A ready-to-go- proposal to improve the challenge of Heavy Fighters and keep AC fresh

I wish I had thought of this weeks ago. Oh well. Anyway, I was playing a runthrough of 22.8 when I realised that while my lone corsair verses 3 heavy fighters in autoresolve stood no chance, but in Air Combat all I had to do was run at them and press the dodge button twice. Like so:

[video=youtube;JyOg28KcKSk]

It didn't feel particularly right that what was so hard in autoresolve was so easy in AC. My analysis of this disparity suggests that AC for Fighters, Heavy Fighters and Interceptors is exactly the same. Rush forward. Press dodge. Fire missile (or not). Press dodge again. Fire missile (or not). Shoot until dead. The only difference between the loadouts of each alien interceptor is the amount of damage they do and in the case of cannons, how quickly they fire, so once you learn how to beat a Fighter, you've learnt how to beat them all. I'm sure some people will like this - that you don't have to keep figuring things out, but I don't know about you, but it feels fundamentally wrong that a) the challenge in Air Combat stops at Fighters, Corvettes and Bombers, and b) that there's that strong disparity between autoresolve and AC when the human interceptor is strongly outnumbered.

So, going back to my old mods, I looked at how the challenge of the Heavy Fighter could be improved through introducing a new mechanism to understand. I looked for a new mechanism rather than beefing up the existing ones, because new mechanisms are what keeps the game fresh and interesting and by introducing sufficent mechanisms to the minigame you can keep further UFO types interesting by mixing them up. when I say "new mechanism", I don't mean "brand new code", rather I mean using existing variables and rulesets in novel and interesting ways.

The Brawler

In AC up to this point we've been introduced to light scouts and fighters that can evade, Scouts and Captial ships that can take punishment and need heavy missiles and fighter craft that use a combination of missiles and guns. When you get to the Heavy Fighter you have all the tech at your fingertips to build the Corsair - a brawler. Well, why not make that same kind of interceptor for the aliens? A two-gun fighter, dangerous to get in front of with thicker armour but not as agile as human craft - something that can be dodged around and taken from behind. Here, let me show you:

[video=youtube;A59e_B039qA]

As you can see the Corsair took heavy punishment trying to use techniques learnt from fighting Fighters. However, the Heavy Fighter turns slowly enough that with a little skill you can maneouvre around it and take it from the back:

[video=youtube;xhxyUDZH6oQ]

Once you've learnt what to do, a Heavy Fighter is no more challenge than any other UFO, but it's that process of learning that keeps AC fresh and interesting. Let's go back and see what happens when I try and take 3 Heavy Fighters on this time.

[video=youtube;0viihJBmu0s]

I actually had to travel at full speed this time, (when I travelled slowly, I got mutilated) and rushing at those Heavy Fighters didn't serve me at all. But when I used my noggin and got them going in one direction:

[video=youtube;6Xbbvn8-lqs]

That lone Corsair was able to beat all three but I had to show some semblance of skill - specfically a sense of timing - to get it right. I wrote in the title this is a ready-to-go proposal and it is. Here's the two files you need to try this out yourselves:

Heavy Fighter Brawler - aircrafts.xml and aircraftweapons.xml files, v22.8 ONLY.

And here's a "real-life" final video, a general melee involving brawling Heavy Fighters escorting a corvette.

[video=youtube;e8luVXlmZ88]

That looks excellent to me. It'd be interesting to see how Condors do/don't manage to deal with them - the rate of fire on the Heavy Fighters looks like it should demolish them, but it would be worth checking to see if you can more easily beat the Heavy Fighters with a group of Condors simply by missiling them to death. If that *doesn't* work, though, you just solved the Condor vs. Corsair issue, too.

(I love the feint you pull in the one-on-one video above to misdirect the Heavy Fighter.)

Gawrsh, I didn't think about that. Having rushed out and conducted several preliminary tests using tier 2 weapons (the appropriate tier when HFighters are introduced) one-to-one the Condor has a 50/50 chance of winning. I've tried feinting, and it doesn't seem fast or agile enough to feint in one direction then turn the other (60deg/sec turing angle rather than 120 deg/sec) so it has to rough it out in head-to-head. Depending on how well you time your dodges, you'll get away with either 50%+ damage or death. However you'll at least have the satisfaction of taking the Heavy Fighter with you. (Unless you forget to select your fighter to do a dodge, in which case it's death straight away)

That sounds quite reasonable.

