IMPORTANT: this does *not* mean that you shouldn't have your station attackers grouped in a fleet. The operative difference isn't "in fleet vs. not in fleet", it's "received fleet orders vs. received individual orders". You can issue individual orders to ships in fleets; just manually select all the ships you want to use and issue your orders to them, as opposed to only issuing an order to the fleet commander. See my "Fleet Fundamentals" guide for more information. Other FAQ: Q: Does your spreadsheet mean fleets are bad? A: No, it just means that fleet commander AI uses destroyers less effectively than individual captain AI during station attacks. Q: How were your fleets set up? A: Very simplistically, for experimental purposes. To see proper fleet compositions in action, check out my video "Earth's Last Stand", and stay tuned for future videos! Q: What about the Asgard? A: I made a follow-up video on that topic!
The Phoenix E is by far the most cost-effective destroyer right now, so that's my recommendation for a mass-produced general use fleet destroyer. Other destroyers can be better for specialized roles. Just depends on what you want to get out of the ship.
There's ALWAYS a derper. It's like an AI assigned role: 'You 5, do your thing! You there, #6! You derp around and drive your player insane with your shenanigans!'
Greatly appreciate the science players/fans do for the X series and the lore videos. ^^ Thanks for this no nonsense informative x4 7.0 science/tips tutorial video. *Have fun and good luck, hope your channel grows quickly.*
I do like destroyers. But carriers are still my favs. I usually have a minimum of 4 wings of 4 fighters (aa) and 2 wings of 8 heavy fighters in fighter bomber config (2xgats and 2x tracking launcher) on board. I just love how I can configure my bomber missile loadouts for the task at hand or resupply/repair during the fight. They're just so versatile. Plus I can carry that compliment again docked in reserve to replace any losses!
Thanks for your insight on X4 combat AI :) Especially on capitals ships!! Nice that you did this great analysis. Hope Egosoft learns a bit from your video
Your observations on station attacks are spot on. I've seen that exact behavior with the Phoenix E slowing down in turret range for no reason when flying in a fleet. At least when used independently ships behave far better than in the past.
I find attacking against plane of the station really helps. For example Xenon stations are always flat so you get all your bois 20 km above or below and then order them to attack. From there they have to make minimum, repositioning to hit all the modules. If you minimise the amount of decisions AI has to make then you minimise it's chance to... add value... to your enterprise
Getting to a point in my first playthrough (Terran cadet) where I have a few miners, a single trader doing small profitable runs looking I'd like to start taking enemy ships to sell do you have any advice or vid recommendations?
Get an Ion Canon, it strips shields, after which abandoning ships is possible. Ions are expensive, however, and hard to get, and are Argon only options. RNG means you will mostly get exploded ships and the worse the damage is, the more likely the explode is rather than the abandon, hence the Ion canon.
@@gjjkjhgfdskelley2288 Mark's comment above is spot on for capturing S and M sized ships. Fighters equipped with ion weaponry from Argon or Boron work great, but it is all up to RNG. Just keep fighting and eventually an enemy will bail out, leaving you with their ship. If you have a slightly larger budget and don't want to depend on RNG, get yourself a Falx (or similar frigate), load it up with marines, pick a faction you don't like, and start boarding their L-sized trading and mining vessels. Nopileos' Fortune is a great place to do this. Just one jump off the highway ring, north of Pious Mists.
Thank you very much for all the testing. Very helpful information and I'll no longer attack stations using fleet formations. I've had enough of micromanaging them in-system previously.
That lost Phoenix down low was having problems with saboteurs. There was one hell of a firefight going on in the engineering sector of that ship. Too bad we didn't get a good copy of the in-ship video before it was purged by internal affairs.
First of all, very cool video! Now, I do have some questions and feedback: 1. I'd love to hear more about the fleet composition and orders. Were the ships on Attack? Bombard? Something else? What formation were they in? 2. What decided the fleet composition? I'm curious about the Terran ships' performance as well as the Asgard with its Big Beam of Doom specifically. 3. Are fighters really worth it in low economy situations? Sure, they are great when I can pump out a hundred of them at a time but they die so easily to everything, even when just intercepting enemies, even to stuff like station module explosions. For the video itself: 4. Some of the fights got a little boring and the commentary was very... obvious at times. "Ship A now moves forward" yes, we are watching the same footage :P. Now, I understand that editing it down and making sure that everything important is still showed and said takes a lot more work, but something simple like speeding it up a bit could do the trick. 5. This goes back to my first question, having some explanation as to how the fleets and their orders were set up would not only be nice to know, but would also allow less experienced players to easier understand what's going on. I'm not saying make this into a tutorial, I'm saying give us something to work with. I did my fair share of messing around with orders and formations and I still have no clue what you used or consider the best. Again, great video, this is just my opinion, you can take it or leave it :)
1. Fleets were divided into equal-sized wings of identical ships. Wings all on Attack. Cross formation. I deliberately kept the setup very simple so that I could be sure that different results were produced by the fleet commander AI or by the addition of different ship types, not by some intricate strategy on my part. 2. I happened to have 38 destroyers sitting 50km from a hostile Terran shipyard, so I assembled my test forces from that armada. I did later throw some Osakas around in non-test runs. They performed about the same as the Commonwealth ships. Didn't test the Asgard; destroyers only. 3. No, I wouldn't recommend fighters for station attacks unless you really need the station gone ASAP for some reason. That said, they've gotten much better at avoiding shock waves. 4. For more entertainment-focused commentary, check out Earth's Last Stand on my channel! 5. I may put out some kind of fleet tutorial in the future. In the meantime, Earth's Last Stand also includes a quick overview of my standard fleet compositions and tactics. Thanks for the in-depth comment!
If I can add a little, for low economy situations, fighters are good for escorting and protecting some sectors (for your miners). But not very more... But.... Yes there is a big but... With a good economy and a lot of fighters... It's something else... Personally my raptor with 121 fighters (set on bombers, so they attack X and XL under 30 km) put down a Xenon I in under 1 minute. Just the time to make their formation (the circle is big with 121 fighters lol) and bam, they do 2-3 attack and the I is gone... Very very strong... My raptor is next to a defense platform (who own 200+ fighters that attack everything, so they take down little ships). I did a lot of tests with my raptor, and I keep all the fighters as bombers to take down only the big ships because anyway the raptor can handle any smaller ships by itself... So yes, fighters are really usefull in X4, to escort and protect some sector with a lot of miners and can be very powerful with a lot of them. It's not really budget friendly because I have for over 500 millions $ of fighters only in my raptor. And if I remember, I had for arround 50 millions of lost lol, but it was beautiful to watch ^^ But I agree, never use them to attack a station. They don't have the range and just gonna get destroyed... I mean, even my Destroyer Syn get destroyed really fast when they go to close, so a fighter have no chance... But it's useful for a lot of other things and against ships.
S are absolutely worth using for anything, just don't use M. Breaking stations requires large investments, and Caps cost a lot in terms of materials and money. And you'd need more than 1 Cap for station breaking, because if you don't have enough firepower, the station will just repair itself and your efforts would be useless. Then you have to spend more for materials and money for more Caps. If you build your own stuff, it's no issue. S are cheap, expendable, and flexible. You have to outfit them properly to get the most out of them. One of the most important aspects for S is that they have weapons specifically designed for breaking station, ship components, like turrets. They're effective at wiping turrets, literally disarming stations, so that you can attack with total safety. That frees up any risk to Caps. You just have to pull the S back before the station explode. Asgard beam reaches 14km, it's very safe from Xenon guns, which have super short range (barely over 5km). They can wipe Stations easily, the Terran Intervention Asgard can be seen doing this with ease against Xenon stations. If you absolutely want to be at fleet level while low econ, get cheap, but effective fighters, like Kyd (literally the cheapest and most effective) and get a Carrier (recommend Zeus Vanguard). Carriers repair for free. Aux ships, while not critical for fleets, they offer free repairs to Caps. Expand from there.
