Emergent Fleet Design

[MacThule]

"An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective." -Wikipedia


I want to talk about what functional Astrotech repair implies for design theory in this game.

Functional astrotech (along with features like shield supply and jump inhibition) opens a major door for support-oriented ships in this game, and heavy support ships seem like a natural choice for fleet motherships since it would empower an admiral to repeatedly return ships to combat during an extended engagement.

Astrotech requires linked cargo to function. This means that every block type used on fleet member ships should be stocked in sufficient numbers to facilitate repair, but so many ships use such a broad variety of block types, that assembling a fleet composed of separately designed individuals would require that any support ship either carry relatively limited amounts of repair materials for any given ship, or be a massive, lumbering whale filled to the brim with an unacceptable amount of faction resources.

The solution seems to be designing entire fleets intended to employ a limited palette of blocks, so that your mothership can effectively keep ships in the fight without being a huge, slow-moving target for the enemy. At that point, it starts to really sound like designing the fleet with a mind towards emergent systems might be of substantial value. Rather than ships intended to stand alone or as homogenous swarms in combat, ships designed to compliment each other start to look really appealing.


I come to this because I have been struggling to design a light command ship for small fleets, just to explore the potential of a support-oriented mothership rather than a battleship style command vessel. So many trade-offs are required under the Beta systems, that excessive cargo for support keeps coming up as an unacceptable option.

Anyone else done any work or thinking on this subject yet?

Anyone interested in discussing ship profiles for coherently designed fleets that don't just match up aesthetically, but also compliment each other in a way that allows them to perform better as a whole than as a collection of individuals?

New systems are still a bit buggy, but I'd love to hear any ideas on this.
[doublepost=1530598131,1530597880][/doublepost]Also... do we know if astrotech turrets can draw blocks through linked dockers that link to a storage unit on parent entities? If not, that probably needs to happen.

 

[Ixalite]

On the subject of repair ships, it is important to note that not all blocks are significant for a ship's combat effectiveness. While the total number of blocks available is of course, hundreds, and many or most of them could be employed in any given ship, repairs sufficient to render a ship combat effective again could be managed with twenty or thirty. While carrying 20-30 thousand blocks does require a large cargo, it is still a small enough investment that a fast fleet auxiliary or even a docked repair shuttle might carry enough material to patch up combat damage.

If Starmade is to evolve to the level of complexity where the structure of a fleet matters beyond complimentary weapons types, a much better AI will be required. I can see a group of 1-4 players working on a sort of "long journey" scenario, where resources would be tight and enemies would be a real threat to a small fleet, but this requires both resource scarcity and enemy AI which is capable of proving a threat to experienced players.

Right now, if you simply measure gameplay in actions, it is far more efficient to create entirely new ships than to repair old ones. Even if you must construct a shipyard to do it, it is much simpler to spawn a new station, lay down a shipyard, and scrap the old ship in it, rebuilding from a blueprint.

In order to foster emergent interactions as you describe, there must both be the capability for those interactions, and some benefit. Right now, you can't have an AI repair ship in your fleet, and operating a repair ship yourself is grossly inefficient.

 

[Edymnion]

Right now, you can't have an AI repair ship in your fleet, and operating a repair ship yourself is grossly inefficient.

True, but that will change in time, most likely during or directly after the Universe update when AI gets a full revamp to finally be able to utilize all the new goodies (remember, we're still running AI that barely knows that rails are a thing).

Anyway, I don't think we'd necessarily need huge amounts of stores to repair with. The idea that you could completely rebuild any ship in the fleet is, IMO, overkill. The idea would be more to repair damaged hull and small holes, not restore an entire ship thats been blown down to 10% of it's original mass.

IMO, again, astrotech repairs fill the gap between "There's too much damage to be worth repairing it one block at a time by hand" and "Screw it, dock it into the shipyard and respawn from design".

To be useful as AI drones, I'd want to see the AI that can check to see what blocks are needed, dock with a mother ship/station, grab as many of those blocks as it can carry, then go back out and start repairs. Not force the repair drone to haul an entire ship's worth of repair blocks all the time.

That way we could have a heavy cargo/tanker ship full of blocks, or even main station stores, and let the drones pull from those as needed.

 

[Nosajimiki]

There is a cool down for damage until you can heal so field repairs are not really going to be viable anyway. It will probably be better just to put a heal turret on your HB for that.

