Can we please stop them from flying in a glued together formation.
It takes all the challenge out of fighting them because all you need to do is sit behind them the whole time and there is no danger what so ever because they all face the same direction at the same time.
its like they arent even trying to win.
fighting NPC Titans is way harder because they are all individually trying to murderise the player at hand, whereas lawfuls just stick to one another and fly like a school of fish. The only time they get to shoot the player is when they first arive at the waypoint and are all spawned facing them, otherwise they are just a waste of time.
Which formations/ships do you mean exactly, and in which situation? (IE mission, attacking an NPC capital patrol, if so which specific patrol/ship count). Need that info to determine the encounter in question.
Fighter wings during missions are most noticeable. All of the NPCs will enter formation on the wing leader, meaning they're all facing the same direction. If you sit behind them, you can just pick them all off one by one, if you kill the wing leader last. As Dii said, it takes the challenge out of it.
The specific example Hidamari was using for this was Torino base in Lorraine. GRN ships will spawn in wings that use formation, making them very easy to kill. Council wings will scatter and attack the player individually, making them much, much harder. Same level difficulty, same mission reward - different AI package.
indeed, but also Gallic capital ships are the same, the move all stuck together in a big huddle most of the time they kill each other before you even have to do anything, and again if you get behind them then its depressingly easy, where as when you fight Molly caps... holy christ, the difficulty can not even be compared. Molly caps fly all over the place each individually attacking the player and making it as hard as possible for you to focus fire.
Molly cruiser missions are probably the best missions for difficulty there is, but i dont want to have to fly a cap to have a harder mission :S
(11-09-2012, 12:35 AM)jammi Wrote: [ -> ]Fighter wings during missions are most noticeable. All of the NPCs will enter formation on the wing leader, meaning they're all facing the same direction. If you sit behind them, you can just pick them all off one by one, if you kill the wing leader last. As Dii said, it takes the challenge out of it.
The specific example Hidamari was using for this was Torino base in Lorraine. GRN ships will spawn in wings that use formation, making them very easy to kill. Council wings will scatter and attack the player individually, making them much, much harder. Same level difficulty, same mission reward - different AI package.
Fighter wings will break formation as they get in range of the player. I can't make them do it sooner then the range they are in now, simply don't know how to. The AI of freelancer is rather limited.
As for Torino. "GRN ships" "Council ships". Which ships, and in what formation, spawned by what means? I need specifics or I can't pinpoint the encounter. From the sound of it, one of the GRN ships isn't using the correct pilot or job settings.
(11-09-2012, 07:55 AM)AeternusDoleo Wrote: [ -> ]Fighter wings will break formation as they get in range of the player.
this is what we are saying. they dont
ever break formation.
(11-09-2012, 07:55 AM)AeternusDoleo Wrote: [ -> ]As for Torino. "GRN ships" "Council ships". Which ships, and in what formation, spawned by what means? I need specifics or I can't pinpoint the encounter. From the sound of it, one of the GRN ships isn't using the correct pilot or job settings.
you should take few missions from Torino yourself because we said what we meant pretty clearly, i don't know any other way to describe it to you.
missions against GRN as a whole, all the NPC's do not ever break formation , even after they are engaged by the player, they all fly in the same direction at the same time and since the player is behind them shooting, they present no danger at all.
(11-09-2012, 07:55 AM)AeternusDoleo Wrote: [ -> ] (11-09-2012, 12:35 AM)jammi Wrote: [ -> ]Fighter wings during missions are most noticeable. All of the NPCs will enter formation on the wing leader, meaning they're all facing the same direction. If you sit behind them, you can just pick them all off one by one, if you kill the wing leader last. As Dii said, it takes the challenge out of it.
The specific example Hidamari was using for this was Torino base in Lorraine. GRN ships will spawn in wings that use formation, making them very easy to kill. Council wings will scatter and attack the player individually, making them much, much harder. Same level difficulty, same mission reward - different AI package.
Fighter wings will break formation as they get in range of the player. I can't make them do it sooner then the range they are in now, simply don't know how to. The AI of freelancer is rather limited.
