[tnathan475]

Having issues creating capital ship battles, I'm trying to make it so larger vessels maneuver very slowly and at one point or another during combat, no matter what the rotation times are set to in the ships.tbl, it seems to become very twitchy and move rotate back and forth very quickly much faster than would seem possible because of what is set in the ships.tbl. Any advice  please?

[General Battuta]

Don't use the 'ai-chase' order. Set waypoint paths for the capships to follow.

[Sololop]

Like he said, waypoints. Though as with all capship battles, watch out for BoE Syndrome.

[sigtau]

I always wondered, when setting waypoints for capital ship battles, do you also have to give attack orders to the ships as well, or will they automatically attack as necessary?

[Droid803]

They will automatically fire their turrets, but "attack as necessary"? I donno. The AI does its own thing.
Even with attack orders sometimes they don't "attack as necessary". :/

[ssmit132]

You can use fire-beam if you want to force beam shots. There's no way (at the moment) to force shots from other turrets, however. You probably wouldn't need to worry about that, however; if the ships are in range, their turrets should fire (though there is the turret limit when you're not using the Fury AI).

[Black Wolf]

As has been mentioned, set waypoints for hip combat and use ship-rot-maneuver for forced slow rotations.

[tnathan475]

thanks for the input everyone, but I'm convinced I am doing something wrong. I've set up way points for the ships to follow, and they do seem to sort of follow them but they only seem to really use them as guidelines and still pretty much do their own thing and go where-ever depending on where enemies are.

[General Battuta]

Do your waypoint path orders have the highest priority of all the orders they have?

[tnathan475]

Yes the priority is set high and are the only orders they have.

[General Battuta]

How close together are the waypoints? Try to space them out a bit.

These are capships following them, yes?

[tnathan475]

Yes these are capitals that are to follow these waypoints, about how far apart should waypoints be?

[General Battuta]

Depending on the size of the ship, you probably want to give them like 500 meters or something and try not to make the turns too sharp? 500 is a pretty conservative value, closer might be okay.

[tnathan475]

Strange, most of my waypoints have at least double that distance and I made it a point to have gentle turns.  Some ships will come to a waypoint and spin on their X or Y axis' for a couple minutes and then continue on waypoints, other ships will decide to roll on their Z axis slightly and not straighten. The only thing that seems to act normal is a waypoint thats in a straight line. How the ships are reacting seems to been related to the enemy capital ships they are fighting (or autofighting because they do not have orders to engage and are just auto-engaging enemy ships at will) I should point out that I am NOT using modded AI tables.

[Trivial Psychic]

Sounds like we may need a new form of waypoint following commands, which would allow the FREDder to dictate a minimum distance that a ship must close to a waypoint before that waypoint is considered achieved and will allow the ship to proceed to the next one.  Something like waypoints-proximity and waypoints-once-proximity.  First field would be obviously the ship, the second would of course be the waypoint path, while the third would be the minimum distance.

[Dragon]

What we need is an imprevement to AI to make capship attack orders work properly.
I'd like to see that working like it does in RTSes, you order a warship to attack and it positions itself in the optimal firing position on it's own.
Something like an "AI-Capship-Chase" order that would behave differently than "AI-Chase".

[Droid803]

or just implement that into ai-chase...seeing as ai-chase with capships is hardly consistent anyway and that probably won't break backwards compatibility...too much

But oh how I wish capships knew how to close into range, stop, and rotate/bank to provide maximum turret coverage...

[General Battuta]

Honestly I'm not sure that would help at all. They would still ram everything and look dumb. Scripted battles are good battles.

[Trivial Psychic]

or just implement that into ai-chase...seeing as ai-chase with capships is hardly consistent anyway and that probably won't break backwards compatibility...too much

But oh how I wish capships knew how to close into range, stop, and rotate/bank to provide maximum turret coverage...

Unlikely, as it would break retail compatibility.  It's more likely to be something to incorporate into ai_profiles.  What could really be useful is a way for the AI to calculate where the most dangerous turrets on an enemy ship are and attempt to maneuver to a point outside of those turret's firing arc, then if possible to try to find a complete blind spot.  It should also take into account any damaged or disabled turrets into its maneuver algorithm, as well as the ability to know where its own most powerful weapons are and point them towards the target.  Also, the attack distance should also take into account the physical size of both ships so we don't get any base-ball bat incidents.  Of course, we're not likely to see any of this any time soon.

[Reprobator]

At a first stage it would be a good thing that cap ship respect what was written in their own table, i mean i can set any value i want in their table :
$Rotation Time:  300.0, 260, 50.0
It'll still move like a fighter .

I remember having done some test in starshatter, send a kamikaze objective to capship onto another capship : that was quite funny to see : the capship accelerate and go straight to its target, 500 m before the impact , the AI seems to change it's mind and prefer to survive: the capship manoeuvre into a uturn and use it's engine at full power, but the inertia made it useless...