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Post by subunit on Jul 2, 2018 6:46:47 GMT
Guys this is killing me- there is a campaign editor, but is it possible to get the AI to do transfer orbits yet? Or will AI still always stay in their starting orbits?
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Post by subunit on May 4, 2017 4:09:13 GMT
I haven't experimented with the particulars in any detail, but I do agree on the shooting range feel. Frankly, there isn't much of a game as-is besides the puzzle-like nature of the missions. It's more like a toolbox for playing around with various scifi ideas. I bought it under that assumption, so I'm not complaining... but I would love if it evolved into more of an actual game. It would take a whole lot of AI development and probably some other things though. What's driving me nuts about this is that CoaDE is riiiight on the edge of being so much more than just a spaceship sandbox. I mean, if the game was just the ship designer and the tactical engine, I still would have bought it and played it, and none of this would be bothering me, because I would say, you're right, it's just a toolbox with a bunch of arbitrary assumptions. But we got n-body physics and a turn based 3d maneuvering engine that should make the Kerbal devs green with envy. I had more or less the same thought the other day- "is the n-body physics engine really just there to make us solve a maneuvering puzzle before we get dumped into the tactical engine?" It just seems crazy that the AI doesn't know how to use it, to the point where I'm half-convinced I must be wrong. One way or another, I have no complaints about what I paid for- I put 90 hours into the campaign, designer, and sandbox before finally deciding to move on to do some mission editing. As fun as the ship designer is, without particular roles, particular missions, particular conflicts to be involved in, ultimately it's all just kind of contextless and drab. But by point of comparison, I have almost 900 hours in ArmA 3, most of which is mission editing time. I love scenario design, I love taking people's content and putting it in a cool context and seeing how it all works given some explicitly designed war scenario, and I really, really wanted to do that with CoaDE. And it's so close- so damn close. The AI doctrines do most of what you need them to do for this kind of thing (if they applied on a per-fleet basis they'd be perfect)- except, except... the AI can't get from here to there! If we just had some kind of scripting, or if the AI could use the automatic-orbit-matching tools that are already in the game.... *sigh*.
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Post by subunit on May 3, 2017 20:24:29 GMT
I'm a little surprised by the muted reaction to this. Has no one ever seen the AI engage a player fleet in another SOI?
Maybe an analogy might help to explain why this is so weird to me: imagine that CMANO marketed itself as The Most Scientifically Accurate Naval Warfare Simulator ever, and that its mission statement was to generate a plausible model of what Near Future Naval Warfare would Really Be Like. Imagine, then, that you were interested in the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and you wanted to experiment with different mixed Taiwanese/American/Japanese battlegroups. How impressive would it be if you discovered that the only way to actually get a fight going in the game was to:
A) Place a Chinese battlegroup in a mainland harbour, sail into the harbour with a Taiwanese battlegroup (if the Taiwanese battlegroup doesn't come to anchor, the Chinese will not attack but will rather attempt to hide in nearby coves and inlets while launching the occasional desultory airstrike) B) Place a Chinese battlegroup unscathed in a Taiwanese harbour
Most people would think that this was not, in fact, a good representation of Near Future Naval Warfare, no matter how detailed the models of the weapons platforms themselves were. I don't think this is a bad analogy for CoaDE either, since the game represents combatants nuking each other's civilian populations- letting an enemy fleet actually establish an orbit around a militarily relevant body before attempting to intercept them is an absurdity in this case, in the same way that letting a carrier battlegroup set up shop in one of your harbours is- of course you want to intercept somewhere where they can't easily bomb your military and civilian infrastructure!
I think the lack of concern over this may arise from the fact that the community here is primarily interested in ship/component design and less interested in larger questions of strategy (one doesn't necessarily come before the other, but they have to be in conversation with one another to end up with any kind of reasonable picture of how the systems would "really" be used). This proceeds to some extent from the game design itself- if you want to play the game as a wargame rather than an engineering simulation, there's not that much to do after you've completed the campaign. IMO this is why building up a robust library of custom levels is important to broadening CoaDE's appeal- but as far as I can figure the AI design prevents anything more interesting or complicated than what can already be achieved in the sandbox.