So whats interesting for me is the destroyers vs the K. Just last night I was in Savage spur I taking out a station. I am new to X4, have all the DLC and I am playing as PURE Terran as a start Terran cadet. I have a Syn and 2 Osaka destroyers for this engagement. Before the K came in I went in with my destroyers and fighter/heavy fighter/corvette escort and cleaned up the system of the enemy ships. I withdrew the escorts back into Getsu Fune where I have established a 3 station Defense semi circle with adv turrets laid out between the gate and the stations. All of these ships are in a fleet with the Syn being the flagship. I selected the syn and his 2 Osaka ships and gave the single command to engage the station. They went in and in a group began to shoot the station quite well. I will note that I was flying the Syn at this time (So I believe this order given to attack is similar to them not being in a fleet and being told to attack). Anyway, about at 35% a K shows up from the other sector with 4 PEs as escort. I stop the station assault with a clear all orders and then Re-issue orders for us to engage the K. We went in and frontal assaulted the K and within 20 seconds she was dead with one of the Osaka's taking oh I would say 30-40% shield maybe? Its important to note that the turret behaviors you have to modify for destroyers to be smart that I have come to find out. Just have all set to shoot at all enemies put them in this CQB like state so I have my L turrets set to Capitals first then others and the M turrets set to Fighters only. So far its working great. OOF TLDR for sure sorry.
I've said it before, but I really feel a lot of X4s problems with ship vs station combat is due to the expectation that ship guns should outrange station defenses. If ships firing on stations could not outrange stations, then ships would simply have to tank the damage and destroy the station before they themselves get destroyed. Station vs destroyer balance would need to be adjusted obviously, because using current balancing, ships would be far too vulnerable to station defenses.
I agree, but I doubt that will ever be implemented in X4 due to the amount of rebalancing (and probably whole new modules/systems) it would take. Maybe in X5!
Intercept, Bombard, and Follow are all fine for their own purposes but not useful vs stations. Mimic could be interesting but I didn't try it. Attack is generally the way to go for station demolition, in my experience. Against capitals, it really depends on your fleet composition.
Hi, dev here (or someone on the internet claimed). Very nice analysis. Question re: fleet setup around 14:53 and the comparative analysis described in your spreadsheet: was that with a fleet where only the fleet commander was ordered to attack (if so, what assignments did the fleet subordinate destroyers have?), or with the coordinate attack order?
In that clip, the fleet shown was one Ray commander with two wings of four Phoenix E, both set to Attack, with only the commander having been given the attack order. Each Phoenix also had 2x Barracuda on Defense, most of which had trickled into the station's guns and died at this point. It wasn't actually one of the runs included in the spreadsheet stats, it was just good footage of the behavior in question. Fleets in the test runs were set up similarly: wings always had the Attack role, and they consisted of mostly equal numbers of identical ships. The spreadsheet's "Scenario" column shows the order given to the fleet, if applicable, and there's a key on the right that gives details on each order. Coordinate Attack was used in some runs, with mixed results.
great video! one thing i'd like to see more testing is does setting the turrets to capital ships only or fighters only changes anything for example, if you set all of ray's turret to "fighters only" and the main battery to "captial ships only", does it stop doing the strafing runs and will always try to stay at distance and snipe?
Great video ! Thanks for sharing. Just wondering if pilot ranking was controlled for in your testing? Sorry if I missed it but wondering if that would contribute to variation in performance / TTK you observed first stations, and the different attack approaches vs K’s
I did try to use ships with similar skill levels. Most were right around 40 skill (two stars), although one or two were as low as 30 or as high as 50. Based on data mined from version 6.2, that amount of skill variation will slightly affect the RNG but shouldn't cause major behavioral differences. That said, I have no idea whether 7.0 has changed the skill thresholds for various behaviors. It's certainly possible.
If you were to have a fleet of destroyers with them set to mimic the commander, would they also engage the same way as if they were independent or is there still some involvement of the commander AI even with mimic? If not, I would elect to use that as my setup so I can keep my ships organized and not have even more to manage in my unassigned tab.
Before 7.00 I was super careful with destroyers breaking down stations, as destroyers had a rather erratic behavior at best. Now, they are much more predictable and it is easier to place them in a way they don't get blown into pieces. One thing though hasn't changed as far as I can tell, if you order them to attack from a great distance, they are going to travel-drive into weapons range of the station, due to drag, but if given a move-point a bit outside of the stations defenses weapon range, the are... actually fine and only move into the stations range if another variable is added, or they don't have a good attack vector. But aside from that, I haven't lost too many destroyers till then and I found that I prefer now to have fewer destroyers deal with stations. Before it felt like throwing destroyers against stations is like throwing at least 4/5 of the fleet into the trash, now destroyers actually seem devastating in their destructive capabilities. THough I really, really don't like the Phoenix. It's turret placement is ridiculously bad. Its design is neat. But damn those L-turrets are.... unless you use missiles I guess. - I always have a 2x 3 Fighters assigned to a destroyer, whether that destroyer is operating with or without fleet does not really matter. Normally these are docked and aren't doing shyte on purpose. They tend to get involved in stuff they shouldn't get involved in, and especially when sending the Destroyers to deal with Kha'ak Stations, the fighters just get vaporised without doing too much. If I have a destroyer positioned in an area in which it benefits from active fighters, I have them undocked and do their thing. Funny enough, I feel like having the fighters grouped in increases their abilities, I always assign two wingman to a leader creating those 3-ship groupings. Losses among fighters are fairly reasonable, one every now and then... unless they are hilariously idiotic and flying through Kha'ak Stations to get to something.
This was an awesome video. Thank you for the analysis. Could you possibly do one on the Asgard? Its probably the number one complained about ship in terms of AI controlled ships in all of X4 as you probably already know. I’m curious to see if it’s combat abilities in the hands of the AI have gotten any better.
Anecdotally, I do think that Asgard performance has improved, but I don't have any hard data on that. I'll look into getting some Asgard content onto the video schedule.
They were set to Attack, since that's the only command that consistently allows them to attack stations. Yes, I did use Coordinated Attack in quite a few runs under two different settings, as shown in the station attack summary table. It's worth noting that I actually like Coordinated Attack quite a bit, even though it's quantitatively worse than manual attack setups.
I'd like to add that OOS is simulated much differently from IS, major fighter losses are to be expected. Caps, unless there's too few, should survive (unless there are Rattlesnakes which are squishy). S can be used, just has to be properly fitted, and for IS purposes, 34 isn't enough. Note on stations: They are fitted randomly, but towards end-game, Xenon will like fitting beams instead of their Red Lasers for fighter AA. Against the Red Lasers, S actually have a good chance of surviving. In terms of fleet formation, it's been a long-running performance issue. The main thing is, the formation is more concerned about sticking to the formation, or reaching a point, regardless of danger. The issue becomes worse as fleet size grows. Smaller fleets do better. But, like most of us, that is way too much to micromanage millions of fleets instead of cramming them into a few large groups just to keep our UI cleaner. For the fleet, think of it like this, the old way of fighting battles was akin to the old empires like we see in movies. Let's take Great Britain for example, walking in a line formation, not allowed to do anything until your commanding officer told you to do anything. Even if they were getting shot, they couldn't react. This is pretty much how the fleets work, maintaining the formation is paramount. Now for non-fleets, think of the Americans during the Revolutionary War, they resorted to guerilla warfare, it's pretty much how non-fleets work. They just need a bit more improvement for autonomy. But, X4 isn't huge on autonomy, player-wise, it's supposed to be deeply layered micromanagement, making the experience feel very personalized.
Are fighters, that are starting to destroyers, still just staying launched and flying with the destroyer as opposed to just docking when idle? It is sometimes annoying where you can't have intercept fighters and stay docked at a destroyer until they're needed, to the annoying recall, subordinates command where it destroyer will stop in his track and wait for fighters to land before doing something
Yes, unfortunately carriers are still the only ships that consistently order their subordinates to dock. Destroyers' escorts just fly with the destroyer unless you personally order them to dock.
