Hi, folks!
I've been tinkering with this game for several years now, off and on, but it's really gotten its hooks into me of late. As a creative outlet, this game has been wonderful, even if I'm not the most artsy sort of person there is. I get the most satisfaction from designing ships that look interesting while still performing to high standards.
On that point, more recently I've discovered the wormhole uploads feed and it's been a wonderful resource for testing my fleets against other designers. Reassembly's stock selection of ships had long ago lost their ability to challenge my own fleets, barring derpy decisions made by the AI (more on that in a moment). Even more recently, I've discovered the monthly NMSS tournaments and the fantastic fleet submissions that it warehouses, which has been a boon to my creative impulses. Thank you for sharing these!
Currently, I have a Terran fleet in play that performs well against most of the participants submitted during the last tournament's championship pool (August 8, 2017), losing to some, effectively stalemating or defeating others. I struggle with two things mainly: 1.) Fleets that specialize in missile barrages, which results in my capital ships endlessly dodging/kiting the missile swarms will spamming PD, with neither side inflicting any real damage after my decoys and defense platforms (and a goodly chunk of theirs) are eliminated - I tend to lose these rounds by points accumulation in the end, although not by much; 2.) More gravely, XDERP7's Piraras and their doom beams, which my capital ships just love get all lovey-dovey over, flying right up close to them for hugs and kisses.
This is odd because, the rest of the time, my ships are pretty well behaved and respect their optimal range to target. Most of the time that is, at least; the AI still makes derpy decisions, particularly where it thinks that rushing into point blank range is a good way to perform an execution on a target that still packs more firepower at that range than it does. *head desk*
It's almost as if that's what my capital ships are doing, wanting to perform a coup-de-grace before the clock has even started ticking. The cynic in me also thinks that XDERP7 designed his swarm around this behavior deliberately in order to exploit weaknesses in the AI's logic tree, in which case he is a thoroughly evil genius, lol.
At any rate, I'm completely stumped here. I've sought out solutions on my own from similar discussions on these and other forums going back as far as 2015. However, I'm concerned that those efforts may have diminishing returns the further back I go as I don't know how out of date their suggestions might be (accounting for how updates change how the game is played, however subtle).
What are some of your solutions for when dealing with these two problems? On the one hand, how do you overcome kiting/avoidance and PD spamming behaviors vs missile swarms? And on the other, how do you discourage the AI from making suicidal bum rushes to point blank range?
Bottom line, how do you force the AI do stay on target at its optimal range for as long as possible?
Pic related, it's what remains of my 8K capital ship getting surrounded and mulched by XDERP7's Piraras swarm within the first seconds of a round. I mean, that's just rude. All he wanted to do was make friends!