As for Torino. "GRN ships" "Council ships". Which ships, and in what formation, spawned by what means? I need specifics or I can't pinpoint the encounter. From the sound of it, one of the GRN ships isn't using the correct pilot or job settings.
(11-09-2012, 03:57 PM)Hidamari Wrote: [ -> ] (11-09-2012, 07:55 AM)AeternusDoleo Wrote: [ -> ]Fighter wings will break formation as they get in range of the player.
this is what we are saying. they dont ever break formation.
(11-09-2012, 07:55 AM)AeternusDoleo Wrote: [ -> ]As for Torino. "GRN ships" "Council ships". Which ships, and in what formation, spawned by what means? I need specifics or I can't pinpoint the encounter. From the sound of it, one of the GRN ships isn't using the correct pilot or job settings.
you should take few missions from Torino yourself because we said what we meant pretty clearly, i don't know any other way to describe it to you.
missions against GRN as a whole, all the NPC's do not ever break formation , even after they are engaged by the player, they all fly in the same direction at the same time and since the player is behind them shooting, they present no danger at all.
I think what they mean is that, when you do a mission, and have reached the waypoint and are engaging, the enemy ships do not at all times during combat fly randomly as they should. Sometimes, when an enemy ship gets too far from its "leader", it will stop maneuvering, and turn on its engines and fly back to rejoin with the leader. You can see this behaviour in gunboats that are in formation with cruisers (my main example is in Leeds). But on top of that, sometimes when there are three ships spawned together, all three will simply fly together, with the two wing ships flying with a third.
I don't think this is something that can be easily changed. I think it has to do with AI and needs to be changed for all ships. The fact gunboats do it as well as fighters might indicate that.
If there is a way to set a spawn from being a single spawn or a group, then it might fix it to simply set all spawns as single instead of group for the mission. But I know from when I was doing that patrolcrash is that npcs are one of the most complex things in this game. It's a whole lotta stuff you gotta go through to change them.
I should mention that when the ships are flying together. They don't do much in the way of maneuvering which is why this a problem really. If they started getting really hard to hit when they were together I imagine it wouldn't be as much considered a problem.
So, to sum this up, GRN fighters do not break formation when they approach a player, when spawned from a mission? I do not have time to playtest these situations based on vague reports Hidamari - I'm relying on player input to point out which ship/pilot entry has the problem. A screenshot would also help (preferably with one of the ships selected so the level is visible).
hidamari - does the behaviour change if you take out the leader - cos bunter npcs that spawn from kill-fighter missions taken at battleship fes do the same thing.
I looked into this a tiny bit and now think it can be fixed by editing pilots_population.ini
the ideal way to fix it would be to change the formations to get them to work properly and still fly in them. there are three formations. formation_never which presumably causes no formation to be flown at all times. formation_swarm which seems to be a middle ground that mainly the xenos use. and formation_stay which lawfuls use.
changing
force_attack_formation_active_time
force_attack_formation_unactive_time
along with
break_formation_damage_trigger_percent
break_formation_damage_trigger_time
to different numbers might make it work right. (formation never uses low active and high unactive, while xenos are middle with lawfuls being opposite. lowering damage trigger percent might mean they break sooner. damage trigger time is a little less clear. it might mean how long it takes them to do something once the percent has happened or it might mean how much damage done to you the player. and it is also unclear if the percentage applies to a single member of the formation or if the game combines the total hitpoints of all ships in it.)
alternatively, you could simply set lawful patrols to use formation_never. that would be a workaround that would get them to fly like pirates but then there wouldn't be formation. right now the pirates use formation_never and xenos using formation swarm and lawfuls use formation_stay.
one more thing it would be better if you could get them to maneuver while formation but if I remember I didn't see anything that allows you to set maneuvering for formation. there are places to set maneuvers but they don't seem to have any way to group. by which I mean there doesn't seem to be a way to say use only this maneuver collection while in formation. it seems like just the ones in formation copy the leader. and changing those maneuvers would make all ships that are using those maneuvers fly like that all the time.