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Fed,

Making cons plant in this way will make it harder to kill them as they are about to plant.

Making it easier for the defense obviously makes it harder for the offense.

And that has been the tenor of the discussion, it will be more difficult to kill cons as they plant.

Con offense harder, con defense easier. Applies equally to both teams. So, like YP said, handle it in the core (regardless of their activeness--they made it, they can fix it or someone can make a new one), and learn to deal with the slight difference in style and tactics.

Also, you think it's not broke. Some do. I say try it out, we can roll it back if needed.

YP, wtf? You're accusing someone of not making an argument, then spewing ad hominem and failing to make an argument yourself.

I'm 100% with Ksero on this, at least as far as cons planting and docking go. The AI drones are part of the tactical situation in Allegiance- they constitute the goals that we are going to engage in PvP to attain. Change the difficulty of those goals and you change the game. We like that rule of the game the way it is, thank you very much, whether or not the original devs intended for it to be that way. It's not an exploit if everyone knows about it, everyone uses it, and everyone likes it. Some bugs are features.

Dogbones, with the possible exception of making it much more difficult to ram planting and docking cons, I like every single change in R4. I don't see how mutiny spam needs to be treated differently than resign spam is now. Some of the minor changes (chatting while applying to a team!) are splendiferous.

I do know that at least one respected commander has concerns with some of the new game setup options (many miners, turning tech trees off)- but I think he's nuts. Given two competent commanders those additional options will increase the balance and fun of the game (30v30s should have 6 miners, and 5v5s should have 2!), and if you have less than two competent commanders the game is going to suck anyway.

I like the idea of being able to lower the number of miners for smaller games, but adding additional miners would hurt the balance of things IMO in any size game. Other than in circumstances where you are testing things I can't see a situation where allowing more than 4 miners makes any sense. But I guess i could just elect not to play in games with additional miners.

As for autobalance I still don't understand how anyone could join a team that has a higher HELO than its opponent. For some reason a 'threshold' was put in that allowed you to join a team that was up in HELO and I think this contributes to the problem of 17 v 14 games. I would start by removing that.

Some good discussion here.

I would make a few comments

There can be a rather large gray area for what is considered a bug/exploit/feature.

Most agree TeleProbes dropped inside rocks was a 'bug' that was 'exploited'.

Personally I think bouncing cons around like a ping-pong ball is one of those things that is on the edge. Easy enough to fix without a code change, just increase the mass of the con.**

AI is a whole issue by itself. Most people (at lest that is my feeling) would like to see the AI 'smarter'. Miners are just plain stupid at times, also I think it is just 'silly' that it takes miners 3 times longer than even most newbs to dock. So YP made them a bit smarter.** The catch is smarter AI impacts balance. So leave them 'dumb' or make them smarter and balance that out in other ways. I am on the side of making them smarter BUT not at the expense of game play most like. There is room in here for compromise but I won't pretend as lead dev I can straddle this fence, the edge is too sharp and there are multiple fences to be straddled /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

I'd like to see the added check of counting friendly versus foe ships in sectors you own make it to gold.
I'd like to see miners/cons not avoiding friendlies make it to gold.
I feel less strongly about the other changes, but in general, I think making miners fly more like humans is a 'good' thing and I'd like to see future improvements, not just in AI but in the commander interface (like marking sectors as 'off limits' to cons or as 'okay' to cons, basically a manual override to the current 'hostile' or 'not-hostile' sector check).

Perhaps and real change in this area may have to wait for an slightly expanded core where we can have a con/miner property that impacts their AI. Standard cons = dumb, Adv cons = smarter. Or better yet have con AI a separate tech item. Research stations could have a tech item "Enhance AI" for instance.

Bottom line is we want something that is enjoyable to play. There are some 'clunky' parts of Allegiance that really add to its charm that I would not like to see go away. AI flying of ships, at least for me, is not really one of those.

**[Note if you actually play the beta I think you will find the docking and plant changes are rather subtle]

Radar wrote:QUOTE (Radar @ Sep 14 2007, 01:36 AM) Hi,
I am posting so Dog and YP and AEM etc know that I was here.

Good to 'see' you /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

I definetly like the "Standard cons = dumb, Adv cons = smarter" idea.

Oh and please, please, PLEASE leave rammable friendly cons in. That is $#@!ing brilliant and wonderful.

It will impact game balance and this makes me slightly a hypocrite but I don't care.

QUOTE Cons/miners will still dodge friendlies when they are not at the very end of their approach (i.e. they will only ignore friendly as the very end of their approach)[/quote]

I got a brilliant idea /doh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":doh:" border="0" alt="doh.gif" /> concerning #mutiny.

If a mutiny vote fails, the player who proposed it gets automatically booted.

This will raise the stackes /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" /> and make em think about it.

I like MoGas's idea.