Star Citizen Live: NPC Capital Ship Combat

So basically the three Idrises are the same at the moment, but they obviously come with bespoke components because these are such large ships that they needed their own components, and they've been tuned that way. I wouldn't say we're happy with the loadouts at the moment. They're still subject to change and balance changes, and we're basically looking at additions to loadouts based on things we've identified during the combat with Xenothreat, and just looking at how these ships are defending themselves. So there's a good possibility that they will change in the future.

Yeah, I don't think it was important to have the Idrises have different loadouts this time around because this is the first time we're proving they work, right? So let's do that first rather than getting back conflicting things from QA who are saying this one's weak and this one's not. Let's focus on being happy with one.

Yeah, so it has been really tricky balancing this because it isn't just the number of ships, it's the type of ships as well that people bring, and it's also the way they use their ships, the tactics they use, the timings they use. There's so many variables, and it comes down to how they can defend themselves as well. So we did have a really good idea of the baseline strengths of these big ships, and we feel we've kind of hit roughly in the right place for the baseline strengths, but we don't feel they're fully able to defend themselves yet. And there's lots of factors involved with that, but we are kind of working on this, and we're basically looking back at how players have attacked these big ships and we're learning weaknesses that these ships have. There's certain times when the players can outgun the turrets, and it's basically because the ship can't keep up with the movement and the turrets can't keep up, and they're able to find a hole where they can't get shot, and they can move in that, and it's really hard for those big ships to react to that. So we're looking at those weaknesses, and we're looking at how well the big ships can defend against torpedoes, because that's what does the real damage to these ships, the torpedoes. So we do see some times where these big ships can use countermeasures really effectively. That's really cool. And they can also shoot some of the big torpedoes. And it's just getting that balance right between: we want these big torpedoes that are basically small nuclear devices to do damage to these ships, but at the same time, we want the big ships to be able to defend themselves. And hitting that balance when you have as many variations possible as we have currently is really tricky, but we're going to look back at these events and we are going to improve it from both a balance side and an AI side as well.

And there is the elephant in the room, which is obviously the servers struggling right now. Because if you're talking about, should it be this easy to kill an Idris, and all you say is it only takes nine size nine torpedoes to blow it up, that seems like too little. I think, actually, no, that makes some kind of sense. As Rich is saying, the issue is that they're not shooting them out of the sky. And on our local servers, that works. It works really well. It's balanced to the point where... I mean, you bring in a whole group of Retaliators and you organize them and you will easily take down an Idris, because that's what the Retaliators are designed for. Otherwise it would be overpowered now for capital ships.

And of course, as more capital ship systems come online, there will be more opportunities for the ships to defend themselves. I know the Idrises aren't using their missiles and stuff like that, but sometimes a good defense is a better offense. So as more of their capabilities come online, it will change that experience.

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.

Yeah. So basically, there's definitely a bias at the moment to making these ships flyable by the AI systems before they get in the players' hands. And we've basically balanced it so that it feels right now. So it basically works in sync with how well the turrets work and how well the ship can aim. So we have probably compromised some of the AI tuning for this. But that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be that way once it gets in the players' hands and once we've made improvements to the AI and the ships can target better. So we've definitely compromised a little bit. So the speeds will probably come down. And also we have some perception issues with some of the sync issues that we've had. And it's probably fair to say that there are times where it looks like it's moving quicker than what it is as well. But yeah, it's probably a bit of both.

The battles we get locally are the ones you see on videos. And the gap between what you see on those videos and what you're actually playing is, I guess, it depends on what's loaded on the server, right? Because when we do playtests, we all head to the battle. So we're not all in different landing zones with those streamed in using up memory there. We all tend to spawn at microTech and go as quickly as possible to the location. So that versus the reality of what players are doing on a server is going to be the difference.

Some of the footage that we saw during the NPC capital ship combat segment that aired last week on ISC was done from internal playtesting. I even released some of the raw video on social media where you can see many Idrises fighting each other and stuff, and the performance was stellar. Honestly, it was a good example of where we're trying to be with all of the work that we're doing behind the scenes on the platform and networking and iCache and all that stuff. So that is certainly the target. And it'll be an exciting day when we get there, to be certain.

