Bonus campaign questions

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chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

For the engine yes, though I doubt WCU will adopt the full radar modelling system... Which is too bad; I think it would make it a better game, but I think canon issues will get in the way. At the very least, though, I think cloak should be radar cloak only; not only because it's better for gameplay, easier to balance, more believable and fun, but because canon already dictates that it be so. After that, pairing use of cloak to a switch to passive radar model I think should be high priority.
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Post by ijuin »

If a ship is invisible to radar, then fighting it would be the same as trying to fight with your radar system disabled. In other words, no target lock and no missile lock. If the target flew offscreen, you would have to locate it without radar aid--which would be challenging if you are fighting more than two such enemies at once. In gameplay terms I would say that a Strakha would have similar performance to a Salthi.
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Post by Spaceman Spiff »

really? ;)

I was thinking about you, the player being cloaked. How would this effect the enemies behaviour? If the ship would be invisible this question would be easy to answer: the ai would ignore you...
But how should it ai act if you are only radar cloaked?... A delay in the AIs time of reaction? and if you would make it this way, would the player notice this at all....
All I wanted to say is, that balancing space fights with the players ship radar cloaked is some hard work to do...
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Post by klauss »

Not hard, but an excercise in abstraction.
If you model your AI to process its senses as it would a normal person, then decreasing its senses' ability to perceive you would indeed decrease its combat effectiveness.

For instance: Lock - An enemy needs to mantain a lock in order to shoot a missile. I think that applies even to the AI. So... no missiles for you. Same with autotrackers: AI wouldn't be able to use autotrackers, nor ITTS. It would poorly aim at the "perceptual" ITTS, which if modelled correctly will depend on your skill in making evasive maneuvers. That's not hard at all.

There's also situational awareness - an enemy engaging you knows where to turn to aim his gun at you when you're not on its FOV because the radar points the way. Now... remove that information, and the AI will have to execute a search pattern if it looses track of your position. That's quite hard, so let's simplify: the AI is tracking you - remembers your position - as a probability cloud. When you're on its FOV, the cloud is small - equal to your ship's size. When you're off its FOV, the cloud grows in time (and does not update positions other than by following a linear prediction path) according to your last known speed. So... the AI turns towards that cloud to find you. The longer it looses track of you, the less it knows how to find you, until it finally just randomly turns one way or the other until - by chance - it finds you. That is easy to code.

But not in XML ;) - that's the big motivation behind C++ AI modules. Embedding all that sophistication in the current AggressiveAI C++ class (the one handling the XML files) would be impractical, IMO.
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Post by spiritplumber »

I don't know, it's nice to be able to do stuff outside of the main executable... maybe do it in python?

This said, the AI should be reasonably simple -- sometimes we have 100+ ships fighting in a system...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

spiritplumber wrote:I don't know, it's nice to be able to do stuff outside of the main executable... maybe do it in python?
But Python is like hundreds of times slower than C++. It's okay to do the high level stuff in Python, but all the heavy crunching and thinking should be in the executable, exposed to python as functions. If we compile it to a dll, though, as has been suggested, then it's easy to tweak and recompile the dll only, so, almost as handy as python, but compiled and fast.
This said, the AI should be reasonably simple -- sometimes we have 100+ ships fighting in a system...
Maybe we shouldn't have that many ships fighting, if that's so. At least I prefer quality over quantity, with most things. If better AI or high ship counts have to suffer, I'd sacrifice the latter, as much as I'd love not to. Same goes for quality of the models; but that's just my personal preference. I mean, how much more happiness does an average player get from seeing 100 ships fighting, versus 50, versus 25? I'd say half a smiley increments per doubling of the number of ships. How much happiness do you get when you see a merchant dropping cargo while fleeing? That's like a smiley and a half. Now, if when you're cloaked your adversaries lose track of you and fly turning in all directions until they spot you by chance, or if they deduce where you are by the direction of the bolts you shoot at them, that's at least one smiley, possibly two ... but that's just my smiley counts ;-)
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Post by PatFett »

First let me say that I love this game!!! I've been addicted the last few days and have been recommending it to all my friends.

Quick question about the bonus missions. Is the catnip mission the last mission? If not where do I go next? Also if it is the last mission, is there a way to restart the missions without restarting a new game so I can try the other path?

Thanks for the help. and keep up the great work on this game.
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Post by ijuin »

The catnip mission is the last one. Once you have reached the asteroid base, you are allowed to buy Kilrathi ships as your reward. The only way to play the other paths of the bonus campaign is to go back to an earlier state.
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

Really? Does that mean you can't buy them before? if so then i've come across a bug of some sort. I've been buying them from the start of the game.

Also where do i have to go for the revolution and what is my role in it? is there two? one on either side?
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ijuin
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Post by ijuin »

Well, once you make the catnip run, you can buy and sell any Kilrathi ships (except the Kamekh) freely--they will always be available at the asteroid base no matter what your faction standings are.
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