Just a quick update to say I'm still working on the next update. My available time has decreased a lot lately so the work is going pretty slowly.

Hi there,

I finally got a try a run through with tactical mod, and I have to say I really enjoyed it, the ship designs for the AI are quite interesting, and it made me really think hard about how I wanted to design my ships to best counter the enemy. Battles seemed a lot more interesting too.

I've only done one playthrough, but I had a few quick hit thoughts to pass on.

Drones:
I really like how the different drones have more distinct roles with fighters having great speed, bombers slower and more powerful, and heavy fighters being able to soak up some damage. It makes sense to me that bombers would top out for damage even above heavy fighters.

I still struggle with finding a role for fighters on their own before bombers show up. Usually I use them as cannon fodder, running ahead of bombers to soak up damage, but I find they get shot down quite easily. The speed is really nice though. Do they have better beam defense (avoidance) compared to other fighters due to their high speed? Might be something that would fit with their role of being small and very fast spacecraft.

And a question on heavy fighters. It looks like the description for heavy fighters still implied that they had both bombs and beams, but from the mod changelog and the YAML files it looks like they instead have two beam weapon and no bomb? I am guessing that the description is just a bit out of date but wanted to confirm.

Achilles Targeting Unit:
I'm really torn on whether this thing is worth using a special module slot for. My play experience and testing suggests that the Achilles only triggers on ships cruiser/gunship size and below, and I think that it does not work with MIRV, which sucks since you would think MIRV would be a great way to improve the one hit kill chance by having more warheads. At least those are my observations. I’d be happy to provide more details on the testing I've done, and would welcome any feedback on what I have found (especially if it's opposite to what I’ve indicated here).

But assuming this is true, with only a 1% chance to kill a cruiser or smaller later in the game when opponents are building bigger ships, and having to give up MIRV to do so, it seems hard to justify using it. I’ve tried making it work, as it could be a nice way to give missiles some late-game added punch, but I’m not sure if it's worth the slot, given how many other options one has at that point in the game. Would be interested if you have any views or experience with this.

Anyways, just wanted to share those thoughts, they are just some initial comments from a first playthrough but hopefully they are helpful. But I do have to say I am really enjoying using tactical mod.

Hey, thanks for sharing! Really appreciate the feedback! If I may, what races did you face and which ones survived?

Drones:
In terms of role, I'd planned for fighters to be more cheap cannon fodder. There's not a lot of room for them to adjust because they already require two hits from laser PD to kill and one hit from Mass Drivers but get a fairly decent beam defense bonus from their speed which makes it hard to kill them early game but very easy to kill late game.

If I bump up their HP they become very difficult to counter early game and make heavy fighters less useful due to the larger quantities of fighters you can field making fighters a better choice. I also can't give them another weapon because that would make their damage too high for early game and on par with heavy fighters late game. I might be able to give them a slight HP boost and see if that helps.

I should also mention, it may depend on who you try to use early drones against will change how they work out. Bulrathi, for example, tend toward a lot of PD especially once the cruisers are fielded.

You're correct about the description for Heavy Fighters, I don't have resources to do translations and I haven't updated them.

Achilles:
This special is never useful and is hardcoded to only affect small ships which is unfortunate because it means I can't really do anything to it. :( I would absolutely love it to work on any size ship.

Originally posted by vaaish:

Hey, thanks for sharing! Really appreciate the feedback! If I may, what races did you face and which ones survived?

No problem! The game was (and actually still is) quite interesting. It's quite late in the game, and I'm intentionally trying out a few extra things as opposed to going straight for the win, which might come back to bite me, but I'm enjoying it so no biggie. Here’s a quick summary:

It was a small 3-arm spiral galaxy, with 9 players on very hard, so lots of close quarters combat. I was the humans, and in my area were the Sakkra and Psilons, the second arm had the Bulrathi (we'll come back to these troublemakers later), Silicoids and Terrans, and the final arm had the Trilarians, Mrrshan and Gnolams.

