I haven't played your mod yet but I can already tell I like where you're going with this. More control of how our fleets move and engage in battle makes the game far more enjoyable. I've been wanting to build a mod that reconfigures the way ships within fleets select targets while engaged in combat... unfortunately I don't see how to do this without having access to the source code.

I would like to use something close to the artificial bee colony optomization algorithm for targeting, fleet movement, and ship positioning (where hopefully every ship would find the sweet spot for range, self preservation, fleet protection, and damage output without needing to rely on pre-determined ranges and charge/bombard mechanics). Maybe some battles are better suited for this or that ship to keep a range and fire on missiles that are destined for a cluster of corvettes and in another battle those same ships may be better off charghing straight at heavily shielded battleships while cruisers move in close and deploy swarms of fighters as cover.... the point is that the capacity exists with the weapons and ships already but the game just doesn't use them in any intelligent way whatsoever.

A 40 distance flanking module would be neat for my Corvettes / Destroyers.

In 1.3, destroyers have the highest accuracy and tracking, making them ideal for fighting corvettes. In actual battle how ever, them seem to target capital ships more than corvet and other destroyers, making them pretty useless.
Can you somehow fix this in your mod?

I have a concern with how ships space themselves with your mod(which is otherwise great). Large fleets can spread out over quite an area(3-4 orbits) with a severe impact on short range ship perfromance. Corvettes and other short range craft can be forced into traveling half the system at combat speed before contributing.

Also a concern for escort designs. Being spaced out so widely has negative impact on PD coverage.

@wangxuanfrank - there is a parameter for relative size, however that is on an overall scale per behaviour. I could probably add specific behaviour modules for specific ships classes (which could make sense for things like corvettes that don't have any use for the 80+ range variants). Looking into it for a future update!
@legion248 - Can't say that I have noticed such behaviour - how many ships and which behaviour modules each are we talking about?

About 250 fleet points of mixed vanilla classes and either charge(DD and corvettes) or 100 range arty(CR and BB). I'll fiddle with it, see if i can't narrow it down. They are following approriate behaviors just super wide fleet spaceing.

Edit:Mod conflict seems the most likely cause at the moment switching off the majority has resovled the issue. Now i'll see if i can't pin it down.

Futher investigation points to the issue actaully being in NSC.

Originally posted by REF Issen:

@wangxuanfrank - there is a parameter for relative size, however that is on an overall scale per behaviour. I could probably add specific behaviour modules for specific ships classes (which could make sense for things like corvettes that don't have any use for the 80+ range variants). Looking into it for a future update!
@legion248 - Can't say that I have noticed such behaviour - how many ships and which behaviour modules each are we talking about?

Thank you for your reply, looking forward to the updates.
In the mean time, I'm trying to mod the numbers myself.
Is the "size_difference_penalty" line in the standard_ship_behaviors.txt file under common\ship_behaviors what need be changed? If I understand it correctly, changing it to a negative number will make the ship target smaller ships first, I'm I correct?

Well, not quite, because it uses Abs in the calculation, so the result is always positive - so you cannot really differentiate between ships that are "smaller than" and those that are "larger than" your ship, just "is not really my own size" - which is weird as hell.

the ship size difference penelty could be set to zero which would eliminate the ship size difference mechanic from targetting. I think a few behaviors already do this. the reason destroyers currently seem to target larger ships over corvettes is a result of negative values in the size difference penalty.

for example, If you've selected "hit and run" behavior (size diff penalties of 60 :: -100; 80 :: -10,000; 100 :: -10,000 respectively), a ship will get a bonus to its target selection that is proportional to the difference in ship size from itself. Since destroyers are a ship size of 2 and corvettes are a ship size of 1, the delta is 1. For carriers the delta is 2 and for battleships the delta is 6.

Honestly I think this mechanic should be set to zero in all behaviors and other targeting mechanics should be used instead, such as shield focus, armor focus, distance to fleet penalty, keep previous target, etc.

By setting this penalty arbitrarily high, you could allow ranged battleships to mainly focus on the largest enemy ships which would be good, but only good if applied to the largest ships in your fleet.

One thing I'd really like to see is a behavior that makes ships -less- likely to attack a ship that's already being attacked, so as to avoid massive overkill when you're going up against a swarm (especially when using missiles). Maybe call it a dogfighting module? Idk

Why are all the ranges for the various scripts so long? It makes sense for large weapons, but anything smaller than that just won't work at distances >60.

Or is this mod meant to be used together with some other mod that changes weapon balance?

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Also, do you have any plans for, and is it even possible to make, smarter behaviour for ship AI?

Like withdrawing when damaged, concentrating fast weapons on weak targets to take them out of the fight, concentrating heavy hitters on strong targets to reduce overkill, spreading missiles out instead of overkilling a single target, etc.

@CHOO CHOO author already agreed that 40-range computers will be really good, just wait for it. As for other requests, as a modder myself I dont see the possibility of this due to how combat works. We simply have no tools to make it possible.

Alright, looking forward to the short range computers.

Shame about the crappy combat mechanics. I like what modders are doing with this game, but the original devs did a really, really sloppy job.

well they chose where to invest there time and it wasn't in combat funtionality. The game has more to do with grand stratgey then acurate simulation. It cares more about the broad strokes then strict adherance to logical and accurate simulation.

They did an equally sloppy job on everything else I have laid eyes on so far. Sometimes I don't know why I even play this game; everything looks unfinished and untested. Including the grand strategy and broad strokes.