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Post by subunit on May 3, 2017 20:01:26 GMT
A Nuclear Explosive-Formed Penetrator is a Casaba Howitzer with a thick inverted cone of metal in front of it. The nuclear force, through the Monroe effect, is used to accelerate a metal plate of several tons to several kilometers per second. It will be much faster than hypersonic missiles, impervious to point defenses and probably have to range to destroy targets over the horizon. Aerodynamic heating is not a big problem when the metal is already half-molten. Drag can be compensated for through sheer momentum - the mass required to prevent the nuclear explosion from simply vaporizing the metal plate has a side effect of having the NEFP projectile mass several tons. This is a better idea than a CH in atmosphere, but I'm skeptical of whether this sort of thing is really a viable naval weapon in the first place. OTH positional fixes are in practice not precise enough to direct a weapon like this- there are good reasons actual militaries prefer supersonic AShMs with terminal guidance to things like railguns, even if they are slightly more susceptible to CIWS fire. You also have no possibility of getting plunging hits and low/no possibility of below-waterline hits. If you're going nuclear in an earthbound confrontation you may as well just use a ballistic missile (also impervious to point defence) to deliver your nuclear material and frag the entire battlegroup instead of hoping to poke above-waterline holes in a few of them with EFPs.
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Post by subunit on May 2, 2017 10:54:56 GMT
Here is my design for current patch. It beats the Vesta Overkill preset with 3 of them with no loss, bar a few weapons. Here is the Vesta Overkill aftermath: As you can see, the massively redundant lithium radiators are redundant for a reason. While the internal 28.5 km/s railgun is useful for setting engagement range, and does contribute to damage, it is out of power more often than not. The chemgun hailstorm, originally intended as point-defence, end up causing much of the damage. Note that no additional input was required during combat, the ship seems to be doing fine even in the hands of poorly trained junior officers. So much for a "rag tag fleet"... thanks Thorneel. I still hope to find some way to make a fun mission out of this, but my initial plan was stopped cold by my discovery that the AI doesn't know how to play the game (http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/thread/1269/ai-chained-soi), which kind of sapped my motivation- I wanted to have a couple of the player LAC designs in each of 3 or 4 fleets spread across several different moons, with the main challenge being uniting enough of them to go take on a big NP gunship fleet before they could be eaten up piecemeal by smaller patrol fleets, but it doesn't look like there's any real way of getting the AI to attack reliably, so it's hard to make a mission design that puts any kind of pressure on the player.
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 11:07:53 GMT
Yeah, the 7 stack is less than 15% the volume of the 1-stack, that's crazy, good catch.
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 10:25:49 GMT
I think my biggest problem with CoaDE is the "shooting range" feel. It's cool to take a toy out onto the range and test it against some targets (hey, they even shoot back), but I've always had a sneaking suspicion that I'm not really playing an opposed wargame on the maneuvering layer. I decided to finally try to do some Levels.txt editing and got stopped dead right away when I tried to get an AI fleet to attack a player fleet in a nearby SOI. Here's my Levels.txt insert:
Speaker Test Speaker Alliance Iroquois Resurgence
StarterFleet LibertyOne ShipTypes Long Assault Cutter Edit
StarterFleet NipponStrike ShipTypes Gunship Large Methane Tanker Large Methane Tanker
Level Liberty or Death JulianYear 2259.1 Description Test description ShortDescription Test description TimeLimit_JulianDays 60 Location MainBody Uranus PlayerAlliance Iroquois Resurgence EnemyAlliance Nippon Prime AI Reckless IsADefendLevel true Fleets Puck 0 Iroquois Resurgence null LibertyOne Mab 0 Nippon Prime null NipponStrike Music The Edge Messages Starting Test Speaker Hey
This much works fine, just insert the level name into the Campaign list and away we go. As you can see I set this up with the "IsADefendLevel" switch to true, in case that was necessary for the AI to go aggro. The gunship has a couple of tankers, more than enough to make an intercept from Mab to Puck (closest approach ~15000 km), though the gunship shouldn't really need the extra fuel. I edited the Reckless doctrine as follows:
CapitalShipInterceptDoctrine InstantaneousDeltaVBudget_Percent 1 DeltaVBudget_Percent 1 DistanceMaximum_km 200000 OnlyEnsurePlanarity true InterceptCapitalShips true TonnageWeightFactor 1. DistanceWeightFactor 0. As far as I can tell, if the AI knows how to do trans-SOI intercepts, those settings should allow them to do so. As the thread title implies, if you set up this mission, the AI does nothing and the mission time expires. In messing around with AI doctrine settings it's not even really clear how you get the AI to stop evading player intercepts- even on Aggressive or Reckless they'll evade an intercepting player for no apparent reason other than to be coy. You can provoke an attack by completing an orbit within the AI's SOI but that's about it. As far as I can tell the player literally always has the initiative except in scenarios where they start in the same SOI as an AI and "IsADefendLevel" is set to true. If this is the case basically every scenario with enemy forces outside the player's starting SOI is a shooting gallery where the AI hangs out until the player makes a pass without completing an orbit, in which case it evades while chucking missiles/drones, or until the player obliges an aggressive AI by settling down into a parking orbit and waiting for them to figure out how to do their job. I really hope I'm wrong here and someone can point out what I'm missing, or that there's some hope of fixing this problem.