Unfortunately, Mimic only causes the subordinate to adopt the commander's default behavior, not its active order, so the subordinate won't attack the station with the commander.
I havent tested the beta, but looking at this new behavior, i can say i prefer the old ai. The destroyer ai was very simple: it will try to move its max wpn range and shoot the enemy. Against moving target, it will look like the destroyer is "confused" because it keeps recalculating the position against the moving target. So the solution for this problem is i simply need to keep the target immobilized. Whether by sending fighter swarm or destroying the engine with specialized S ships, the target needs to stay still so the destroyer can do its job. Another advice i can give is always set the default "response to atk" to "ignore". This will prevent the destroyer from changing the target when under fire (like trying to target station defense drones during station demolition)
The last time I tried attacking Xenon stations with destroyers while being in the same sector, they all died to graviton turrets. I am amased this worked at all, much less that they took only one loss on average.
what about when they are grouped up but you select all of them and order them to attack. that should count as a individual order right? (with destroyer vs station)
Combined crew skill (pilot and service crew) affects a lot of destroyer behaviors. It generally makes them fight faster and smarter. In v6.2, player destroyers had "plot armor" that treated them as if they had 5 star combined skill for most behaviors. It isn’t clear whether that's still the case now. In this video, combined skill was right around 2 stars for all ships.
Goodmorning Captain. The camera angle you are using (say at 6:59) vaguelyl reminds me of RTS games like homeworld, which camera is it and how do you get to it? Also can you issue commands while using this perspective and actually play the game like an RTS. Cheers
That's the External Static View, which you activate with F4 by default. You need to get your camera pre-positioned using the other camera modes, then press F4 to anchor it to that spot. Unfortunately, the UI doesn't work very well in static view. Some ships are not selectable from some angles. You can still use the map to issue commands, as always, but it's impractical to issue commands directly from the third person static camera.
Are there any space sims with fleet battles that arent simply two blobs of ships parked within a few dozen kilometers of each other, slugging away in a perfectly matched frame of reference?
You might've seen now since it's a month past. But if not. Hope you know these are battleships vsing. Not medium or small fighters. That can be more faster pace then large/XL ships that move more like slugs and smack eachother with pillows. Example. Play Descent Freespace. Once you start having to vs cap ships. It'll get more intense.
I'm not using cheat mods to set up these experiments, and it's just a little too hard to lure an I into a controlled environment for proper rigorous testing. If I see an opportunity, I might run some tests. In the meantime, my video "Fleet AI vs. the Endgame Crisis" shows destroyers fighting an I, among other things.
These are all fit pretty standard. Argon plasma and flak. Split engines, Terran shields. Strong, but not very exciting. I'll have a video coming out in a few days that focuses more on individual destroyers and their loadouts, so stay tuned!
6 місяців тому
Great video and analysis. I wonder is there any difference between OOS No Fleet and Fleet attack on stations?
19:15 what was your fleetcomanders skill level? (manager skill, not captain skill) have you tested out different levels to see if there is a progression going on, comming from his experiences?
I believe it was 2 stars. I am very interested in whether skills have any new effects in 7.0. I'm hoping we will get an update to the Steam guide that we currently have for 6.2.
If destroyers are in a fleet, set on "Bombard" and not "Attack for Commander", and then within the fleet are individually told to attack a station, will they attack following a fleet leader, or will they attack as if they were individual ships?
Bombard sets the ship to attack exclusively capital ships, not stations. Little bit of a misnomer there. That said, it doesn't really matter for your question. Any direct order given by the player overrides the ship's role in its fleet. If you order any ship in a fleet to attack, it will attack as an individual ship until the target is destroyed or you order the fleet commander to recall subordinates.
I would like your opinion on each destroyer. I haven't played for awhile since the Terrans where add. for the most advanced race they seemed to have the worst behaviour and 90% of the time don't use their main battery's and it's infuriating since I can clear out a xenon sector solo with one Syn. I also miss their trademark weapons from X3. Half finished DLC is what I thought and haven't played since.
Personal opinion, performance vs. cost, under AI control: - Behemoth E - performs. Decent & cheap all-rounder. Good fighter docks. - Odysseus E - performs. Good damage, bad geometry. Best when sniping. - Osaka - underperforms. Decent & expensive all-rounder. Missile turrets help. - Phoenix E - overperforms. Good & cheap all-rounder. Impressive mobility. - Rattlesnake - underperforms. Glass cannon. Not enough "wiggle room" for the AI. - Ray - overperforms. Great anti-fighter escort, holds its own in a brawl. - Syn - performs. Fantastic all-rounder, hard to get, exorbitant price. Main battery usage is greatly improved since the old days.
I don't mind how the ai deals with stations and have adapted strategies to deal with the short falls. I've had a lot of success setting up a carrier with 24 heavy fighters set up with a 2x unguided missile 2x pulse setup as bombers. These bombers are set to dive in targetting turrets. As the station deploys drones, they fall back behind two wings of 24 AA setup fighters on pos defence. Once those defence drones are locked in combat or destroyed, the bombers dive back in to get those turrets as a destroyer group comes in to deal with the station modules. On a good op, you get about 25% bomber casualties, no more than 10% fighter casualties, and 0 capital losses, with a respectable TTK - in my experience, much quicker than individual destroyer attack orders.
If the fleet commander is not involved in the station attack and you simply order the destroyers to attack a station, but do not involve their commander, is combat still worse? Or is it only if the commander is ordered to attack the station and the destroyers follow them?
Great work! What if the destroyer is the fleet commander, just with a couple of small ships supporting it in it's own fleet? Will that work as if it were independent?
I imagine so. The operative difference isn't whether the destroyer is part of a fleet, it's whether it's received its attack order from the fleet commander or the player. So as long as you're the one telling the destroyer to attack the station, it shouldn't matter whether it has subordinates or even whether it itself is a subordinate. That said, fighter escorts have a tendency to wander into the station guns regardless of their assigned role, so watch out for that.
With a behemoth even if you went 10 intercept nova's and 10 bombardment nova's that would do a lot for you. Even with just MK2 Combat Engines, Combat Thrusters and MK2 Pulse Lasers. Nova's are hard to hit and even 1-2 star pilots can do a good bit with them because if the ships profile. The 10 bombardment Nova's will be distracting fire from the K or (insert capital ship) leaving the Behemoth free to do what it needs to. Ideally though the bombardment Nova's will probably need either a MK2 Bolt Repeater or Plasma Cannon along with a MK2 Torpedo Launcher to help with disarming it. Additionally you can command them to target the turrets and just about completely disarm the capital ship leaving your Behemoth to have free reign over. Laser Towers work wonders as well.
Very well done! you deserve more subs! How much does pilot skill level affect things if the highest was chosen as the leader for the fleet? Because I honestly am not seeing much improvement from one ship's behaviour to another with different leveled pilots
Thanks! Average crew skill (weighted 70% pilot + 30% service crew) makes a tremendous difference for almost all aspects of NPC factions' capital ship combat behavior. Player-owned capital ships actually get a lot of "plot armor" and are treated as if they have maximum crew skill for maybe 3/4 of the applicable behaviors, which is probably why you don't see much ship-to-ship difference. Two behaviors that *are* affected by crew skill for player-owned ships (in v6.2) are (1) target reevaluation time, i.e., how long a ship is "locked in" to fighting its current target, and (2) time-to-live calculations, which determine the timing with which a ship attempts to disengage from a fight when damaged. I don't think pilot skill has a direct impact on fleet performance, but it does affect availability of different fleet formations, which can make a surprising difference.
Yes, combined crew skill matters quite a bit for capital ship performance, especially if they're following independent orders. Combined skill includes both captain and service crew, weighted towards the captain, and it takes into account morale, piloting (for captain), and engineering (for crew). All ships in this test had roughly 2 stars combined skill.
