Veterans First?

posted on September 17th, 2009, 12:44 pm

its not like you can produce highranked vessels. if you swarm the map with highranked vessels, your opponent is probably already dead I favor that the vessels act as intelligent as possible and therefore target the vessels first that are easier to destroy. if you want a different behaivor, you can always manually target large, highranked vessels

posted on September 17th, 2009, 12:45 pm

actually that AI target pattern has been slightly reworked for the next patch, we are still testing it. so it's not about hitpoints only anymore - they still play a major role though, when a target is evaluated

posted on September 17th, 2009, 12:55 pm

aye, we have added a bit more information about the unit "value" (its offensive and defensive values) but the AI will still prefere a damaged vessel over an undamaged vessel of the same class

posted on September 17th, 2009, 1:50 pm

It makes sense the way it is. You could justify it by looking at it from a different perspective - more experienced crews get hit less

posted on September 17th, 2009, 1:56 pm

Am I alone on this? How about this as an idea...

It will target lower classes first, but the ranked of those if any due to the fact that the ranked do have more strength and can deal more damage per shot round.

[silent93]

posted on September 17th, 2009, 3:05 pm

Last edited by silent93 on October 20th, 2009, 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

That doesn't actually work.  There's not a lot of difference in the offensive value of the ranked Monsoon and the new Monsoon.  But there's about a 50 point difference in the defensive value of the new monsoon vs the veteran.

*long belated edit for a typo*

posted on September 17th, 2009, 6:58 pm

There is supposed to be a balance in here... i think it seems imbalanced where no one attacks the ranked ships first. Maybe have multi-target weapons focus on them, I dunno. But it should not be easy at all to try in preserve a well ranked Phalanx or Descent, computers should at least look smart by tring to get rid of these if ever possible.

Because without a countering effect like this to make preserving an experienced ship harder, there is nothing stoping someone from having an entire map swarming with r5 and r6 ships!

It's not exactly that.

The AI targets the lower ranked ships first, right. That gives the high ranked ships time to either flee or turn the attacking ship(s) into floating space debris. But that doesn't mean that high ranked ships are safe from being attacked. IF a fleet is composed entirely of 2 goldbar ships, the targeted one will be the closer. So you will lose one (or more) high ranked ship(s) in that scenario.

It also means that is a good tactic to have a couple of low ranked ships in a fleet to save more expensive losses. They may buy you time, and time can be priceless.

Besides, the AI cheats, so I'm not above taking every possible (human) advantage.

posted on October 19th, 2009, 9:54 pm

The only time it annoys me is if I've made some Monsoons into Veterans, and the computer isn't shooting at them.  They get a massive amount of durability for such a little ship, but relatively little firepower.

  That's the whole point 

  Why would you want to shoot at a ship who's JOB is to absorb damage?  If you run the math behind it per second you are FAR better off to quickly remove the damage per second as much as possible - done by eliminating the weakest structurally first.