturing a lot of NPR commercial ships to build a data set. Note that NPRs are incapable of using tugs, so all of their miners, harvesters etc. have engines. NPRs use the same AI logic as civilian shipping lines where the logic exists - so for cargo, colonists, and harvesting.

NPR ground forces:

• Usually these are infantry-heavy forces with some armor and artillery present as well. NPRs do not use a very complex HQ hierarchy, basically just enough so that they can use the ground combat mechanics competently.
• NPR ground formations are usually in the ~15k ton range. You can see this most readily if you start a new game and let the game design and build ground forces for you, as it will use the AI templates.
• Spoiler races can vary, notably I think the Rakhas use <10k ton formations.
• NPRs use slow, heavily-armored dropships in the ~100k ton range (this is very approximate) to transport troops. This can be a useful tell when a NPR fleet approaching a colony might be about to do something you would prefer for them not to live to regret.
• NPRs will typically start with a few to several million tons of ground forces, which means any homeworld invasion will require at least 2x or 3x this amount depending on terrain and tech levels. As a player this means you need to be churning out ground forces and training centers early and often, or else SM in a larger than usual starting army (I usually do this, the starting BP frankly do not allow for a realistic starting army relative to the player race population).

I do not claim that this is an exhaustive reference, but it is a collection covering most of my observations in C#. The key overarching thing about the AI is that they are not adaptive at all, aside from some limited ability to learn about your ships and adjust their assessment to assign targeting priorities or determine whether to attack or retreat based on a probability of winning. However, the AI is not able to develop brand-new countermeasures and generally does not know any tactics aside from "attack", "retreat", "explode", and "jump back and forth in 5-second increments until the player ragequits" (the last one was finally patched out in 2.0+). This means that once you figure out how to counter or exploit the AI, to taste, this will never change and you can abuse them to the tune of destroying 2 million tons of warships for virtually nil losses. The AI is definitely much better than in VB6, and improves every few patches, but it is a long way from the kind of semi-competitive AI that a triple-AAA studio can put into their games, and still mostly exists as a foil for the player race to tell whatever roleplay story the player wants. If you want a seriously competitive game with every faction adapting to the other(s), multiple-player-race games are still a necessity.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Pretty good overview given by @nuclearslurpee

In order to make the AI semi competitive I just build all my ships as if the AI would behave like an intelligent adaptive opponent... which leaves my fleet sort of less "optimized" to fight the AI in all respects. But yes... the NPR is mainly there to give some challenges to you... so giving them a decent bonus in tech can be important too.

I do find the tactical AI in aurora to be better than most other games I have played, even AAA titles. I also have found almost no AI in any game that are able to adapt to player fleet doctrines, even less to changes in them when adapting to the AI composition the AI in every game I have ever played just do more of the same with no regard to what I do.

[Xkill (OP)]

That is a pretty awesome overview there, exactly the sort of thing I was looking for! Much appreciated!

Many encouraging things - some disappointing ones, but all of them very interesting.

Seems to follow what I gathered from Steve's posts on the subject, especially the fleet composition stuff.
A bit concerned about those ship size ranges there. Seem to be a bit on the small side, especially compared to the spoilers. Swarm motherships in VB massed 60kt. Pretty sure I saw in C# a couple prec battleships/bases (I did not get a good look so don't know for sure), mass 45kt.

Don't like how the sizes are multiplicative. Would prefer if they were percentage based.
Have, say, 4 "size types", representing minor ships, major ships, and 2 magnitudes of capitals, each being between 150% to 250% the size of the preceding size type, perhaps with variations for purpose mixed in, depending on the design philosophy. So defensive ships may tend toward the lower percentages and offensive ships toward the higher ones, for example.
I actually like the fact that NPRs don't deviate and adapt too much strategically. Think it makes each one more unique and flavorful instead of eventually gravitating towards what is "best". Thankfully I already design my ships in a similar manner (ship tonnages being multiples of the smallest base hull), with at most, 2 distinct roles.
Extremely saddened that ODPs cannot be redeployed by AIs! I love the damn things and it would be great if they could be deployed liberally to protect NPR colonies. Maybe give them a single, small engine for relocation purposes only?
Surprised that only 3 out of 27 philosophies use shields! I find them quite useful.

The part about commercial ships is... worrying...
I find that if you want to do any sort of colonization in a decent timeframe and scale, you need lots of lift capacity. Which means dozens if not hundreds of freighters and colony ships. Also, spreading and splitting your lift capacity is generally a bad idea. Personally, I aim to build like 2 to 5 commercial shipyards with 5 slips each and just pump out freighters practically non stop.  Not sure civilian ship logic can handle that sort of thing. Seems like NPRs are quite weak economically, which is incredibly unfortunate.

Did not know NPRs had troop transports and could invade! Very happy to read that! Probably a rare occurence, but nice that it can happen.
The information about ground force sizes is very useful as well, will have to increase the size of my military a bit and perhaps dial down a little on the integrated arty support that I place everywhere. 

Think there's a lot that can be done with this system, so I'm happy that it exists. Hoping enormously that it gets expanded upon in the soonish future.

[rainyday]

NPR ships are based on a random nominal tonnage mark between 6,000 and 9,000. Small ships usually in the destroyer classes are 1x this mark, medium ships in the cruiser classes are 2x this mark (12k to 18k), and capital ships are 3x this mark (18k to 27k). I believe that one spoiler race uses dreadnoughts in the 4x mark range (24k to 36k) but I've never seen an NPR use this large of a warship.

I definitely had an NPR in one of my recent games with a bunch of 36500-ton ships. I was very surprised to see them as I also didn't think the NPRs built that large. IIRC, they were a beam only NPR, but I don't remember which game it was so I can't go back and look at their templates. They were *massive* compared to my player race ships at the time.

A single size of engine is used for all ships, I think in 2x/4x/6x configurations.

Don't like how the sizes are multiplicative. Would prefer if they were percentage based.

To be fair, that's how I usually design my own ships. Makes it pretty easy to cover all the "standard space navy" size-based classifications and save on engine research.

[Zhukov]

Has anyone seen any ground support fighters among the NPRs?  Is there any reason to include Anti-Aircraft units in your ground forces?

[Andrew]

NPR's do not use ground support fighters.

[Prapor]

Hi, do NPR use fighters? If so, then I need specialized ships to deal with them.
And are NPR building ships to fight with fighters?

[Black]

Hi, do NPR use fighters? If so, then I need specialized ships to deal with them.
And are NPR building ships to fight with fighters?

NPRs do not use fighters. There is however the Star Swarm and they use small FACs.

NPRs use AMM ships and those will be quite effective against fighters. I also encountered some anti-ship missile armed ships with sensors tuned to detect small crafts.

[Xkill (OP)]

Don't like how the sizes are multiplicative. Would prefer if they were percentage based.

To be fair, that's how I usually design my own ships. Makes it pretty easy to cover all the "standard space navy" size-based classifications and save on engine research.

True! So do I, mostly. Since reading Steve's Nato vs Soviets writeup, I love having big ships of 30k tons, and generally make the rest be multiples of this (7500, 15k, 45k, 60k). This starts to breakdown at the larger sizes, though. 2x 30k = 60k. This can quickly become too big for "normal" gameplay, especially if AIs build such smaller ships.
The Solarian Empires campaign followed a more "traditional" progression, which was nice too, even if ships there were extra small overall.  I believe making it a percentage rather than simple multiplier provides more granularity and control over the possible ship sizes. I can see how it might be more complex, though.
Guess I'm just a sucker for big ships.