This is outstanding to see. I'm used to Destroyers running headfirst into a K just to realize their mistake and try to flee only to die under the overwhelming firepower of the K. Basically the same story for stations. Ragnos seems unimpressed with the AI updates but your analysis shows a slightly different story. As always, it's better to get a second opinion before jumping to conclusions as the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Thank you for the content and data. What are your thoughts on the new E class Destroyers?
The Phoenix E is a game changer, absolutely top tier. Behemoth E is solid, not spectacular, as expected from the Argon. It still has the 4 S docks, which I love. The new AI will definitely take some getting used to, and some continued adjustments, but I think it has a lot of potential!
I really liked the preview, "Enhanced Violence Protocol" is exactly what I would like to install on my warships! By the way, the video is cool, although I have already played x4 for almost a thousand hours, but I still don’t know or understand some of the nuances poorly.
Nice - so: will always have a "fleet" of "not-fleet" destroyers (and Asgards) in a "group" that isn't grouped to take out stations. Will just have to put up with a mess of "Station Killer 1" and "2" etc in my "unassigned" ship list. Works for me. For capital ships... have a real fleet... and help out by sitting yourself in an Asgard when facing the Xenon big boys. DAKKA DAKKA!
Hot take: that advice is outdated in the new patch. It was good advice in version 6 because destroyers were scripted to *always* use their main battery and *always* from a pre-determined range, which frequently led to them pointing their best turrets away from the enemy as they tried to maintain range. Here in version 7, they seem "smart" enough to abandon their sniping behavior and brawl effectively with their turrets when the situation calls for it.
Combined crew skill (70% captain 30% crew) made a huge difference in 6.2. They almost certainly do in 7.0 as well, but there's no hard data on that yet. There's Steam user who datamines the AI scripts and puts them in a guide, so I'm hoping that will be updated soon.
I'm brand new to X4, so maybe this is a stupid question, but I noticed that for OOS you didn't make a distinction between fleets or no fleets. Does that have no effect in OOS?
The Coordinate Attack OOS scenario was definitely a fleet command. I can't remember about the Attack scenarios. Fleet/individual differences are reduced OOS because there's relatively little maneuvering involved; it's mainly treated as a battle of mathematics between blobs of raw numbers. There are still some differences though.
And so in terms of destroying Destroyers, 40 cluster missiles destroy any ship with 1-2 salvos, as well as a torpedo (but they are more expensive in terms of resources) I use specialized fighter-bombers that carry only missiles and are not distracted by anything else. The Commonwealth destroyers fly off even faster. I tested the battle of an aircraft carrier against the Argon defensive fleet, launched 40 interceptors, then after 30 seconds 8 gladiuses with missiles (4 launchers) and a bombing order, they very quickly dealt with the Destroyers, they did not reach the aircraft carrier, the downside is their behavior, that’s it They limit the attack radius to 10-15 km from the carrier. . .
Noob here, have about 300hrs in the game, using various videos as guides. Problem one, most yt videos are obsolete. Started just before 7.0 came out, now fleets drive me crazy. In 7.0 I've observed the same things you mention, destroyers doing stupid things in a fleet. I also have problems issuing correct commands on carrier and 20 fighters. I issued a command to attack all enemies, my fighters did well, killed everyone, then 3 new xenon ships came to the fight and my fighters stood there waiting for the xenons to kill them one by one. In the map there were like 20 attack "circles" and only when I clicked each one they disappeared and my fighters started attacking, by then it was too late, Alt F4 was the only thing to do.
I have 4 Rays destroyed 3 K The Reys had heavy missiles and flaks, 1 Rey was almost destroyed, but the missiles and flaks managed to destroy the turrets on K, a clear victory with the cost of up to 50% of the missiles. The entire battle was at close range and took about 5 minutes. =)
i have 1 Ody, 1 Pheonix E, 1 Rattlesnake - all with good Terran MK3 Shields, L Plasma & M Flak = they secure a Split Sector (Family Zhin) from Xenons directly next to the gate. I also added a very minimalistic DefenseStation a little behind. The 3 Destroyers do fight very well against all Xenons coming there - even killed 2 Xenon K with escorts at the same time - without even sending out their Fighters. But this is "out of sector combat"
Kind of shocked at the destroyer vs station as fleet result. It always looked so nice to see them automatically spread with the "coordinate attack" command. But I will stop doing that when it's really hindering their movement during the rest of the fight 😐. Maybe go for coordinate attack as fleet to set it up and then disband the fleet for the fight. 🤔
Yeah, I do like the way ships move with Coordinated Attack. I still use it vs stations sometimes, just for the aesthetic value, even though it's not the "maximum efficiency" method and I frequently take a loss or two.
Btw the ai inability to point main guns at target and shoot, especially in a multiple on one situation where dps rules supreme is what made the design decision to even have main batteries an idiot move. The devs gimped turrets for this. Meanwhile, in botboiland, the xenon looked at that decision and said "naw." In beepboop language. And designed warships. I can dakka down 2 to 3 k with a syn easily.... when i am in command.
First of all: Thank you very very much for getting me to understand AI and what it 'thinks' for the first time in nearly 1k hours of time played. It ain't by far as stupid and untrustworthy as I had supposed. So far I never trusted it and rarely let it do an attack all on its own. I usually am in command myself and tell all participants what to do. That leads me to my question: How did you set up the turret behaviour of your destroyers? In my experience if you set all M turrets and maybe one L on "Attack fighters first" (I like beam turrets for that) even waves of twenty PE's won't do much damage to the shields. All the rest of the turrets can attack the big target. Probably not the fastest TTK, but a rather safe (and also cheap) one without having to have dozens of escort ships to protect your a$$. Would my "player-controlled-fighting-set-up" also be valid for pure "AI-fighting-set-up", what do you think?
Yep, for flak and similar anti-fighter turrets, I usually have half or 2/3 on Attack Fighters First, and the remainder on Shoot Missiles First. Plasma and similar turrets are set to Attack Capitals First, and missiles are set to attack only their intended target (usually Attack Capitals Only). That's how the turrets in this video were set up.
IMPORTANT: this does *not* mean that you shouldn't have your station attackers grouped in a fleet. The operative difference isn't "in fleet vs. not in fleet", it's "received fleet orders vs. received individual orders". You can issue individual orders to ships in fleets; just manually select all the ships you want to use and issue your orders to them, as opposed to only issuing an order to the fleet commander. See my "Fleet Fundamentals" guide for more information.
Other FAQ:
Q: Does your spreadsheet mean fleets are bad?
A: No, it just means that fleet commander AI uses destroyers less effectively than individual captain AI during station attacks.
Q: How were your fleets set up?
A: Very simplistically, for experimental purposes. To see proper fleet compositions in action, check out my video "Earth's Last Stand", and stay tuned for future videos!
Q: What about the Asgard?
A: I made a follow-up video on that topic!
Do you recommend a particular destroyer if your buying instead of salvaging?
The Phoenix E is by far the most cost-effective destroyer right now, so that's my recommendation for a mass-produced general use fleet destroyer. Other destroyers can be better for specialized roles. Just depends on what you want to get out of the ship.
@@CptSnuggles07 I'm not finding any is that in the new Timelines update?
@@darkcloudrider359 Yep, my bad, it's included in the free 7.0 update coming out in two days (alongside the paid Timelines DLC).
Maybe you address this (I'm only a few mins in), but I wonder if the mimic fleet command will work similarly to individual attack orders.
I also found out that screaming at the monitor doesn’t help to save a destroyer
Do you have a spreadsheet to prove this
I could feel your pain through your words lmao
Teleporting out of the sector its in does though. Rule of thumb, everything performs better OOS especially when it comes to survivability.
@@liammorris1018 the ships start dancin when Im not around
@@Miszkaaaaa yeah dancing to dodge those graviton turrets. 🤣 dunno what they changed but a single destroyer and solo Ks OOS now.
Between you and ragnos28 there is so much good testing being done on Destroyer behaviour I really hope Egosoft are watching closely.
