Light Frigate Ability Autocast?

K, i did some work with offensive abilities of the utitlity cruisers. It seems to pick targets a little better, but it's still seems to be associated with the auto-attack. The utility cruiser fleet AI seems less intent on focus-firing (which is fine), so therefore we get slightly better de-buff coverage.

But these things still aren't functioning optimally. I think autocast should do a better job... or am I using it wrong?

I definitely agree that this could do with improvement. Nice to know about the toggling auto-attack off and on as a temporary fix though (rather than doing the entire thing manual).

Very good information and research. I'm new to the game, but trying to understand the mechanics of everything as fast as I can. Now I can see why light frigates never worked as well as I thought they should. I'll have to test out the auto-attack toggling next game.

Hope the developers see this and fix the code, because this is obviously not what they intended.

see Idunno that this is not what they intended.

I trust that they played the game a lot... and it's kind of a critical issue. These Light Frigates abilities are THE counter to utility cruisers... so if it wasn't functioning properly they would probably notice.

But there have been so many times where I've come across issues like this, and thought "what the hell are they thinking?" But after some heavy investment, i understand the issue in a different light, use it differently and am actually quite satisfied with the way it works. Every single issue i've had with the game has actually been resolved in this matter. (sorry for being so acid tongued in my previous ignorance, I'm starting to cope now)

This one does seem big enough to be different. But I can't help but think there's a chance that we're misunderstanding what it's supposed to be doing, or using improperly.


But yah, I definitely know the feeling of light frigates not working as well as I thought they should.

Awaiting further insight and comments? Frogboy? Anyone?

Thanks.

I would wager two things:

First, in a fairly recent podcast, Blair explained that pretty much all the CPU power goes to the AI. They had to be very careful and picky, and he even said that there are AI routines they never included because they haven't yet figured out how to integrate them and maintain performance, and are adding them as they can. With Sins' scale, the AI has to make a lot of calculations which is not the case in a lot of other games, so while it seems odd in a way that processing power is actually the main AI limitation, the discovery of the Malice issue helps exemplify how even one ability can dramatically affect performance.

So, I think in part there had to be some concessions to less-critical AI elements that could be managed by the player (such as ability auto-cast) in order to improve that which cannot (global AI behaviors).

Second, generally there always has to be some distinction between micromanagement and leaving it up to the AI. Sins always had the intention of making the AI pretty smart and fairly capable, but there was always the effect that micromanaging gave you the edge. After all, there are people on both sides of the fence to please. Some may want their ships to do everything by themselves and they just watch, while others want their input to be more decisive and effective. So some middle ground had to be found there as well.

Those are just my thoughts, though given my experiences with the beta and the developers, I hope they're at least somewhat educated

Both good points Annatar. Especially interesting about the processing power bit.

However, I'm not convinced that this is a less-critical AI element.

I understand that there are people on both sides of the "micro-fence." In a previous post I mentioned that a game can't please everyone and probably shouldn't try. The best bet is to pick a side and go for it. Given the scale of Sins, I thought I had a pretty good idea of which side of the fence it was on, but I could be wrong.

However, I don't think it matters which side of the fence you're on to see this as a problem.

I understand the desire for tactical micro... that the person who kites, dances, and feints should beat the person whose not paying any attention. But those are all levels of micro that require a human level intelligence to use effectively.

It doesn't not require human level intelligence to decide that in an RTS situation, Fire should be focused, but debuffs should be diffused. It's a mathematical fact. And diffusing debuffs, like focusing fire is a protocal that needs to be executed every single time under every single circumstance.

Executing diffused debuffs manually is an excercise in tedium and monotony. It's something that can be automated without taking any signficant control out of the hands of the hardcore micromanager. There are no decisions to be made here... it's just a protocal, a default method of operation. It's just like focus fire, and as such, it should probably be automated. Or at least automated to the extent that focus fire is automated in this game.


The fact that victory should go to the player who kites, dances, and feints is a reasonable argument that bears consideration. The fact that victory should go to the player who can spam "q-click-tab-q-click-tab-q-click-tab.." the fastest is an argument that, imo, bears absolutely no merit, espeically in a game like Sins.


The idea that concessions had to be made due to processing power is a valid one, but I disagree that this is a less critical AI element, because there's simply no justification in leaving it out.