Yeah, that's a pretty good question. So we balance it really for where we think it's going to be, so the ideal circumstances. And then we look at what's going right or wrong with that, and we'll make compromises along the way. So basically, as things get better and we understand the problems and we're able to improve some of the framework on the server, we'll basically be able to move back to where our original goal was as we go. But there's always compromise with that. And as Luke said, it just kind of varies as well where people are on the server and stuff like that. So we've got lots of server kind of things to deal with where it creates a lot of variance in the testing. And that does make the balance tricky, because it does make it hard sometimes to understand where the balance currently is. But we're always aiming for where it should be, and then we kind of bring it back to make sure it's delivering the best experience at that time.

Yeah, sure. So it basically comes down to the speed at which they move. So we've got the size fours on top and the size sevens at the bottom, and the size fours move much quicker, so they can track targets much easier. So they're choosing to fire at that point. It's more difficult for the size sevens to do that. That's kind of why you're seeing the size sevens probably not fire as much, but that's something we are working on with the AI as well, to be more selective about what they're targeting when they fire. So in the future, they will be firing more at the targets that those weapons are specifically able to fire at as well. So the size fours are more defense against light fighters, whereas the size sevens are more defense against larger ships. So it's a case of picking those right ships. That's something we don't quite have right yet.

Yes. Yeah, so basically at the moment it looks like they're kind of vanishing because they do accelerate very quickly, but also it's the server as well, so it's that time in that initial phase where they accelerate. But we do plan to communicate more the spooling phase and reduce that initial acceleration, so you can visually see them go out and you can see the lines come off the ship as it accelerates. That's definitely something we're going to work on, because it does look a bit strange at the moment sometimes when it's not communicated, and suddenly the ship just vanishes.

I can confirm they do actually quantum travel. That's how sometimes you find them ending up at the wreck site or some random rest stop when they shouldn't. But yeah, when we got that in, we were a little disappointed to see that that's how it looks. I kind of expected some kind of effect on the spool that would signal that. But I mean, if you squint, you can see that there's a few frames of movement before it vanishes.

Yes, definitely. We are now. I think Mark, my coder, is actually working on it. It's obviously difficult to know if it's really accidental. Figuring out the intent of a player is never going to be possible to 100%, but we can... I don't know if I want to tell everyone the things we do, because then people find the edge case and use it against us. So yes, we're working on that. And no dates. It'll be soon. It's fairly straightforward. I don't think it will fix everything. I mean, it's never going to fix that one case where you got unlucky or you were trying to cause it. So it's really difficult. How do you create a law system when you don't have judges and stuff like that? The law system as well, I mean, you kind of overlook the fact that there is no death right now in the game. Right now. So the law system can only kind of cope with... if someone smashes into you, well, they're dead, but oh no, they've respawned and they're coming back. It's difficult to make a law system for a world that doesn't exist, right?

Yet.

The situations that will be fixed in future.

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.

I'm not sure if this is particularly aimed at maybe phase two of the Xenothreat mission. In phase two, we tell it to do a very specific thing, which is to fire at the Javelin. So it has to keep its nose on the Javelin. It has to stay out of the range of the Javelin and the security station. If it's that, then that's probably why. Otherwise, like in phase three and in all the other missions, they're told to move freely. So it can be quite difficult to perceive it moving because it moves so slow compared with you. But they do move. If you were to track it through that gas cloud, I've seen it passing through into the depths of the murk of it and coming out the other side of the gas cloud. And those things are huge, those gas clouds. So they don't hang about.

Yeah, so I think it's fair to say we've got the base system in place where the ships can detect incoming size 9 torpedoes or any kind of missiles, and we've got the turrets to detect them so the turrets can shoot them. The feeling that it might not be like that all the time is: if it was like that all the time, we'd end up with a very linear result where either the missiles would get shot all the time or the missiles [would hit] all the time. And basically, what we're trying to do is get variance, so yes, you can fire your countermeasures, but that isn't a guaranteed result that those countermeasures will deflect that size 9 torpedo. And it's also not a guaranteed result that a turret will be able to shoot an incoming missile or torpedo. So we've tried to create a variance in there, which might seem from the outside like the system is changing, but it's just variance in the system based upon the mechanics we have in the game. And that makes it really interesting because it creates this view that you're taking a big risk firing your size 9 torpedo, and you've got to really get in the right place to fire it, so that you increase your chances of it hitting the ship. Because they do cause a lot of damage. So when they do hit, they take off a huge chunk of damage of those ships. So we have to make it like that, so there's a skill element to it as well.

And I imagine as more systems that are currently in development, like the various power systems and the physicalized damage, come online and you'll be able to damage these subsystems on these ships more, it will affect how quickly they can track, it'll affect how often they can shoot and stuff. So it lends itself to a lot of variance, as you said, that can be perceived as bugs or perceived as some kind of issue.