There's ALWAYS a derper. It's like an AI assigned role: 'You 5, do your thing! You there, #6! You derp around and drive your player insane with your shenanigans!'
There's always gotta be one. I guess they're just cutting out the middle man and making it part of the AI.
Bravo, Egosoft.
Excel spreadsheets makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Thank you so much for your detailed analysis!
Spreadsheets - warm and fuzzy? You played EVE a lot?
Ah, the memories...
@@merusalemThanks, I just got flooded with the best memories spreadsheets can offer. EVE online was 🐐 back in the day.
THIS is the kind of stuff I LOVE to see from a community. Watching every second, thank you for your effort.
Greatly appreciate the science players/fans do for the X series and the lore videos. ^^
Thanks for this no nonsense informative x4 7.0 science/tips tutorial video.
*Have fun and good luck, hope your channel grows quickly.*
We need more in-depth scenario analysis in this world, where we can learn from it. No idea how you don't have more subs, but you got a new one :D
I do like destroyers. But carriers are still my favs. I usually have a minimum of 4 wings of 4 fighters (aa) and 2 wings of 8 heavy fighters in fighter bomber config (2xgats and 2x tracking launcher) on board. I just love how I can configure my bomber missile loadouts for the task at hand or resupply/repair during the fight. They're just so versatile. Plus I can carry that compliment again docked in reserve to replace any losses!
Thanks for your insight on X4 combat AI :) Especially on capitals ships!! Nice that you did this great analysis. Hope Egosoft learns a bit from your video
Your observations on station attacks are spot on. I've seen that exact behavior with the Phoenix E slowing down in turret range for no reason when flying in a fleet. At least when used independently ships behave far better than in the past.
I like the combination of words "improved violence protocols"
I find attacking against plane of the station really helps. For example Xenon stations are always flat so you get all your bois 20 km above or below and then order them to attack. From there they have to make minimum, repositioning to hit all the modules.
If you minimise the amount of decisions AI has to make then you minimise it's chance to... add value... to your enterprise
Amazing videos. You have majorly helped me get back into X4. What an incredible game
Just got into the game your videos have been really helpful thank you!
Getting to a point in my first playthrough (Terran cadet) where I have a few miners, a single trader doing small profitable runs looking I'd like to start taking enemy ships to sell do you have any advice or vid recommendations?
Get an Ion Canon, it strips shields, after which abandoning ships is possible. Ions are expensive, however, and hard to get, and are Argon only options. RNG means you will mostly get exploded ships and the worse the damage is, the more likely the explode is rather than the abandon, hence the Ion canon.
@@gjjkjhgfdskelley2288 Mark's comment above is spot on for capturing S and M sized ships. Fighters equipped with ion weaponry from Argon or Boron work great, but it is all up to RNG. Just keep fighting and eventually an enemy will bail out, leaving you with their ship. If you have a slightly larger budget and don't want to depend on RNG, get yourself a Falx (or similar frigate), load it up with marines, pick a faction you don't like, and start boarding their L-sized trading and mining vessels. Nopileos' Fortune is a great place to do this. Just one jump off the highway ring, north of Pious Mists.
subbed. Reporting to command deck after successful post traumatic therapy caused by the sight of any K rising above the ecliptic.
Thank you very much for all the testing. Very helpful information and I'll no longer attack stations using fleet formations. I've had enough of micromanaging them in-system previously.
Thank you for the research and spreadsheet, this is amazing data for AI. Fleet vs individual differences.
That lost Phoenix down low was having problems with saboteurs. There was one hell of a firefight going on in the engineering sector of that ship. Too bad we didn't get a good copy of the in-ship video before it was purged by internal affairs.
top notch quality overview. I saw you linked on SWI Discord channel and just advised Reemergence community to go watch you too. Keep it up!
Love to see a similar video on fighters and interceptors, even perhaps something on torpedo bombers
That is quality content there and if you keep it up, I think we're seeing the start of a great UA-cam career here. Subbed to you!
First of all, very cool video!
Now, I do have some questions and feedback:
1. I'd love to hear more about the fleet composition and orders. Were the ships on Attack? Bombard? Something else? What formation were they in?
2. What decided the fleet composition? I'm curious about the Terran ships' performance as well as the Asgard with its Big Beam of Doom specifically.
3. Are fighters really worth it in low economy situations? Sure, they are great when I can pump out a hundred of them at a time but they die so easily to everything, even when just intercepting enemies, even to stuff like station module explosions.
For the video itself:
4. Some of the fights got a little boring and the commentary was very... obvious at times. "Ship A now moves forward" yes, we are watching the same footage :P. Now, I understand that editing it down and making sure that everything important is still showed and said takes a lot more work, but something simple like speeding it up a bit could do the trick.
5. This goes back to my first question, having some explanation as to how the fleets and their orders were set up would not only be nice to know, but would also allow less experienced players to easier understand what's going on. I'm not saying make this into a tutorial, I'm saying give us something to work with. I did my fair share of messing around with orders and formations and I still have no clue what you used or consider the best.
Again, great video, this is just my opinion, you can take it or leave it :)
1. Fleets were divided into equal-sized wings of identical ships. Wings all on Attack. Cross formation. I deliberately kept the setup very simple so that I could be sure that different results were produced by the fleet commander AI or by the addition of different ship types, not by some intricate strategy on my part.
2. I happened to have 38 destroyers sitting 50km from a hostile Terran shipyard, so I assembled my test forces from that armada. I did later throw some Osakas around in non-test runs. They performed about the same as the Commonwealth ships. Didn't test the Asgard; destroyers only.
3. No, I wouldn't recommend fighters for station attacks unless you really need the station gone ASAP for some reason. That said, they've gotten much better at avoiding shock waves.
4. For more entertainment-focused commentary, check out Earth's Last Stand on my channel!
5. I may put out some kind of fleet tutorial in the future. In the meantime, Earth's Last Stand also includes a quick overview of my standard fleet compositions and tactics.
Thanks for the in-depth comment!
If I can add a little, for low economy situations, fighters are good for escorting and protecting some sectors (for your miners). But not very more... But.... Yes there is a big but... With a good economy and a lot of fighters... It's something else... Personally my raptor with 121 fighters (set on bombers, so they attack X and XL under 30 km) put down a Xenon I in under 1 minute. Just the time to make their formation (the circle is big with 121 fighters lol) and bam, they do 2-3 attack and the I is gone... Very very strong... My raptor is next to a defense platform (who own 200+ fighters that attack everything, so they take down little ships). I did a lot of tests with my raptor, and I keep all the fighters as bombers to take down only the big ships because anyway the raptor can handle any smaller ships by itself...
So yes, fighters are really usefull in X4, to escort and protect some sector with a lot of miners and can be very powerful with a lot of them. It's not really budget friendly because I have for over 500 millions $ of fighters only in my raptor. And if I remember, I had for arround 50 millions of lost lol, but it was beautiful to watch ^^
But I agree, never use them to attack a station. They don't have the range and just gonna get destroyed... I mean, even my Destroyer Syn get destroyed really fast when they go to close, so a fighter have no chance... But it's useful for a lot of other things and against ships.
S are absolutely worth using for anything, just don't use M. Breaking stations requires large investments, and Caps cost a lot in terms of materials and money. And you'd need more than 1 Cap for station breaking, because if you don't have enough firepower, the station will just repair itself and your efforts would be useless. Then you have to spend more for materials and money for more Caps. If you build your own stuff, it's no issue.
S are cheap, expendable, and flexible. You have to outfit them properly to get the most out of them. One of the most important aspects for S is that they have weapons specifically designed for breaking station, ship components, like turrets. They're effective at wiping turrets, literally disarming stations, so that you can attack with total safety. That frees up any risk to Caps. You just have to pull the S back before the station explode.
Asgard beam reaches 14km, it's very safe from Xenon guns, which have super short range (barely over 5km). They can wipe Stations easily, the Terran Intervention Asgard can be seen doing this with ease against Xenon stations.
