Stand-off Tatics

and Nova AI

What determines if a ship will use stand-off tatics with a particular weapon? Does it have to not be a secondary weapon, or does it need not have ammo (except that can't be true, the AI will stand-off with missiles), or does it have more to do with the type of AI a ship has (Warship, Interceptor, Brave Trader, Wimpy Trader)?

Also, what determines the difference between a medium ship and a fighter?

One more thing, what is the highest tech level of a outfit that won't mess stuff up? I had it set to the magic number of 32767, and it did not like it very much, something about an invalid outfit was said in the debug log. I changed it to 9999 and it was ok with it. I thought the max for any non-specified max field was 32767, it normally is, correct?

This post has been edited by WonderBoy : 16 December 2006 - 10:39 PM

Ships will use stand-off tactics iff they're told to do so.

The max working tech level for outfits is 32766. For some reason it doesn't like 32767, although I think it's okay with ships.

@guy, on Dec 17 2006, 08:11 AM, said in Stand-off Tatics:

Ships will use stand-off tactics iff they're told to do so.

Perhaps the question should have been "When will Stand-Off tactics work? "

The behavior I have sometimes seen with Stand-Off behavior is as follows:
1: The ship will close in on the target, coming within a certain (short) range without firing a single shot.
2: The ship will then turn around and start running away while firing turrets.
3: The ship will, after getting some distance from the target, turn around and start closing in again.

This behavior is next to useless for me, so when I see a particular ship doing this instead of normal Stand-Off behavior, I change it so it doesn't use Stand-Off at all. I have seen some of my ships using it properly, but I'm not certain what the trigger is.

To clarify, yes, this ship has long ranged missiles.

Fighter AI: Accelerate toward target and fire when in range. Fly past target. Turn around. Accelerate toward target again.
Warship AI: Move within range of primary weapons. Fire until target is out of range. Turn around. Go the opposite way. Turn around to face target. Accelerate to meet target and repeat. Since rail guns are long range, they look like they stand off.

...

That's not quite what we're talking about.

In the shďp resources in the Nova Data Files, there is a flag that alters the combat behavior of that ship.

Normally, all computer-controlled ships would behave, basically, as what you identify as Fighter AI (With some caveats*). The behavior that causes a computer-controlled ship to stop in place and shoot at a target, as well as the resource flag associated with it, is called Stand-Off behavior.

• With the 'Warship AI,' the ship will charge if the enemy target is charging. However, if the enemy is accelerating away from the warship faster than the warship can accelerate , the warship will stop in place and shoot at the enemy (A la Stand-Off). The concept seems to be that there's no point in chasing after a target you cannot hope to catch.

I've always noticed it a different way, but thank's for clearing that up.