From the first mod video you posted, even using a 'poor' strategy you managed to win. It looks like it would be quite hard to lose 1 on 1 with a Corsair, even without learning the knack. Moreover, the Corsair can with skill win against three heavy fighters.

With a Condor, you can win 1 on 1 at significant cost while it would be impossible to win one vs. three. So basically, if you don't upgrade to Corsairs by the time Heavy Fighters turn up, you're going to have a very hard time dealing with them. That seems spot on.

You do feel the agility of the Corsair when your opponent doesn't have a turning speed that quite good enough. The turning speed of a Heavy Fighter is more than enough to keep something in it's sights, but it can't handle sudden turns very well. However, I will conduct more tests with Condors to make sure that the prelim tests weren't flukes, and perhaps put up a comparison video.

Interesting, I'll try this out. But note that Corsair vs 3 Heavyfighters is the same like Condor vs 3 Fighters (not sure if autocannon would do, but one Condor with gatling laser tears them appart).

Well, it looks like you can beat the New and Improved Heavy fighter one-on-one with a Condor, provided you know how. If you take a Heavy Fighter on face to-face, you die.

[video=youtube;lRCY7wdMHmo]

At least you get to kill the Heavy Fighter as well, so no biggie. But....

If you fly at a paralell, you take damage but kill the Heavy Fighter...

[video=youtube;Tm3ggPSFnmE]

Mess that up, however, and you put yourself at a massive disadvantage - you're flying in the teeth of the Heavy Fighter so you have to get the angle just right. Thankfully, Alenium missiles have a wide cone, and you only need one to take out a Heavy Fighter.

And....

It's a lot more work, but with some fancy flying you can outmaneouvre a Heavy Fighter and punish him.

[video=youtube;knXaoxltayA]

That being said, the Heavy Fighter I propose does sharpen skills and challenges the player to find new ways to beat the enemy, rather than do the same thing over and over.

You could give HFs a few more hitpoints. I'm actually not convinced that a single Alenium missile should be downing a Heavy Fighter; by the time they turn up you should be close enough to having Plasma missiles, if you don't have them already.

(An aside, I notice that you kill the HF in the second video with missiles even though you release them at the same time. It looks like the HF can't dodge far enough to avoid them from the angle and range you release them.)

It's to do with attacking at an angle to the HF - the missiles come at it across the "line" it will dodge so if it dodges in either direction it either flies into the missiles or gives the missile a better angle of attack. It was pretty cool that I had to work out a good strategy to beat it!

EDIT: Did you know that UFOs automatically set their speed to the current speed of the aircraft they're attacking. That was how I worked out how to get past the UFO - speed up to start with so it forms a long lead, then turn rapidly (or as rapidly as you can with these creaky old things). Naturally, the Corsair does that much better.

Interesting idea to keep things fresh, and mitigate the issue of fighter type UFO being a pushover.

(if you know what you're doing, 1v3 can easily be done successfully. I remember Chris wondering on the autoresolve thread whether fighters are equally underpowered on RL; they are.)

No reason not to do it with functioning autoresolve available, I think

Another thing I propose is to increase the width (and maybe length?) of normal fighter cannons - using roll commands at right time, you can take these things down too easily without taking any damage at all. Decrease fighter cannon damage if necessary, and even then it'll be a buff since UFO fighter will actually get a chance to shoot at something.

One-on-ones are one thing, melees are another. This is one of the more successful melees I've had.

[video=youtube;sj7eIGjhsWc]

While you might think that I'm playing very badly, there's a lot more micromanagement involved with Condors and my attention on one combat means that I don't do so well with the other two. I do everything right to begin with - find out who the heavy fighters are attacking, set up the feint by speeding up the Condors and set the Foxtrot to attack the Corvette but then I'm drawn to the battle at the bottom and my Condor and Foxtrot suffer for it. I also have a very embarrassing melee where both heavy fighters went after the Foxtrot - the Foxtrot could only keep ahead of them by using his afterburner, and the Condors couldn't keep up with the Foxtrot or the Heavy Fighters, so I had to retreat the Foxtrot.

Again, that seems like a fair outcome (and being able to get a better outcome with more practice doesn't seem unreasonable, either). It's certainly more difficult than the same combat would be using vanilla HFs.