I came into conflict pretty early with the Sakkra and was able to take them out without too much difficulty. Shortly after that the Psilons declared war on me. They were pretty heavy into beams and cannons but I was able to make missiles and later carriers work. Bit of a back and forth with them for a bit, no real decisive wins or losses.

Eventually I started making contact with races from the other arms. The Trilarians had taken out the Mrrshan before I met them, but the Gnolams, while not as big as me, seemed to be holding the line. The Bulrathi were pretty big, having taken out the Silicoids pretty early on, and the Terrans had about 5 turns of life left in them when I met them before the Bulrathi took them out too.

Things seemed to be fairly stable for a bit after that, and then the Bulrathi decided to declare war on me, and I almost lost the game. Their first fleet made it all the way to Sol before I barely took it out. They then sent an even larger fleet after me which I saw coming and tried to fight, but I pretty much had to turn tail and run after a bad loss, as the carriers and missiles I was able to make work against the Psilons were largely ineffective (speaking to your point about good Bulrathi PD).

I pretty much had to retool the entire fleet, and I thought it was game over as they swarmed into my main ship building system. Interestingly the thing that really turned the tide were smaller torpedo ships. The Bulrathi had some titans and a bunch of battleships, but I just couldn't go strength on strength, so I made a pile of gunships and set them to blitz with side launching torpedoes. With a few of my own big ships loaded with every defensive tech I could get to tank, the gunships basically orbited the larger Bulrathi ships and eventually I was able to grind them down with antimatter torpedoes.

After getting that situation under control, I was then able to take over almost all the important planets the Psilons had, and I am now going on the offensive against the Bulrathi. I never fought the Trilarians or Gnolams up to this point. I'm feeling pretty good about where I am at the moment (although I was also feeling good right before the Bulrathi almost overwhelmed me the first time).

Originally posted by vaaish:

Drones:
In terms of role, I'd planned for fighters to be more cheap cannon fodder. There's not a lot of room for them to adjust because they already require two hits from laser PD to kill and one hit from Mass Drivers but get a fairly decent beam defense bonus from their speed which makes it hard to kill them early game but very easy to kill late game.

If I bump up their HP they become very difficult to counter early game and make heavy fighters less useful due to the larger quantities of fighters you can field making fighters a better choice. I also can't give them another weapon because that would make their damage too high for early game and on par with heavy fighters late game. I might be able to give them a slight HP boost and see if that helps.

I should also mention, it may depend on who you try to use early drones against will change how they work out. Bulrathi, for example, tend toward a lot of PD especially once the cruisers are fielded.

You're correct about the description for Heavy Fighters, I don't have resources to do translations and I haven't updated them.

For sure, I get that the fighter balance is a very delicate balancing act, and who you fight probably matters a lot too. This is only one game on my part and small sampling is poor statistics, but I do like what you are trying to achieve with them. Something I will experiment a bit more with, as I have a soft spot for fighters.

Originally posted by vaaish:

Achilles:
This special is never useful and is hardcoded to only affect small ships which is unfortunate because it means I can't really do anything to it. :( I would absolutely love it to work on any size ship.

Yeah I figured at least part of it was hardcoded. When I was messing around with it I was able to modify the one hit kill chance, but not the type of ships it could take out. I would think 1% (or something close to it, like 2%) might actually be reasonable if you could take out any size ship with an Achilles strike, but with its current limitations I just don’t think 1% is worth it against smaller ships.

It's too bad since I always thought Achilles should be one of those techs that, if as a defender you take seriously and build a tight missile defense to protect yourself against it, then it's probably a minor annoyance, but if you don’t prepare properly then you will experience the MOO equivalent of getting dumped in a garbage can and rolled down the stairs.

It's actually a bit funny, since before I did any testing I thought that when the description referred to "smaller ships" I thought they meant smaller than the ship that launched the missiles, so I actually tried making a doomstar into a mobile missile base to see if I could use it to pop titans/dreadnoughts and other big ships 😁. But unfortunately it never worked.