Warcraft 3 is the ultimate Micromanagers game and even the autocast in that game did a damn good job of giving you diffuse debuffs. So you could focus of higher level things such as kiting, dancing, and feinting.

The fact that a game with the scale of Sins would ask you to dig into a level of minutiae that hasn't been present since we were all bloodlusting ogres by hand seems a little nonsensical.


You want your fire focused and your de-buffs diffused. It's just a basic principle of RTSing. Auto-cast and Auto-attack have polar opposite objectives (for most spells). So the decision to put them on the same AI decision path seems more than a little dubious. It seems like a decision that would take precedence over most other AI behaviors.

And if AI is the bottleneck here, but none of the AI protocols are doing a particularly good job, then what's the point?

I know you're not Ironclad, or speaking for them... so I'm not attacking you or them. These are just my thoughts in reaction to the points you raised.

I'm still holding out hope that the AI will autocast debuffs effectively if we give it the proper instructions, we just haven't figured out what they are yet.

Thanks.

Mehoo -

Intriguing. Some thoughts -

1) Were your light frigates grouped as a fleet or manually? Have you tried both? With and without focus firing? Fleet-grouping might solve the issue if you haven't tried it (which, given your comprehensive tests seems like a slim possibility, but anyway) as it is designed to allow each class to do what it does best. Fleet grouping a mixed unit swarm, at least for support cruisers, greatly increases their contextual ability auto-casting.

Additionally, I would group the light frigates with a few heavy cruisers and see if that makes a difference, as in a fleet solely composed of LF they could be reverting to 'main attack unit' in lieu of 'debuff support unit'

2) One of your deeper concerns was that a unit cannot auto-attack in one direction and auto-cast in another. I know that cap ships can multi-task in this sense, not sure if it's restricted to caps, but could probably be modded.

**Not necessarily a solution, but as a point toward the meta-game:

Light frigs deal negligible damage, especially by the time you get their debuffs going (mid-game: pretty much as soon as you see your opponent's first subverter, hoshinko, or guardian, but by this point your gunners should consist mostly of LRMs or heavy cruisers). Turning off their auto-attack and keeping 5-15 LF as a debuff team with a main fleet of harder hitters is valuable, and in some circumstances essential, despite the damage lost.

In fact the devs may be a step or two ahead of us on this one, as using your LFs as an attack force late-game is a quick way to see them get slagged. Forcing the "attack off" to allow good debuffs could be a subtle mechanism for increasing LF survivability.

ahh Ke5strel, good to see you. Thanks for weighing in on my most recent diatribe.

1) I just had 15 light friagtes in a fleet vs. 15 cielos and hoshikos. I did try them unfleeted and got the same results. I haven't tried mixing fleets up much. Let me play around with that and see comes of it.

Do you really think auto-cast is contextual based on fleet composition? This would be great. I thought fleets were just grouping mechanisms to get units in formation with eachother and moving together. So now we're back to old questions, how exactly do fleets affect the unit AI? And why isn't this documented anywhere? If there is this much amazing stuff going on under the hood, you'de think Ironclad would do a better job of bragging about it, and showing us exactly what's happening.


2) Are you sure about this? Auto-casting on friendy targets is one thing, but I don't recall ever seeing a capship auto-cast on an enemy target it wasn't shooting at. Although I really haven't been watching for this at all. I don't think there are many capship spells you'de want cast on a target you weren't shooting at anyway.




A friend of mine also suggested that turning off auto-attack is where it's at. That it functions more like a mode-switcher, from attack mode to de-buff mode. Similar to units in other games that have modes (like siege tanks, or footmen in war3) I totally buy this as a game mechanic and a balance decision. But the way this mechanic is presented is SOO deceiving, it disturbs me greatly.



I'm going to scamper off and do some more tests with mixing fleets up a bit. I'll get back to you.


I'm quite confident that the developers are a step or two a head of us on this one as they have been on every other line of inquiry I've presented. It'de just be nice if they left a couple breadcrumbs behind every once and a while.

Almost certain I've seen Radiance auto-casting Burn Antimatter at militia cobalts when the main target was a militia heavy cruiser or LRM. Now this might be because the cobalt was the only thing with anti-matter in the vicinity, but still shows multi-target scripting.

I feel like I came across an old Beta Dev post introducing Fleets in which they pointed to increased functionality of the swarm by class; where if you grouped as a fleet and targeted something the HCs would shoot, the support cruisers would use their relevant abilities, and flak would stick to the main battle group instead of haring off across the gravwell, etc...

