[Suggestion] (try to) Hasten Autoattack & tweak Autocasting

from Sins Forums

Ok, here's the deal.

Let's take a standard "returning armada" fleet:
5 Skirmishers, (light frigs)
25 Enforcers, (HCs)
20 Sentinels, (flak frigs)
40 Assailants, (LRMs)
30 Transporters (carrier cruisers)
and make a fleet out of them, set it to "engage grav well" and "loose formation" (though the latter has no effect on what I will note below).

If such a fleet is in combat with another, standard AI fleet (zounds of light carriers and support stuff, some HCs and light frigs and LRMs), I notice that the Enforcers basically do not do anything most of the time. They just sit there for a few seconds, then they target and shoot something. As it blows up, for the next few seconds they are again doing nothing.

This behaviour also takes place when we're talking about almost any other. Only cap ships seem to be relatively quick in reaquiring targets, then strike craft, but the latter too have moments of "uhhh.. what wus I... oh yeah, shoot".

This is pretty much irritating, because those said Enforcers do 30% of what they should unless I manually queue targets for them.
Assailants happen to be even worse, because they are neither quick in finding new targets nor they are clever enough to know when to stop. So not only they fire 3 salvos of phase missiles against a ship that will blow up after the first one, but they will also be cheering for the next 3 seconds instead of taking a new target.

SOMETIMES the ships aquire a new target almost immediately, sometimes it takes them up to 3 or so seconds.
Can't there be a trigger that would say "target killed -> autotarget another"?
Or maybe the ships could have two targets queued by autoattack instead of one, so they would attack the other right away?

Oh and this also stays true with some autocast abilities.
For instance, my Enforcers have the Inertial Field ability, which lasts 10 seconds and has a 30 sec cooldown.
SOOO, basically, 3 Enforcers are enough to prevent any enemy ship from running away from them. And it is easy to handle with minimal micro (Select 3 Enforcers -> IF button -> 1,2,3...,9,10 -> TAB to select next Enforcer -> IF button -> 1,2....).
Instead, I pretty much always see enemy LRMs (hell, even those goddamn siege frigs I REALLY want dead) run away from even a few dozens of Enforcers with IF on Autocast. The Enforcers simply do not use the ability in time, while the enemy ships are in its range. As I look over the enemy ships, they are usually not affected by Inertial Field for about 15 seconds before it is reapplied on them again, EVEN IF there are 40 Enforcers there (so Inertial Field could in fact be reapplied every 0.75 sec, forever!).
I know there are mechanisms applied that prevent the Enforcers from simply casting 40 IFs at once and then being like "Eyyyy... wait for ussss, dooode" for the next 20 seconds. However, the way it is now, researching Inertial Field is an absolute waste of cash unless you plan on microing it yourself all day long.

Please, take a minute to look into these issues and see if you can give those ships' crews some coffee, cause they act as if they were asleep.

1,502 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Just to summarize, you feel Inertial Field and various other abilities need a faster target refresh time - we can look at that.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

That was brutal, but yeah, that's the point.
Thanks ^_^

PS. I really need to stop placing walls of text without a clear point ;s. It's 7AM and I'm on my way to Uni in minutes and I wasn't really thinking too much about the composition of what I was writing ;p.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Blair, reply 1
Just to summarize, you feel Inertial Field and various other abilities need a faster target refresh time - we can look at that.
End of Blair's quote

I think the other issue he was trying to point out, that I've seen myself once battles get large enough, is that it looks like there are various AI execution priorities by the game. In a big congested battle, it's not uncommon to have a noticeable delay for ships to auto-attack the next target. It's almost as if the game is going "Ok, the CPU is going to start choking soon, need to make sure the really important stuff gets dealt with, and then we can run this code for the idle ships to select the next target". You can manually order the attacks and it'll be instant, it's the auto-attack routines that tend to lag behind a little.

It's gotten much better in 1.05 and 1.1, but in the earlier builds sometimes you could go for 10-20 seconds before your idle ships finally picked the next target.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I tis true.