If you absolutely want to be at fleet level while low econ, get cheap, but effective fighters, like Kyd (literally the cheapest and most effective) and get a Carrier (recommend Zeus Vanguard). Carriers repair for free. Aux ships, while not critical for fleets, they offer free repairs to Caps. Expand from there.
Oh, I am indeed here for spreadsheets. They are great!
Spreadsheet, numbers and even color. +1 subs. Welcome on board Captain!
This is some great analysis. Really appreciate the effort that went into this!
Really helpful to see what the AI is actually doing.
Thanks for the Destroyer review snugs!
So whats interesting for me is the destroyers vs the K. Just last night I was in Savage spur I taking out a station. I am new to X4, have all the DLC and I am playing as PURE Terran as a start Terran cadet. I have a Syn and 2 Osaka destroyers for this engagement. Before the K came in I went in with my destroyers and fighter/heavy fighter/corvette escort and cleaned up the system of the enemy ships. I withdrew the escorts back into Getsu Fune where I have established a 3 station Defense semi circle with adv turrets laid out between the gate and the stations. All of these ships are in a fleet with the Syn being the flagship. I selected the syn and his 2 Osaka ships and gave the single command to engage the station. They went in and in a group began to shoot the station quite well. I will note that I was flying the Syn at this time (So I believe this order given to attack is similar to them not being in a fleet and being told to attack). Anyway, about at 35% a K shows up from the other sector with 4 PEs as escort. I stop the station assault with a clear all orders and then Re-issue orders for us to engage the K. We went in and frontal assaulted the K and within 20 seconds she was dead with one of the Osaka's taking oh I would say 30-40% shield maybe? Its important to note that the turret behaviors you have to modify for destroyers to be smart that I have come to find out. Just have all set to shoot at all enemies put them in this CQB like state so I have my L turrets set to Capitals first then others and the M turrets set to Fighters only. So far its working great. OOF TLDR for sure sorry.
This video was a treat! Thanks & subbed.
Holy shit is this the bradley whistance of x4? +1 sub!
I've said it before, but I really feel a lot of X4s problems with ship vs station combat is due to the expectation that ship guns should outrange station defenses. If ships firing on stations could not outrange stations, then ships would simply have to tank the damage and destroy the station before they themselves get destroyed. Station vs destroyer balance would need to be adjusted obviously, because using current balancing, ships would be far too vulnerable to station defenses.
I agree, but I doubt that will ever be implemented in X4 due to the amount of rebalancing (and probably whole new modules/systems) it would take. Maybe in X5!
Great job on this video, mate! It was cool to watch and informative.
having a wing of fighter in a carrier just to send them to destroy shields and turrets in stations is a really good strat
Great video! Always look for logic in everything. Greetings from the Russian pilot ❤
Brilliant overview, thank you so much for this info.
Did you look at the differences between Attack, Intercept, Follow, and Mimic assignments?
Intercept, Bombard, and Follow are all fine for their own purposes but not useful vs stations. Mimic could be interesting but I didn't try it. Attack is generally the way to go for station demolition, in my experience. Against capitals, it really depends on your fleet composition.
Cool stuff, keep going mate! Love from x4 community
Great work😊🎉
Hi, dev here (or someone on the internet claimed). Very nice analysis. Question re: fleet setup around 14:53 and the comparative analysis described in your spreadsheet: was that with a fleet where only the fleet commander was ordered to attack (if so, what assignments did the fleet subordinate destroyers have?), or with the coordinate attack order?
In that clip, the fleet shown was one Ray commander with two wings of four Phoenix E, both set to Attack, with only the commander having been given the attack order. Each Phoenix also had 2x Barracuda on Defense, most of which had trickled into the station's guns and died at this point. It wasn't actually one of the runs included in the spreadsheet stats, it was just good footage of the behavior in question.
Fleets in the test runs were set up similarly: wings always had the Attack role, and they consisted of mostly equal numbers of identical ships. The spreadsheet's "Scenario" column shows the order given to the fleet, if applicable, and there's a key on the right that gives details on each order. Coordinate Attack was used in some runs, with mixed results.
Aloft and below? Why nit dorsal and ventral like in naval nomenclature?
Thank you Captain Snuggles! o7
great video! one thing i'd like to see more testing is does setting the turrets to capital ships only or fighters only changes anything
for example, if you set all of ray's turret to "fighters only" and the main battery to "captial ships only", does it stop doing the strafing runs and will always try to stay at distance and snipe?
Great video ! Thanks for sharing. Just wondering if pilot ranking was controlled for in your testing? Sorry if I missed it but wondering if that would contribute to variation in performance / TTK you observed first stations, and the different attack approaches vs K’s
I did try to use ships with similar skill levels. Most were right around 40 skill (two stars), although one or two were as low as 30 or as high as 50. Based on data mined from version 6.2, that amount of skill variation will slightly affect the RNG but shouldn't cause major behavioral differences. That said, I have no idea whether 7.0 has changed the skill thresholds for various behaviors. It's certainly possible.
If you were to have a fleet of destroyers with them set to mimic the commander, would they also engage the same way as if they were independent or is there still some involvement of the commander AI even with mimic? If not, I would elect to use that as my setup so I can keep my ships organized and not have even more to manage in my unassigned tab.
Before 7.00 I was super careful with destroyers breaking down stations, as destroyers had a rather erratic behavior at best. Now, they are much more predictable and it is easier to place them in a way they don't get blown into pieces.
One thing though hasn't changed as far as I can tell, if you order them to attack from a great distance, they are going to travel-drive into weapons range of the station, due to drag, but if given a move-point a bit outside of the stations defenses weapon range, the are... actually fine and only move into the stations range if another variable is added, or they don't have a good attack vector.
But aside from that, I haven't lost too many destroyers till then and I found that I prefer now to have fewer destroyers deal with stations. Before it felt like throwing destroyers against stations is like throwing at least 4/5 of the fleet into the trash, now destroyers actually seem devastating in their destructive capabilities.
THough I really, really don't like the Phoenix. It's turret placement is ridiculously bad. Its design is neat. But damn those L-turrets are.... unless you use missiles I guess.
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I always have a 2x 3 Fighters assigned to a destroyer, whether that destroyer is operating with or without fleet does not really matter. Normally these are docked and aren't doing shyte on purpose. They tend to get involved in stuff they shouldn't get involved in, and especially when sending the Destroyers to deal with Kha'ak Stations, the fighters just get vaporised without doing too much.
If I have a destroyer positioned in an area in which it benefits from active fighters, I have them undocked and do their thing. Funny enough, I feel like having the fighters grouped in increases their abilities, I always assign two wingman to a leader creating those 3-ship groupings. Losses among fighters are fairly reasonable, one every now and then... unless they are hilariously idiotic and flying through Kha'ak Stations to get to something.
Quick question in regards to fleets. Do you know if (either for station or v destroyers) the calculus changes if you are the fleet commander?
This was an awesome video. Thank you for the analysis. Could you possibly do one on the Asgard? Its probably the number one complained about ship in terms of AI controlled ships in all of X4 as you probably already know. I’m curious to see if it’s combat abilities in the hands of the AI have gotten any better.
Anecdotally, I do think that Asgard performance has improved, but I don't have any hard data on that. I'll look into getting some Asgard content onto the video schedule.
Nice😊@@CptSnuggles07
Thanks for the hard work! Great video.
In the fleet vs single ships outcomes, what command were the fleet ships set to(Defend, Attack)?
And did you use coordinate attack on any of these?
They were set to Attack, since that's the only command that consistently allows them to attack stations. Yes, I did use Coordinated Attack in quite a few runs under two different settings, as shown in the station attack summary table. It's worth noting that I actually like Coordinated Attack quite a bit, even though it's quantitatively worse than manual attack setups.
I'd like to add that OOS is simulated much differently from IS, major fighter losses are to be expected. Caps, unless there's too few, should survive (unless there are Rattlesnakes which are squishy). S can be used, just has to be properly fitted, and for IS purposes, 34 isn't enough.
