Zeraan
Novice
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2013
- Messages
- 11
I think this might be a sign that your combat system is bland and overly predictable, rather than a problem with the AI or retreating. If the outcome of a battle is so obvious, then this is the only logical outcome. Real, all-out battles don't get fought between sides that already know what the outcome is going to be in real life, either, unless your opponent is cornered. Space lacks corners, and the only reason the battle occurs at all is because of the granularity of turn-based movement.
If combat and its tactics are so predictably obvious that there is no room to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, then it's also kind of a boring and redundant combat system you may as well do without. The meat of a tactical combat system is to win battles you shouldn't have won. If this cannot happen, why bother having it?
Sorry if I implied that combat is dull. Right now, special equipments such as automatic repair special, pulsars, etc. that could tip the balance aren't implemented yet. The AI will consider the firepower and health of each side, and if they don't think they can win, they simply retreat. Consider the fact that AI also don't attack heavily guarded planets unless they have a superior fleet, but would rather attack other less guarded planets, means that most of the time, combat occurs when the AI is confident it'd win. I'm just saying that the AI is just dang too good at guessing which combats it should tackle, unlike MoO 1. Would you send your 1,000 tiny ships against an AI's 1,000 large ships? No, and neither will the AI. However, we do have fog of war, meaning that data can be outdated, and the AI attacks a planet that's heavily guarded when it thought the planet wasn't guarded.
Since special equipments aren't implemented yet, the formula for winning combat is pretty straightforward as there's only the weapons, shields, armors, and computers. But once the special equipment are implemented, things will be a lot less black/white, and more gray. The game is still in pre-alpha, so balancing isn't really done at this point, but will be done later in development when most everything has been fleshed out.
On the other hand, if there's some combats where the outcome is without question, you can hit auto-resolve (i.e. a scout stumbled onto your homeworld with 100 missile bases) to skip those non-critical combats. It will act the same as normal combat, but with AI taking control of your units, and resolving the combat. So there's no "why are the results wildly different if I manually take control vs hitting auto resolve?" issue.