A few other comments:

While the new ship designs are more purposeful than before, it also made certain techs more valuable. For example, going up against enemies who like to go beam/cannon heavy, the beam defense techs were a lot more useful to me, and I was using them more as opposed to just going with straight HP improvement techs.

Also, have you ever tried to improve scout ships at all? I find scouting is very important, but usually I use cheap frigates to do it, since I can fly them up to an enemy fleet, bring up the pre-battle screen, and see how they are building their ships. With scout ships, which don’t have weapons, I need the enemy to shoot at me in order to get the battle screen to come up, and they don't always cooperate. It would be nice if they had some kind of scan function that would allow them to bring up the pre-battle screen the same way, if they were next to an opponent's fleet, but not be able to initiate combat, since scouts have no weapons. I suspect that it would require code changes, so it's probably outside the scope of what can be done here, but throwing it out there just in case.

That sounds like a pretty good game. I would caution that you kill Psilon before they get going or they will wipe everyone out. They really get nasty as the game progresses. Sakkra are a sore spot for me. They occasionally make it late game and do all right but I've not managed to get them reliably strong. Terrans and Trilarians are hit or miss but it seems to mostly be what early matchups they have. Mrrshan rarely make it to late game because they tend to send fleets half across the galaxy to declare war on everyone fairly early in the game. It ends up leaving them vulnerable. Gnolam are curious. They always perform much better than they have right to perform. Prior to the last release of 5x, I could almost guarantee Gnolam would make it to late game and it's not necessarily they have exceptional ships.

Bulrathi get pretty strong mid game. Once their big ships come out and their defensive techs get researched they are a pain to shift but they don't maneuver too much which makes them more vulnerable to torpedoes. I once test out pure missiles vs bulrathi and just watched as waves of missiles evaporated against their PD. :)

Techs:
You're absolutely right, the techs are going to be more valuable depending on which enemy you are facing and a lot of the AI starts with more focus on beams and cannons. It should diverge, but I have noticed that not enough emphasis is placed on missiles and torpedoes. There's only two races that are focused on missiles and I need to adjust so that drone races will prioritize missiles until they get bombers.

Scouts:
I've not touched civ ships. For the most part they aren't really a thing in combat and I don't want to add weapons to scouts since it might make them exploitable and messes up the AI logic for building frigates. Anything else would need a code change unfortunately. :(

That AAR above rocked. Damn Bulrathi! Nice image with side firing torpedoes. What fun combat.

Can't wait for the next release vaaish!

I think the next release wl be a small one. I'm taking a break for the moment so I can test the missile changes and monsters with fresh eyes. That will probably be all I add this go round. Then I'll spend more time on the drone race blueprints to get them using more missiles until they get bombers.

I've updated the changelog to include a few more aggressive changes I'm work on. First of all, I'm reducing the front and rear arcs because they were wide enough that even slow turning ships didn't have difficulty maintaining a target. This change matches the forward arc in Moo2 and should make maneuvering pay off a bit more.

Secondly, after a bit of a break I noticed that ship speed progression really got too fast too quickly. To that end I've adjusted the speed bonuses from engines to be less than previous and also adjusted the base and best engine values relative to the bomb ketch base speed (because it's the smallest class and the slowest frigate).

I'm also testing a potential adjustment to CP making larger ships more costly with a goal of making swarm fleets more viable by reducing the amount of ships you can get if you go heavy on battleships and titans.

Update time:

I've been primarily testing two things right now: CP changes and Missiles. For the fun of it I thought it would be nice to see about maintaining a similar damage output for missiles but increasing the numbers you can carry. The thought being that it would promote more PD on ships and look cool to see the waves of missiles getting launched instead of a couple at a time. What I landed on was about 2/3 the size with about half the normal firepower.