Note on stations: They are fitted randomly, but towards end-game, Xenon will like fitting beams instead of their Red Lasers for fighter AA. Against the Red Lasers, S actually have a good chance of surviving.
In terms of fleet formation, it's been a long-running performance issue. The main thing is, the formation is more concerned about sticking to the formation, or reaching a point, regardless of danger. The issue becomes worse as fleet size grows. Smaller fleets do better. But, like most of us, that is way too much to micromanage millions of fleets instead of cramming them into a few large groups just to keep our UI cleaner.
For the fleet, think of it like this, the old way of fighting battles was akin to the old empires like we see in movies. Let's take Great Britain for example, walking in a line formation, not allowed to do anything until your commanding officer told you to do anything. Even if they were getting shot, they couldn't react. This is pretty much how the fleets work, maintaining the formation is paramount.
Now for non-fleets, think of the Americans during the Revolutionary War, they resorted to guerilla warfare, it's pretty much how non-fleets work. They just need a bit more improvement for autonomy. But, X4 isn't huge on autonomy, player-wise, it's supposed to be deeply layered micromanagement, making the experience feel very personalized.
Are fighters, that are starting to destroyers, still just staying launched and flying with the destroyer as opposed to just docking when idle? It is sometimes annoying where you can't have intercept fighters and stay docked at a destroyer until they're needed, to the annoying recall, subordinates command where it destroyer will stop in his track and wait for fighters to land before doing something
Yes, unfortunately carriers are still the only ships that consistently order their subordinates to dock. Destroyers' escorts just fly with the destroyer unless you personally order them to dock.
I wonder if it makes a difference placing a subordinate destroyer as Mimic instead of Attack while targeting a station
Unfortunately, Mimic only causes the subordinate to adopt the commander's default behavior, not its active order, so the subordinate won't attack the station with the commander.
I havent tested the beta, but looking at this new behavior, i can say i prefer the old ai.
The destroyer ai was very simple: it will try to move its max wpn range and shoot the enemy. Against moving target, it will look like the destroyer is "confused" because it keeps recalculating the position against the moving target.
So the solution for this problem is i simply need to keep the target immobilized. Whether by sending fighter swarm or destroying the engine with specialized S ships, the target needs to stay still so the destroyer can do its job.
Another advice i can give is always set the default "response to atk" to "ignore". This will prevent the destroyer from changing the target when under fire (like trying to target station defense drones during station demolition)
This is great stuff. Thanks!
Did you consider the captains star rating for the captain of the commanding ship in a fleet?
All captains and crews had roughly 6 points of skill (2 stars), +/- one point.
The last time I tried attacking Xenon stations with destroyers while being in the same sector, they all died to graviton turrets. I am amased this worked at all, much less that they took only one loss on average.
what about when they are grouped up but you select all of them and order them to attack. that should count as a individual order right? (with destroyer vs station)
Correct. I haven't seen any difference between doing that and fully removing them from the fleet before issuing the attack order.
Sorry if this is covered already, what are the pilot skill levels? Does it seem to matter?
Combined crew skill (pilot and service crew) affects a lot of destroyer behaviors. It generally makes them fight faster and smarter. In v6.2, player destroyers had "plot armor" that treated them as if they had 5 star combined skill for most behaviors. It isn’t clear whether that's still the case now. In this video, combined skill was right around 2 stars for all ships.
Goodmorning Captain. The camera angle you are using (say at 6:59) vaguelyl reminds me of RTS games like homeworld, which camera is it and how do you get to it?
Also can you issue commands while using this perspective and actually play the game like an RTS.
Cheers
That's the External Static View, which you activate with F4 by default. You need to get your camera pre-positioned using the other camera modes, then press F4 to anchor it to that spot. Unfortunately, the UI doesn't work very well in static view. Some ships are not selectable from some angles. You can still use the map to issue commands, as always, but it's impractical to issue commands directly from the third person static camera.
@@CptSnuggles07thanks.
Are there any space sims with fleet battles that arent simply two blobs of ships parked within a few dozen kilometers of each other, slugging away in a perfectly matched frame of reference?
You might've seen now since it's a month past. But if not. Hope you know these are battleships vsing. Not medium or small fighters. That can be more faster pace then large/XL ships that move more like slugs and smack eachother with pillows.
Example. Play Descent Freespace. Once you start having to vs cap ships. It'll get more intense.
Can we have a test again vs a Xen I? 😊
I'm not using cheat mods to set up these experiments, and it's just a little too hard to lure an I into a controlled environment for proper rigorous testing. If I see an opportunity, I might run some tests. In the meantime, my video "Fleet AI vs. the Endgame Crisis" shows destroyers fighting an I, among other things.
Mind me asking how you fit out your destroyers? Turrets etc
These are all fit pretty standard. Argon plasma and flak. Split engines, Terran shields. Strong, but not very exciting. I'll have a video coming out in a few days that focuses more on individual destroyers and their loadouts, so stay tuned!
Great video and analysis. I wonder is there any difference between OOS No Fleet and Fleet attack on stations?
I didn't specifically test that, but I've tried it both ways and haven't seen any meaningful difference. Coordinate Attack might be a different story.
19:15 what was your fleetcomanders skill level? (manager skill, not captain skill) have you tested out different levels to see if there is a progression going on, comming from his experiences?
I believe it was 2 stars. I am very interested in whether skills have any new effects in 7.0. I'm hoping we will get an update to the Steam guide that we currently have for 6.2.
If destroyers are in a fleet, set on "Bombard" and not "Attack for Commander", and then within the fleet are individually told to attack a station, will they attack following a fleet leader, or will they attack as if they were individual ships?
Bombard sets the ship to attack exclusively capital ships, not stations. Little bit of a misnomer there. That said, it doesn't really matter for your question. Any direct order given by the player overrides the ship's role in its fleet. If you order any ship in a fleet to attack, it will attack as an individual ship until the target is destroyed or you order the fleet commander to recall subordinates.
I would like your opinion on each destroyer. I haven't played for awhile since the Terrans where add. for the most advanced race they seemed to have the worst behaviour and 90% of the time don't use their main battery's and it's infuriating since I can clear out a xenon sector solo with one Syn. I also miss their trademark weapons from X3. Half finished DLC is what I thought and haven't played since.
Personal opinion, performance vs. cost, under AI control:
- Behemoth E - performs. Decent & cheap all-rounder. Good fighter docks.
- Odysseus E - performs. Good damage, bad geometry. Best when sniping.
- Osaka - underperforms. Decent & expensive all-rounder. Missile turrets help.
- Phoenix E - overperforms. Good & cheap all-rounder. Impressive mobility.
- Rattlesnake - underperforms. Glass cannon. Not enough "wiggle room" for the AI.
- Ray - overperforms. Great anti-fighter escort, holds its own in a brawl.
- Syn - performs. Fantastic all-rounder, hard to get, exorbitant price.
Main battery usage is greatly improved since the old days.
Phoenix E is so good right now i ❤ it
Subbed, keep up the good data
I don't mind how the ai deals with stations and have adapted strategies to deal with the short falls. I've had a lot of success setting up a carrier with 24 heavy fighters set up with a 2x unguided missile 2x pulse setup as bombers. These bombers are set to dive in targetting turrets. As the station deploys drones, they fall back behind two wings of 24 AA setup fighters on pos defence. Once those defence drones are locked in combat or destroyed, the bombers dive back in to get those turrets as a destroyer group comes in to deal with the station modules. On a good op, you get about 25% bomber casualties, no more than 10% fighter casualties, and 0 capital losses, with a respectable TTK - in my experience, much quicker than individual destroyer attack orders.
If the fleet commander is not involved in the station attack and you simply order the destroyers to attack a station, but do not involve their commander, is combat still worse? Or is it only if the commander is ordered to attack the station and the destroyers follow them?
Performance is only worse if the commander is ordered to attack the station and the subordinates follow them.