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 5:04:44 GMT
Maybe an optional "Q-sub" requirement to carry decoy cargo pods and be mostly unarmored (other than the weapons which would need armor concealment), in exchange for the heat output requirement?
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 4:29:04 GMT
Has anyone updated these designs to the current patch? I had an idea to make a custom mission "challenge mission" set around Uranus, with some of Nippon Prime's moons declaring for the IR, and using one of each of any of the designs I could cull from this thread as the IR rebels' rag-tag fleet that they would have to use to fight some stock NP ships. Most of the designs are a couple patches old, so I'd have to modify them and distribute the modifications for the mission to be playable- I figured I'd check to see if anyone had kept any of these up to date first.
e: to be clear, I don't care whether the designs currently meet this thread's original design spec, so if you had to use diamond to make your LAC laser work in 1.1.1, it's fine.
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 4:02:00 GMT
Does anyone want to do Space Submariner Logistics Roleplay.. I'll be the Space BuOrd guy who forces you to use the Mk14 SpaceTorp. For years you will send me videos of engagements where Mk14 SpaceTorps prematurely detonate or bounce harmlessly off the hulls of their targets while I accuse you of being incompetent rather than testing the torpedo,
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 3:35:50 GMT
Yeah. CH design uses a nuke to create fast-moving hot plasma in an environment (vacuum) where it can persist for some time as a cohesive plume. Plasma is dispersed quickly in atmosphere as the ions are constantly colliding with the gasses that make up the atmosphere, dumping their kinetic energy, reacting with them, being deflected in all manner of directions, etc. If you have a 100kt nuke and you want to kill a carrier, you need to get it within a few hundred meters of the carrier (mission kill maybe a km or two). Alright. And i don't know it because i am a noob in term of physic I'm pretty sure every single person here has been schooled in some aspect or other of physics or material science by this game
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 3:32:33 GMT
We'd be getting CHed all day by spacedust if the atmosphere would permit this kind of thing. You mean CH is completely useless in atmosphere? Yeah. CH design uses a nuke to create fast-moving hot plasma in an environment (vacuum) where it can persist for some time as a cohesive plume. Plasma is dispersed quickly in atmosphere as the ions are constantly colliding with the gasses that make up the atmosphere, dumping their kinetic energy, reacting with them, being deflected in all manner of directions, etc. If you have a 100kt nuke and you want to kill a carrier, you need to get it within a few hundred meters of the carrier (mission kill maybe a km or two).
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 3:15:45 GMT
66cm torpedo tubes on seawolf class attack subs, why the limit of 533mm? HERR KALEUN. DAS ZEEWULF IST EIN SCHWULER AMERIKANISCHER TRASH SUB. DU BRAUCHST NICHST 66cm. G7E IST 53.3cm. IST GUT
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 3:13:11 GMT
We'd be getting CHed all day by spacedust if the atmosphere would permit this kind of thing.
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Post by subunit on Apr 30, 2017 0:48:57 GMT
If all the porous flag is doing is preventing you from using particular materials as fuel containers, it may not necessarily apply to all fibers. Engines, barrels, radiators, crew modules, turbopumps, momentum wheels, and probably more are prevented from using porous/fibrous materials. Ah, that makes sense. I think probably a thin-surface cross-link would not be sufficient for a gun barrel material, so porousness should probably just remain as it is.
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