Am I just crazy...

...or have things always been like this?

Over the past week or so I've been messing around a lot with getting one of our governments ships & weapons stats set up. Things have gotten a lot better in the last week, no longer do heavy warships fly around like Fed Patrol Boats, and weapons that could kill you quicker than most ships in Nova now do a more fair amount of damage. As I tinkered with this stuff I noticed a few odd things and I wanted to ask a couple of questions:

1. I've been having very odd problems with the standoff attack setting. Two ships that I balanced out would do the oddest thing if I leave them set to do a standoff attack. They will move towards whatever enemy ship they've targeted and not fire their weapons even if they are in range, then when the get right on top of the enemy ship they'll open fire, but only so long as they are very close to the enemy ship. I've also seen them go through an enemy ship, turn around, and start attacking in standoff mode, but typically they will die before they get that chance.

Both of these ship are big and slow (think Fed Carrier speeds and turn rates) and have plenty of long range weapons and missiles and fighters, yet most but not all of the time they refuse to do long range standoff attacks, preferring instead to wade into enemy fire and get killed without firing a shot.

Sure I've seen some standoff attack oddities like Auroran Abominations being killed by Fed Destroyers without firing a shot because the IR missiles don't let the Abomination get set up in the stationary position the standoff attack AI seems to require, but I've never seen this odd charge the enemy without firing behavior before. I experimented a lot and as far as I could tell for the most part the ships from Nova for whatever reason aren't doing these odd things.

Has anybody else seen these kinds of problems in the standoff attack behavior? For now I've had to uncheck standoff attacks for these two ship, its the lesser of two evils, do I let these ships wade into enemy fire and die without fighting back at all, or do I let them wade into enemy fire and die but maybe take an enemy with them...

2. In watching some fighters equipped with beam weapons attack a bigger target I noticed that beams from one fighter can hit and do damage to other friendly ships from the same government and even (I think) other fighters launched from the same ship. Other projectile/pulse based weapons pass by allies like normal but the beams are damaging friendlies.

I've played a lot of Nova and I've used beam equipped fighters like the Polaris Manta a lot but I can never remember this happening. Have beams always damaged friendly ships like this and I've just never noticed it?

Definitely 'yes' on two as I recall...

I've seen both. The first one is more of a problem for me, though. I don't think that beams always damage friendly ships, though.

You're using carried fighters in #2, right? I suspect that might have something to do with it, but I'm not sure.

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 09 February 2006 - 09:35 AM

Eugene Chin, on Feb 9 2006, 08:32 AM, said:

I've seen both. The first one is more of a problem for me, though. I don't think that beams always damage friendly ships, though.

You're using carried fighters in #2, right? I suspect that might have something to do with it, but I'm not sure.
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Yeah #1 is a huge annoyance. While turning off standoff attacks works its not all that elegant a solution.

Yes, in #2 I am specifically watching fighters launched from an AI controlled ship.

This post has been edited by Ragashingo : 09 February 2006 - 10:30 AM

Weird. I know there's a problem with non-standoff tactics that manifests itself in stock Nova whereby Nil'kimas Dragons, when escorting the player, won't fire their TBRLs even when in range, except in really short spurts with gaps in between. Nil'kimas Strikers, set to stand off, fire their TBRLs continuously when in range, and will charge into range as soon as their Wraithii are expended, and sometimes before.

Beams I know use a different collision calculation algorithm from projectiles, though I don't know exactly how it works. I've seen, for instance, a rather short beam like a TH-lance, when fired at an Aurora Carrier from the side from a distance such that the beam enters the square of the target but doesn't actually reach the image mask, does damage and counts as hitting.

If your AI stand-off problems were associated with a përs I would suspect the Aggress field of being the culprit, but for an entire class of ship and an entire government... oy! Have you tried, just for the sake of research, setting the ship to have a different inherent government and putting it in a düde of that other government, just to see if the behavior issues stay with it or are relegated to one specific gövt?

Qaanol, on Feb 9 2006, 05:27 PM, said:

Weird. I know there's a problem with non-standoff tactics that manifests itself in stock Nova whereby Nil'kimas Dragons, when escorting the player, won't fire their TBRLs even when in range, except in really short spurts with gaps in between. Nil'kimas Strikers, set to stand off, fire their TBRLs continuously when in range, and will charge into range as soon as their Wraithii are expended, and sometimes before.

Beams I know use a different collision calculation algorithm from projectiles, though I don't know exactly how it works. I've seen, for instance, a rather short beam like a TH-lance, when fired at an Aurora Carrier from the side from a distance such that the beam enters the square of the target but doesn't actually reach the image mask, does damage and counts as hitting.

If your AI stand-off problems were associated with a përs I would suspect the Aggress field of being the culprit, but for an entire class of ship and an entire government... oy! Have you tried, just for the sake of research, setting the ship to have a different inherent government and putting it in a düde of that other government, just to see if the behavior issues stay with it or are relegated to one specific gövt?
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I've tried many things, but I haven't tried changing govs and doing pers stuff. I will note that I have other ships in the same gov that do standoff attacks just fine. I once changed the stats and weapons of these two ships to that of an Auroran Carrier and it seemed to work fine. But I've also given these two ships only one kind of weapon at a time to try to see if it was a weapon problem but it wasn't.

I'll try the gov and pers thing, but unfortunately I'm not hopeful, but who knows maybe I'll get lucky

What if you switch the problem ship into a plugin by itself and give it to a stock Nova government like the Federation and see if it's still bugged then?

Or give a stock Nova ship like the Federation Carrier to your plugin government and see if the bug manifests itself?

I mean, just to try to figure out what resources are actually causing issues. Of course, it's entirely possible that it's a sort of "ghost in the machine" effect that only happens when a ship is set up a certain way and is given to a government set up a certain way—or worse, a bug that only shows up when a ship and a government are both not set up a certain way.

Heck, by that reasoning it could have anything to do with anything, like the game engine might be transposing a bit that's supposed to go with a crön into a section of RAM being used for AI behavior. If that's the case you'd need some external app to check the RAM as you run Nova, and it'd still be hard to pinpoint, and impossible to fix.

But hopefully that won't be the case. With any luck you'll find it's just some quirk of the game that has a simple workaround.

Good luck, Ragashino.