Auto return on damage

posted on March 11th, 2011, 1:57 am

I'm not sure if this has been posted before, but is it possible to have the ships (cloak and) return back to base for repairs automatically when their shields have failed or they have sustained heavy damage. This game I play called warzone : 2100 has this feature for "yellow" or "red" health, user selectable.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 2:01 am

It has been asked for before, and I'm pretty sure it is planned to be implemented. I think the reason we haven't seen it yet is because the devs have a LOT of cool ideas to implement and it takes a while to add each new feature.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 10:57 am

Cool. I look forward to seeing this somday!

posted on March 11th, 2011, 11:41 am

As i recall there was some controversy regarding this feature when it was last proposed.

Some people didn't like the idea of auto-returns.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 12:56 pm

I would not support this idea at all - such features are best left to the player. If you might imagine a situation where you are chasing a damaged unit with your own damaged unit... "oh well, time to run along home now", or perhaps even flying through enemy territory to get to that shipyard.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 2:59 pm

I agree with Dom. Sometimes it is crucial to follow a unit to get it finally killed, no matter if you lose some ships yourself(esp. against Borg). The Dominion uses many ships with weak defenses that have restricted fire arcs and they have little problems with losing some ships, I guess Dominion players wouldn't like their ships to turn around right after getting into battle . Furthermore there should be some room left for micromanagement, the ships shouldn't do everything on their own .

posted on March 11th, 2011, 3:37 pm

i like the idea. some ppl dont like micro-managing their ships while others do. i think it would be good to have this so that ppl who arent good with microing wont always be defeated by more advanced players coz advanced player can micro better. microing shouldnt become a handicap for players.

the solutions to questions dom and company have raised, is simply to make the option toggle-able. such a feature would also be very helpful in battles involving critical mass. that way it can be used at the players discretion. sure it may be bad to use it in certain circumstances and good in others. let the player decide  

posted on March 11th, 2011, 4:18 pm

Going off what deathincarn said, the feature would be something you could put in the ship's AI menu, like special weapon autonomy. Also, when a battle gets large enough that micro would be really helpful, my frame rate has dropped to a point that makes it really impractical so I would benefit from a feature like this.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 7:08 pm

I would not support this idea at all - such features are best left to the player. If you might imagine a situation where you are chasing a damaged unit with your own damaged unit... "oh well, time to run along home now", or perhaps even flying through enemy territory to get to that shipyard.

I guess I was indeed not remembering correctly what happened the last time it was proposed. Must've been a while ago.

This wouldn't be a problem if you had the default setting for the toggle suggested be "never retreat unless explicitly told to do so", that way people would actually have to screw with settings to get auto-retreats. And if they change it to auto-retreat at some damage resulting in bad things happening, it's their fault for making a bad decision (and in the case of the enemy territory, bad pathing AI as well.)

posted on March 12th, 2011, 4:11 am

In Warlords Battlecry  you could set  your troops to several  engaugement  stances. Sorry going off memory.  The disk  I had died a while back . but you had  several options,  like Allways pursue till opponent killed,Pursue  till X from atacking unit.  Or Run away!. Each  stance  dictated  the Agressiveness of your  troops.  So one could set  you troops  any thing from  mindless  timid sheep to  blood thirsty Bezerkers that  would follow you offf a cliff  just to kill you  before they died. So If  the FO Gods  would  to try to  impliment a  feature like this  that would allow  a Auto return feature  that would be toggleable . I would not mind. So It could be:  never use auto return, or Use auto return if X from  oponient ships , or Flee like  a cowardly  Federation Cur!

posted on March 12th, 2011, 5:22 am

Well what would i do during a fight if i didnt have ships to mirco out of danger? it would be boring....

posted on March 12th, 2011, 2:36 pm

Well what would i do during a fight if i didnt have ships to mirco out of danger? it would be boring....

use chat to insult your enemy

or macro lol

[Anonymous]

posted on March 13th, 2011, 2:30 am

Last edited by Anonymous on March 13th, 2011, 2:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Honestly while I would love such a feature myself I'm still against it.

I mean that's the great deal about it. You have to micromanagement your ships and if you're not paying attention well then you and anyone else not paying attention is his losing ships. That's just like it is.

If we would get this auto repair function it would be really hard to get any kills in battles. And most of the micromanagement part would be gone. At the moment there are 2 ways to win battles & eventually games in Fleetops. Make good use of special weapons and counter ships or have a superiour army of ships under your disposal.

With this feature enabled we would still have all that sort of battles but it could turn into a "simple send in and don't worry anymore about ships" gameplay. Just due to the automatic repairing. Sounds boring. I mean the trilling thing in battles is it to keep your ships alive & if you fail in that you lose.

Besides what is if you're in a large battle maybe even winning it but your and the enemy ships are all heavily damaged... Well don't worry everyone is returning home for repairs for another skirmish with no caculties at both sides. ^^

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on March 13th, 2011, 3:10 am

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on March 13th, 2011, 3:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

The "not killing a single ship" thing already happens quite often when I'm microing my K'beajQ (and when they aren't being boarded by Scubes.) You can kill a retreating ship if you chase after it or have critical mass or use some cool special weapons. I really don't see it as being a problem, as people already had their ships retreat that were taking damage, It's not that hard to kill a retreating ship.
Also, if an opponent plays it safe by setting auto-return at half shields to delay critical mass or prevent being killed by retreating, then they are losing that ship's offense earlier from their fleet.

As far as sending in ships and not worrying, that will still lead to the enemy getting kills unless the enemy doesn't have much offense. You would still have to actually micro, just not quite as much.

posted on March 14th, 2011, 12:34 am

New idea I came up with: Only have auto-retreat near a yard. This would be helpful for those repair-cycling battles where you have to constantly look at the battle to keep ships alive, which can really take your attention off of macro.