Overall this worked fine until battleships and titans came into play and the massive numbers of MIRV capable missiles they could carry. The issue being that tactical was almost guaranteed to tank with the numbers of objects being generated. So missiles are back where they started for 3.4 with a slight size reduction to help them fit a bit better for now.

Second, I've been testing out some significant increases in CP for the larger ship classes. The goal here was to give swarm fleets a better chance at taking them out and to reduce the overall sizes of fleets because it becomes very hard to effectively manage the tactical battle granularly (manual control of weapons and specials along with maneuvers) once fleets get above 10 or so individual ships even with squadrons.

This seems to be working fairly well so far but I need to make sure that I'm not ending up with similar fleet structures regardless of Heavy Army setting because races that want heavy ships are still building frigates an small ships.

Just a heads up, I plan to release 3.4 on May 20th. Between now and release I'll be testing whether I keep the adjusted CP changes for ships. The goal here is to reduce the size of heavy fleets and make swarm fleets get a bit of a boost.

Just want to say, thanks for doing this. Much fun has been had in this home.

You're quite welcome! I'm glad you are enjoying it and I hope you'll leave any feedback you might have at some point to give me some insight into how you're playing with Tactical Mod :)

I mostly try to design fleets that will operate effectively when set to "cinematic" mode. It's entertaining to watch and prevents the huge advantage a human can get over an AI through intelligent micro.

Overall I'm loving it, but in case this is what you want:

1) on the initial long-range volley of torpedos, the AI ships seem to always veer slightly, causing a miss, while mine fly straight in and get hit. Seems like both sides should do the same thing?

2)Missiles are both better and cheaper than beams for most of the game. By the time that changes, the game is all over but the crying. There doesn't seem to be a strategy that beats missile spam, other than torps if the missiles are on largish ships. You'd think heavy PD plus some beams, but I can't seem to make it work. Best I've done is a couple PD frigates + missiles >> pure missiles.

3)Fighters seem really overcosted and swingy. They can crush bases at long range with zero risk for a while, but when decent armor and PD comes out, they still cost a ton but do basically nothing. Carriers are SO expensive and seem, if anything, to be LESS effective than other options. I tried mixing fighters + missiles (the fighters will distract the PD!), but the PD kills fighters while missiles are on CD, when otherwise the PD would sit idle, so pure missile seems better. Maybe I'm missing the point of using fighters?

Thanks for taking time to write all that! All feedback is appreciated! Helps me understand how folks are playing vs what I assumed. :)

1) This is outside of what I can affect in CTS unfortunately. Sol has helped with updating the logic a bit which helps, but the AI doesn't know anything about incoming torpedoes which is why they can't moved to avoid them. You might be seeing some of the different ship profiles coming into effect making the AI ships look like they are dodging while yours are are targeting a station and just flying straight in.

2) I'm currently looking into missiles vs beams. The math behind the hits would indicate that at the beginning of the game with just an electronic computer would be around 36% accuracy compared to 90% for missiles. However, cannons still are reading as closer to 50% accuracy compared to 20-30% for missiles. Overall, what I'm seeing is that missiles are fairly close in performance to beams/cannons and cannons take over more towards late game. Missiles are hard countered by ECM and later PD is much better at killing them. There's some tweaks coming in 3.4 that I think help a little.

3) Fighters are also a weird one, but I've currently got them set up as more a supporting role unless you really stock up on them. I think the actual stats for them are working well, but they might need some cost drops to help make them more useful. I'll keep your thoughts in mind and look into them more.

I was thinking about the fighters thing, and they scale through the game with my computers, PD beams, and armor. So maybe you shouldn't change the price, and I have to accept they just aren't very good for their cost as soon as they are available.

It is... interesting that lower tech weapons are far better for price than newer weapons. It only makes sense to get anything other than the lowest-tech weapons when you're getting close to fleet cap. But if you're using your cheap-and-effective fleets to conquer, that fleet cap can grow pretty quick...