[edit]: bringing a repair freighter behind you for after a fight may be helpful. Since new combat mechanics lead to more system damage, losing jump-drives is a pretty common problem now so having something to patch up after a fight just enough to get home could be useful.
[doublepost=1530644377,1530643490][/doublepost]As for the OP, the only combo I've really noticed start to take shape is mixing stealth ambush ships and interceptors. An ambush ship with enough alpha could hit-and-run on an enemy that your interceptor could then chase down and finish off.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I see what you're saying.

It might be a good thing if astrotech could repair/rebuild with RAW materials. Then you could have dual-function minin/repair swarms. Even without repair-from-raw, having your wounds patched up with the scrap you salvage from the wrecks of your enemies could still be a thing, and somewhat mitigate your cargo-bloat problem. One would assume at least some common (reactor, shield, chamber, etc) blocks would survive the death of a ship and be useful to patch u your wounds.

It might also become an emergent feature to "scuttle" a ship in your own fleet that's barely alive to bring a couple at 70-80% back to 100, though that might require some fancy logic or human intervention to "finish it off" in a way that gives you back useful parts....

 

[Ixalite]

I would suggest taking it a step further: have a repair "juice" made from all of the raw materials mixed together. You can have a cargo full of regular materials, or a storage full of "juice" which can (inefficiently) repair any block.

 

[BusterCrabb]

"An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective." -Wikipedia

simple entities (point defense turrets AI TARGETING priorities) vs. simple entities (missiles strength/speed/SHIELD) makes this a duel-dual emergent behavior as pointed out by jw608 this will be an observable emergent system with a changing environment (promised galaxy update, and whatever makes it out as "stable" until then). Jump to 2:30 for the relevant part.

 

[aceface]

interesting that support ships will be viable. would also like to see shield supply and power supply ships as support. in general i think support weapons need longer range to be able to keep out of the fight and help. they have so short range any weapon can hit them very easily.

also for the problem with many blocks, i think a solution could also be to have the astrotech beam use scrap. maybe add a factory block called recycler that converts blocks into scrap, then the astrotech uses 2x amount of scraps to repair a certain block that it would be to break it down to scrap preventing abuse.

 

[Edymnion]

interesting that support ships will be viable. would also like to see shield supply and power supply ships as support. in general i think support weapons need longer range to be able to keep out of the fight and help. they have so short range any weapon can hit them very easily.

also for the problem with many blocks, i think a solution could also be to have the astrotech beam use scrap. maybe add a factory block called recycler that converts blocks into scrap, then the astrotech uses 2x amount of scraps to repair a certain block that it would be to break it down to scrap preventing abuse.

Honestly, I'd rather see it just use mesh and composite. After 15 minutes of play you always have an infinite supply of that stuff anyway, might as well use it.

 

[Briaireous]

Honestly, I'd rather see it just use mesh and composite. After 15 minutes of play you always have an infinite supply of that stuff anyway, might as well use it.

Ikr, also makes repairing less tedious, that way if shit ever stops repairing, you just need to unload more mesh, composition, or scrap instead of having to find the specific block you ran out of.

 

[EricBlank]

I think to really make fleet combat stick the ai needs to be able to do at least these things: share scanning information between fleet members and run scans themselves to allow targetting stealth craft, mine asteroids and salvage wrecks (for mining fleets) without constant supervision, deploy and recall fighters, prioritize friendly assets' status and apply power/shield supply beams to fleet members under fire or having reactor trouble, and utilize astromech beams after combat to repair damaged craft and maybe reboot overheating ships. They also need to maintain fleet formation/coherence so they dont get spread too far from one another, or too close, to support one another, and they need to respond to attacks on faction infrastructure, say defense fleets moving to a sector known to have a hostile ship present and attempting to destroy it if ordered to guard a system, not just a sector. It may also need ai-performed cargo transfers to restock repair vessels from standby cargo vessels.

Without these things, ai fleets will forever be utterly useless between player factions. A stealth ship can do whatever it wants because ai dont run scans. Fleet members dont support one another when one of them is taking fire, they can easily be kited out of range of one another etc.


Erm, more on topic, what your ships are actually made of shouldnt be too big a deal. You really only need to repair the functional components, and the armor. The problem right now is the astromech wont let you continue to repair other parts of a ship if you dont have one useless decorative component

Or like in the case of the ship i was testing it on, it wouldnt let me repair it because it didnt have any "gray basic armor wedge." It literally had a few hundred thousand gray basic armor blocks, but i guess wedges dont come from blocks according to tue astromech beam...

 

[Ixalite]

didnt have any "gray basic armor wedge

That needs to be reported

 

[EricBlank]

...i often dont report bugs because i assume everybody experiences them and the bug tracker must already be inundated with duplicates, but if it hasnt been reported then i will do that.