Not sure if I just dreamed that one, but I'll look for it

Anyway, looking forward to the results

PS breadcrumbs are good, and transparency is why Tom Chick prefers Rise of Nations to SoaSE, but I kinda like playing detective and piecing it together..mebbe just me

okay....

so things got a little better when I started mixing up my fleets.

A neat thing I noticed is when you hold down alt you get red lines showing what a unit is attempting at, and green lines showing what a unit is attempting to cast at.

We don't see the green lines very often because most ability's instacast (although if you look really closely you can see the green lines . Where they do show up however is 1) when a unit has decided to cast at something that's out of range and is trying to chase it down. or 2) when the unit must be facing the target in order to cast (as documented in the entities but nowhere in the game).



By playing around and watching lines I've come to some conclusions. Again, these are purely observational, not empirical. I've just played around with a couple of things and made my best guess to explain what I'm seeing.

Units have either a single red line or a single green line. Never both, so this suggests stronlgy that a unit cannot shoot at one target and cast at another.

Because it can't do both at the same time, the unit has to decide whether to cast at something or to shoot at something. When it decides to shoot at something it shoots it 'til it's dead, then decides what to do next. (cast or shoot)


Choosing whether to cast or shoot IS context sensitive. It seems to be dependent on what else is going on in the area. If a unit senses it's the only thing with a gun in the area it will shoot almost exclusively. For example when I jumped my cielos into the enemy grav well all by themselves, they shot a whole bunch and didn't cast a single spell (maybe 2 or 3) . When I jumped 20 Kodiak heavy cruisers in with my Cielos, they did a whole lot of casting and didn't fire a single shot.

Now a Cobalt thinks it's gun has more to contribute to the fight than a Cielo, so the decision is a little harder. When I had 25 Kodiaks and 13 Cobalts, the Cobalts did a fair amount of shooting but spend most of their time casting. They were even will to chase down utility cruisers that were running away from the battle in order to cast at them. When I dropped it to 9 Kodiaks, the Cobalts did a lot more shooting at the closest target.

More details about utility cruiser and light frigate casting behavior to follow.


This context-sensitive evaluation of whether to cast or shoot seems be determined by what's going on in the area. It doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with how the fleets are constructed. I'm pretty sure I got the same behavior whether my Kodiaks and Cobalts were in the same fleet or seperate fleets.


Casting also seems to follow the same algorithm as focus firing, so you'll see a bunch of units trying to cast at the same target at once, then they'll all try to cast at the next target, etc. This isn't a big deal most of the time because most everything is insta-cast so they just go bang bang bang and buff/de-buff all the targets. But does significantly slow down Cobalts (details below).


Utility Cruisers:
Utility cruisers don't value their guns very highly. So as long as there's something else to do the shooting they will cast to their heart's content and do a pretty darn good job of getting adequate buff/debuff coverage.

One thing to look out for is spells have different ranges. For example the cielo's debuff has a much longer range than it's buff. At one point I noticed my Cielo's weren't casting their buff very often (except occasionally on eachother... useless). When I press alt to see what was up, i noticed they were hanging out at maximum range of their debuff. Thus debuffing all the guys that were shooting my Kodiaks, but not buffing them. I moved the cielo's closer, and immediately all my Kodiaks became buffed. So be aware of casting ranges, and remember to micromanage such things or better yet set fleet cohesion accordingly.



Light Frigates, esp. Cobalts:
Unlike utility Cruisers, Light frigates think they're guns have something to contribute to the fight. I'm inclined to agree for now, even though I know that's an unpopular position.

So if auto-attack is on: You will see more or less casting depending on what's going on around them. Disciples and Skirmishers don't need to face their target, so they can just insta-cast. So they tend to cast more frequenlty than cobalts. They will still cast a fair amount even if they are the only thing in the area with guns and give you pretty good coverage. Although for the absolute best in debuff coverage I recommend turning auto-attack off and let them focus exclusively on casting.

Cobalts on the other hand must face their target to cast. And casting follows the same algorithm as focus firing. So if the cobalts decide to cast, you'll see a bunch of green lines as 10-12 cobalts start turning towards the target to cast. The first one to get there will get the spell off and the target will be affected. Now they choose "cast or shoot again." Since they've already started turning towards the target, it is much more likely that they will finish turning and shoot that target than choose to cast at a different target. So with Cobalts you get an awful lot of "cast debuff, then shoot the guy we just debuffed so he explodes, thus wasting the debuff." Again, it's less of an issue if the Cobalts don't think their guns are very important but it's still an issue.

