Robbie Elms

The latter. Because originally, without doing any work, they did focus all on one thing and then move to the next thing and then move to the next thing. And it was not fun to be in a fight for a few seconds and then obliterated. Also, it just made the ship look like it was controlled by an AI. Robotic. These are manned turrets.

Like a hive mind on it.

Yeah, exactly. Everyone has their own focus. Everyone knows what they can shoot at at any one point, because they can only cover so much of an arc. So yeah, it looked bad. It felt really bad. And we actually put a lot of effort into getting these individual turrets to prioritize their own. As Robbie was saying, they shoot at different size ships. The larger turrets shoot at larger ships because otherwise they'd miss all the time, because the ships move too fast. So yeah, it's a conscious decision to make it work like that. There's still work to do.

I feel like, depending on the situation, and this is just me speaking anecdotally from the hours of streams and videos that I've been watching for the last week, it seems like a bomber without proper cover sometimes seems to draw all the turrets to them. And it's pretty magnificent when you see it happen, when you see all the turrets just converge on one and just decide to yeet somebody into a different game.

It's the same as a railgun. The railgun only chooses to shoot at certain things because otherwise it would just miss all the time. So I mean, we had plenty of tests where people brought a Hammerhead along, fully crewed, thought they were going to own this thing and just got one-shot out of the sky.

I happened to be in one of the playtests. Yeah, it was basically us as a team, and then it just pointed towards us. It missed the first time, and we thought we evaded it, but then it came back, and it just one-shotted us, and we're like, oh well, that's us dead.

So I'd say bring your friends and take out as much of the turrets as possible to open up gaps, and then make sure you've brought other friends with you that have some size nine torpedoes, and they can exploit those gaps. And good luck.

My advice: I'd say use up the ship's countermeasures with cheap missiles. That is a tactic we've seen. Fire all your cheap missiles off at it. This is the thing about this game. For designers, it's a real headache, but for players it's quite interesting. They do have finite everything. So they will run out of ballistics, and that might end up looking like a bug, but actually now it's real. It's realistic. So they will run out of countermeasures if you fire enough cheap missiles at them, and then just save your size nines for later when they've stopped popping those.

Yeah, I was going to echo the exact same thing, but try and stay on the rear of the Idris and not get near that railgun.

Or take the railgun off.

Yeah, take it off.

Sure. So yeah, we incorporated the skill levels and the expertise levels that you've mentioned. So the helmsman of a capital ship, they would take their piloting skill across, and it'll be impacting their turn circles, like broadsiding or coming up to maneuver in a battle, as well as rolling. So if they're getting pelted on the underbelly, they would be reactive enough with their piloting skill to tilt their turrets to take full capitalization on that. But also, as you say, from a Navy and a pirate faction, you could go, oh, right, one's military trained, one isn't. And therefore, maybe their turret gunners have better trigger discipline on the military side. They'll know when to shoot and work as a unit. Go, okay, starboard side are going to focus this thing here, all turrets on that. Whereas a pirate fleet, they'll just be all gung-ho: oh, there's a guy over there, there's a guy over there. And they won't work together, just go for maximum kaboom, for a little personal gain and glory. But then, as I've hinted on before with the trait system, we would apply that to the captain role, for example, but you could have a captain who's indecisive, like a negative trait, and it would take him longer to give an order to the crew because he wasn't sure what to do in this situation. So the turret gunners would be waiting to fire on a higher priority target, for example.

It's an interesting challenge that exists in AI for all games. It's the difference between making an AI that is just S tier and always hits their targets and always knows when to shoot and when not, and it's just this perfect Terminator killing machine, and then wanting to have AI that are, for lack of a better term, me, and just bad and terrible and don't really know what they're doing in a game.

Exactly. It's like sometimes perfect AI isn't fun AI, and it's that balance, of course, when trying to get the best experience.

That's a good one. So definitely, I think we're all kind of... I'm into sci-fi massively, so I watch all the TV shows and all the films and stuff, and we definitely take inspiration from the feelings that each show generates and each film generates, because each one does it in slightly different ways that make it unique to that particular TV series or unique to that particular film. And it comes from the VFX, it comes from the audio. So we do take influence, but we also try and create our own identity within that. So yeah, I spend a lot of my spare time, especially now we're locked down, just watching TV shows and movies.

Yeah, I was going to say, binging Battlestar and Expanse, essentially.

Yes, exactly, those two. And one thing that you take away from that as well, like The Expanse, right? It doesn't have fighters. I didn't realize that until very late on. It does not have fighter ships because they've made that decision that it's the missiles... they fly faster, more maneuverable than any person could ever be. And then they have the guns on the actual ships to take missiles out. So I just think that's a really interesting decision they made there. And we've gone kind of a Star Wars way, right, where fighters are much more important. So it's just really cool, all the different choices you can make in sci-fi. They're so different.

Yeah, so from our side, excited about all of the above. As far as those things coming next, we're looking at the defense of the big ships, and that does mean those big ships having small fighters coming out. It does mean them firing torpedoes, and also the way that the current damage works in turrets. So we're kind of moving all these things together as we evaluate what happened in Xenothreat and just how it felt and came together. And then also the additions on top. So just improving the defense, as we talked about earlier, with the capital ships. It's basically having bespoke weapons on the capital ships that are specifically designed to defend against the weaknesses that are identified. So that's something we're really excited about having.

I'm just really interested in building a living bridge crew, essentially, so with the captain giving orders to his weapons officer, who then sends that on to his turret gunners, or then sends it to the comms officer to tell the other people to surrender, and also getting the fighters launching from capital ships outside of Squadron 42. It's going to be awesome.

I think they covered it all. Well done, guys.