On this, we used QA and playtests, and I made a series of questionnaires, and we watched the videos back. We spotted the elements that were causing frustration or that didn't score well on the questionnaire. And so many times we went back and forth between: the Idris is too easy, the Idris is too difficult, the Idris is too easy. Because what we'd be doing is identifying, okay, why is it too difficult? It's because it's firing all of its turrets at one thing at once and just blowing it up. Okay, fix that. Now it's too easy. Great. Okay, so what do we need to do? Well, let's up its shields. Okay, now it's too difficult. Okay, what do we need to do? Oh, we need to make torpedoes do more damage. Okay, now it's too easy. Right, we need to slow torpedoes down. Back and forth until finally you end up with something everyone's happy with. And by that point, you've got all that stuff I said: AI firing at turrets, AI much more intelligently, or maybe less intelligently, using their countermeasures, because too intelligent just felt cheap. If every time I fire a size 9, it just fires off its countermeasures, it's really frustrating. That's why we were saying fire a small missile, make it fire its countermeasures. It has a little bit of a cooldown before it can, so you can sneak in a size 9 missile while those flares are dying down, before it will fire another one. And that was just satisfying that way. Otherwise, it's frustrating.

And I know, besides the internal QA and stuff, you're a continual watcher of streams. I've seen you in various Twitch streams, watching how these events actually play out in the players' hands. After Prisons came out, it seemed like every stream I went to, there was Luke Presley watching and getting that raw feedback directly from our players.

And if you didn't see me, I was lurking.

So it's definitely something we tried with Xenothreat. So we made quite a wide range [of changes] to the weapons on those ships. Basically, it's slow, powerful. So these big ships have these kind of slow projectiles, but they're much more powerful. So it creates that variance, as I said earlier, where sometimes they can be effective against countermeasures and sometimes they're not. And it's up to us to understand this, as [I said] earlier: we look at the results of this and go, actually, if a person fired 20 size nines at the ship, how effective would those 20 be? Is it split 50-50 down the middle consistently? Does it vary between five and 15? And we're looking at all these things to make sure that it's working as we intend it to be. But we are happy with the overall system. But it does need improvements on the balance side, and just how the different systems come together to actually countermeasure against these size nine torpedoes, and also how you can intercept them as well. Because that's been an important part: the fact we slowed them down means people can intercept. And we have seen various things where people have grabbed these torpedoes as well. So there's been lots of interesting gameplay coming from that.

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.

It comes down to balance, right? So we want these ships to be feared. These are massive ships with massive artillery, massive access to weapons, but it comes down to the balance. It comes down to the other ships in the game. So basically, we've got the Eclipse, we've got the Retaliator, and these ships are designed to bring down those ships. And it's how we strike the right balance between this big ship and these other kind of smaller ships but with much more powerful weapons, and it's just how those things come together that will define how dominant the capital ships are in the game.

Yeah, and they're expensive and they take a long time to get back and repair, so if you think you've got carte blanche to just roam around being a bully, or you think you're going to take out every pirate, you're not, because there are systems in place that will prevent that too. If you start becoming too famous or too infamous, then we can create systems that send bounty hunters after you. I'm sure there will be players out there, player bounty hunters, player assassins, whose sole role is to take out capital ships. And the stations are going to have... I'm sure we'll see station-mounted railguns and stuff like that in the future. You won't just be able to waltz in anywhere just because you've got a big ship, right?

So from a vehicle experience side of things, we're looking at the effectiveness of the weapon changes we made for the big ships and how we can move that down between all the other ships. So as I said, slow but more powerful, and how we move those balance numbers down throughout the whole ship range and weapon range. So that's been something we've learned, because we're generally really happy with how these big slow weapons feel, from a balance side, from a visual effects side, from an audio side. When that size nine Javelin turret fires, it sounds amazing. So it's basically bringing that down to the other ships and the other weapons in the game. That's kind of where we're moving forward with that now.

Yeah, and we've learned obviously a lot on the mission side. Always room for improvement, but lots of positives. We have already talked about the edge cases of the law. One of the other things was splash damage. Splash damage on targeted missiles should not cause friendly fire, as it were. It should not cause crimes to happen. When it comes to dumbfire missiles that we'll have in the future, then I think that's going to have to, because players can fire those anywhere. But if we know that you tried to hit something and it did hit that, and you also just hurt someone else nearby, then that's going to be fine.

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.