(Re: Foxtrots being chased by fighters - been there too. You're not alone.)

This seems interesting, Max - do the results from combat for the average / inexperienced player meet up with the autoresolve predicted outcomes in this system? Or at least, do they do so better than the current statlines do?

The autoresolve for a cannoned-up Condor verses my modded Hfighter is 50% (someone correct me if I'm wrong). As the videos show, you can win one-on-one with a Condor verses a Heavy Fighter but you have to learn new techniques to do it and survive. An unexperienced or simply crap player can take out a Heavy Fighter at the cost of their own fighter if they have the right weapons, so someone who bitterly hates AC but also equally hates the even odds in autoresolve can just scream BANZAI and send a HFighter harasser to the ground. From a strict perspective, the autoresolve function doesn't match up closely with the AC function in that you don't win but you don't loose either. As skill improves and techniques get netdecked by more skilled players (LP'ers especially love situations where they can be the most Radical man in the Radical Land) the correlation between autoresolve and AC improves (taking damage rather than dying due to mistimed dodges), then as skill mastery is achieved it overtakes the 50/50. The technique to destroy a HFighter does improve with weapon type as each new missile type has their range bumped up signifcantly so the player exposes their fighter less and less (although this is truer of the Condor and the Maurauder than the Corsair, due to the nature of the Corsairs loadout), so it retains correlation with escalating autoresolve.

Corsairs have a much better chance, both in AC and autoresolve. As you could see from the videos, even if you play it using techniques learnt from the fighter, a Corsair can muscle through anything that a Heavy Fighter can throw at it, so the correlation between autoresolve and AC is pretty good, however survival is pretty much the only thing that you can do, tbh, which does not correlate strongly with autoresolve. You have to learn how to lead a HFighter (which is much easier to do with a Corsair) to be able to get a 0% damage rating.

A Condor in the particular era that HFighters appear can no longer take a squadron of three HFighters on any more, skilled or unskilled (and I challenge the high-level players otherwise! Videos or it didn't happen!), so that keeps it inline with the autoresolve result of 0%. However a Corsair can muscle through most of what a squadron of heavy fighters can throw at it, and while in the video the corsair was shot down, that wasn't for want of trying and next time, the Corsair might make it through. So while autoresolve offers a only offers a 9% chance of winning, a poor player could sometimes win 1-on-3 in AC.

In a cap-ship melee escorting HFighters present their own issue that you are not fighting a uniform enemy - cap ships require different techniques, and even though each cap ship can be taken on by the same technique (it's my personal intent to mod each cap ship to present their own particular challenge), the primary difficulty is juggling the escorts and the cap ship successfully (as you could see in the melee video). Corsairs are much easier to juggle than Condors - any mistakes with a Corsair is not a life and death situation and the agility and speed of a Corsair makes it much easier to take out HFighters using any technique. 2 HFighters and a vanilla Corvette verses three corsairs was a 100% win rate, which is reasonable, but Condors are more at variance. I don't have the figures in front of me, but I did notice that a Condor/Foxtrot combo was more likely to win in AC than in autoresolve.

This needs more data, tbh. I was perhaps too focussed on the HFighter itself (typicall modder, eh?). Oy - the only way for me to work out adequate autobattle data is to fight battles over and over, which takes forever . An autobattle generator would be sweet, but I don't know that a generator would be able to properly simulate the variables involved.

You're aware that you can force an aircombat by running the game with the the -aircmbt tag? The UFOs and interceptors used are in gameconfig.xml.

In either case, that's a big wall of text. If I changed the Heavy Fighters to what you're proposing, would I also have to make a bunch of changes to the autoresolve numbers?

...

No, no I didn't.

Anyway, no, not really. I didn't change the autoresolve values for anything, so the current autoresolve value of a Heavy Fighter is 1100 Roll, 1400 NoRoll. The modded version is 1200 Roll/NoRoll. In comparison a Corsair (lasers) would be 1600 Roll/NoRoll , a Condor (lasers/alenium) 1200 Roll, 1400 NoRoll, a Foxtrot 200 Roll, 1400 NoRoll. A Corsair wins every time, a Foxtrot looses every time, and a Condor 50/50.

Is there plan to include this suggestion in final release?

Is there plan to include this suggestion in final release?

Based on Chris' response it seems highly unlikely.