It seems like neither the Javelin nor the Idris fire all of their turrets at one time to use their firepower to overwhelm us. A full broadside from the Javelin should shred most ships. Why doesn't the NPC crew focus fire on one enemy at a time to destroy them? Is this an AI or server limitation, or a pre-planned thing to keep the fights more balanced?
TL;DRTurrets deliberately don't focus fire, because early focused fire felt unfun and robotic; each turret picks its own targets by size, and the team says there is still work to do.
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.