If you are serious about using "Sabotage Reactor" I strongly recommend turning off auto-attack on your cobalts. At which point will get get pretty good de-buff coverage, but still not great. Given that their ability frickin' rocks!!!!! this seems entirely reasonable.




________________________________

A couple other things I noticed. Heavy Cruisers will auto-target Utility cruisers/carriers over just about anything, even other heavy cruisers. Given this fact, there really isn't much point in using light frigates for anti-cruiser duty once Heavy Cruisers roll out. Thus definitely freeing them up for turning off auto-attack and letting them cast.

Bombers will auto-target heavy cruisers over unitility cruisers/carriers. The implications here are obvious.


I wish there was a chart showing the order in which unit will prioritize targets (i.e. which units will they attack first, second, etc.) I'de like to assume this WWW Link is. but it's clearly wrong or incomplete in lots of cases.

I also wish we could get more information on the factors the AI considers when deciding whether to cast or shoot, etc...


Anyway, that's it for me today.

Once again we discover that once we figure out how the system works it's a pretty darn good system that works pretty darn well. I just wish we didn't have to figure all this stuff out for ourselves.

sorry for lots of bad spelling and punctuation in the above... i do know my grammer, but sometimes I mistype things, and there's not edit button for me to go back and adjust. And given that this is an online forum for a computer game, I'm not that interested in spending a lot of time proofreading.

I noticed your post after I made my post, and I can't go back and edit:

Playing detective is fun.. but playing the game and knowing how it works is more fun. IMO.

Is that what happened to Tom Chick? He made some oustanding contributions to this forum days before release, but hasn't been heard from again. I prefer RoL to RoN, but RoN was great as well. RoL just seems to crystallize all that into the leanest, meanest, most graceful RTS experience I've ever played. It's a shame the horrific single-layer and online functionality turned away so many people. Sins is definitely ahead in this regard. Although perhaps not because the lack of single-player campaign or adequate tutorialage leaves us rummaging around in the dark like this.

All that aside, as I beign to comprehend the depths and bowels of SoaSE it seems to be just as graceful as RoL, but much grander.



PS: (i can edit this post for some reason) It may be possible that ships can fire at one target and cast a spell at another. They may not choose cast or shoot just when they've blown up a target. But since most everything is instacast, this is only relevant for Cobalts who most certainly cannot cast at one target and shoot at another.

I was looking at the Colbalt's file, and when I read in you're post that the frigates love to focus fire (too what seems like a fault), I searched for focus fire stuff, and literally found:

prefersToFocusFire TRUE

I figure (though haven't tested yet) that if that is changed to false, then while they won't concentrate fire, they might just be willing to auto-cast more liberally.

Off to test that now

Excellent post. More support for mixed fleets. The game gets more intelligent when you add versatility. I too am against micro to much. I think of myself as the admiral, not the pilot or even a battleship commander.

I've only had the game for a few weeks but I did notice some odd things about ship casting. Since then, I've ceased to use such upgrades on ships like cobalts which has made them essentially "not used". Given mid game AI uses a lot of support cruisers adding cobalts into the mix and paying more attention to how they act will give me a better idea to making balanced fleets. Thanks again!

I just double checked a couple of things...

Units can indeed cast at a target other than the one they're shooting so long as they don't have to turn towards it (Cobalts). So Skirmishers and Disciples will do just fine casting whether they are on auto-attack or not. The only one you want to bother with disabling auto attack on is Cobalts.

And remember to watch the ranges on your Utility cruisers to know if they are close enough to be using the spell youw ant them to. If you hover over the spell icon in it will give you a purple casting range circle around the cruiser.

(Can't edit again, jeez) in which case it's save to say you just pretty much ALWAYS want to disable auto-attack on your cobalts once you've got Sabotage Reactor, (if you're shooting utility cruisers) because their damage output is phenomally better when they are casting that spell.

Alternatively, you can edit the ability file and set it so that it doesn't need to turn to face its target

yah, but i actually think it balances pretty well this way. That ability is pretty heavy duty.

Here's the link on Fleets: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/170693

Blair's Beta Dev Journal

Throw a little karma his way for answering so many of our questions before we knew we had them