Thanks, love the videos, you deserve more attention. Super in depth and helpful 🙃
Great work! What if the destroyer is the fleet commander, just with a couple of small ships supporting it in it's own fleet? Will that work as if it were independent?
I imagine so. The operative difference isn't whether the destroyer is part of a fleet, it's whether it's received its attack order from the fleet commander or the player. So as long as you're the one telling the destroyer to attack the station, it shouldn't matter whether it has subordinates or even whether it itself is a subordinate.
That said, fighter escorts have a tendency to wander into the station guns regardless of their assigned role, so watch out for that.
With a behemoth even if you went 10 intercept nova's and 10 bombardment nova's that would do a lot for you. Even with just MK2 Combat Engines, Combat Thrusters and MK2 Pulse Lasers. Nova's are hard to hit and even 1-2 star pilots can do a good bit with them because if the ships profile. The 10 bombardment Nova's will be distracting fire from the K or (insert capital ship) leaving the Behemoth free to do what it needs to. Ideally though the bombardment Nova's will probably need either a MK2 Bolt Repeater or Plasma Cannon along with a MK2 Torpedo Launcher to help with disarming it. Additionally you can command them to target the turrets and just about completely disarm the capital ship leaving your Behemoth to have free reign over. Laser Towers work wonders as well.
Very well done! you deserve more subs! How much does pilot skill level affect things if the highest was chosen as the leader for the fleet? Because I honestly am not seeing much improvement from one ship's behaviour to another with different leveled pilots
Thanks! Average crew skill (weighted 70% pilot + 30% service crew) makes a tremendous difference for almost all aspects of NPC factions' capital ship combat behavior. Player-owned capital ships actually get a lot of "plot armor" and are treated as if they have maximum crew skill for maybe 3/4 of the applicable behaviors, which is probably why you don't see much ship-to-ship difference. Two behaviors that *are* affected by crew skill for player-owned ships (in v6.2) are (1) target reevaluation time, i.e., how long a ship is "locked in" to fighting its current target, and (2) time-to-live calculations, which determine the timing with which a ship attempts to disengage from a fight when damaged. I don't think pilot skill has a direct impact on fleet performance, but it does affect availability of different fleet formations, which can make a surprising difference.
@@CptSnuggles07 thanks
Can you still have them in fleet, when giving manual attack order? Don't wanna bloat my ship list too much. Or I just have to accept the few losses :D
Yes, you can still have them in fleet. Just make sure you give all the subordinates their manual orders before giving the fleet commander its orders.
why dont they make KudaAi a part of the game? Also are those captains 5 star?
does destroyer captain pilot or management skill have any affect? like do 4 stars out perform 2 stars?
Yes, combined crew skill matters quite a bit for capital ship performance, especially if they're following independent orders. Combined skill includes both captain and service crew, weighted towards the captain, and it takes into account morale, piloting (for captain), and engineering (for crew). All ships in this test had roughly 2 stars combined skill.
This is outstanding to see. I'm used to Destroyers running headfirst into a K just to realize their mistake and try to flee only to die under the overwhelming firepower of the K. Basically the same story for stations.
Ragnos seems unimpressed with the AI updates but your analysis shows a slightly different story. As always, it's better to get a second opinion before jumping to conclusions as the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
Thank you for the content and data. What are your thoughts on the new E class Destroyers?
The Phoenix E is a game changer, absolutely top tier. Behemoth E is solid, not spectacular, as expected from the Argon. It still has the 4 S docks, which I love.
The new AI will definitely take some getting used to, and some continued adjustments, but I think it has a lot of potential!
I really liked the preview, "Enhanced Violence Protocol" is exactly what I would like to install on my warships! By the way, the video is cool, although I have already played x4 for almost a thousand hours, but I still don’t know or understand some of the nuances poorly.
Do they still activate travel drive and then disengage it after a split second? That was always annoying.
Sometimes. The Boron are better about this since their travel drives activate instantly; less time wasted waiting for it to charge.
0:07
Wow that is a long-reaching beam.
What weapon is that?
It's the main battery of the Ray, 11 km range. Not great vs stations, but I like to keep one or two around just because the beam looks cool!
Nice - so: will always have a "fleet" of "not-fleet" destroyers (and Asgards) in a "group" that isn't grouped to take out stations. Will just have to put up with a mess of "Station Killer 1" and "2" etc in my "unassigned" ship list. Works for me.
For capital ships... have a real fleet... and help out by sitting yourself in an Asgard when facing the Xenon big boys. DAKKA DAKKA!
Thanks!
I heard On Ray's especially, it better to not equip main battery to force it to use rest its weapons more effectly, any opinion on this?
Hot take: that advice is outdated in the new patch. It was good advice in version 6 because destroyers were scripted to *always* use their main battery and *always* from a pre-determined range, which frequently led to them pointing their best turrets away from the enemy as they tried to maintain range. Here in version 7, they seem "smart" enough to abandon their sniping behavior and brawl effectively with their turrets when the situation calls for it.
Do Captain or crew skills modify this at all?
Combined crew skill (70% captain 30% crew) made a huge difference in 6.2. They almost certainly do in 7.0 as well, but there's no hard data on that yet. There's Steam user who datamines the AI scripts and puts them in a guide, so I'm hoping that will be updated soon.
Instructions unclear, Holy Vision is being sacked by I and K-class destroyers 28 hours into my new game.
I'm brand new to X4, so maybe this is a stupid question, but I noticed that for OOS you didn't make a distinction between fleets or no fleets.
Does that have no effect in OOS?
The Coordinate Attack OOS scenario was definitely a fleet command. I can't remember about the Attack scenarios. Fleet/individual differences are reduced OOS because there's relatively little maneuvering involved; it's mainly treated as a battle of mathematics between blobs of raw numbers. There are still some differences though.
personally i always add a few s and m ship to my destroyer or battleship and made them on guard or even protect into a behavior order
It's definitely always a good policy to have some sort of escort for your capital ships!
There needs to be a station attack setting for fleets
And so in terms of destroying Destroyers, 40 cluster missiles destroy any ship with 1-2 salvos, as well as a torpedo (but they are more expensive in terms of resources)
I use specialized fighter-bombers that carry only missiles and are not distracted by anything else. The Commonwealth destroyers fly off even faster.
I tested the battle of an aircraft carrier against the Argon defensive fleet, launched 40 interceptors, then after 30 seconds 8 gladiuses with missiles (4 launchers) and a bombing order, they very quickly dealt with the Destroyers, they did not reach the aircraft carrier, the downside is their behavior, that’s it They limit the attack radius to 10-15 km from the carrier. . .
Very nice video, pls more
Noob here, have about 300hrs in the game, using various videos as guides. Problem one, most yt videos are obsolete.
Started just before 7.0 came out, now fleets drive me crazy. In 7.0 I've observed the same things you mention, destroyers doing stupid things in a fleet. I also have problems issuing correct commands on carrier and 20 fighters. I issued a command to attack all enemies, my fighters did well, killed everyone, then 3 new xenon ships came to the fight and my fighters stood there waiting for the xenons to kill them one by one. In the map there were like 20 attack "circles" and only when I clicked each one they disappeared and my fighters started attacking, by then it was too late, Alt F4 was the only thing to do.
I enjoyed your vid. just getting into x4. but i had to watch on x2 speed
When the AI decide that your the turrets of your Asgard are better suited to take down a xenon station, than the main gun...
Enemy’s K AI is always better than my destroyer AI
I have 4 Rays destroyed 3 K
The Reys had heavy missiles and flaks, 1 Rey was almost destroyed, but the missiles and flaks managed to destroy the turrets on K, a clear victory with the cost of up to 50% of the missiles. The entire battle was at close range and took about 5 minutes. =)
i have 1 Ody, 1 Pheonix E, 1 Rattlesnake - all with good Terran MK3 Shields, L Plasma & M Flak = they secure a Split Sector (Family Zhin) from Xenons directly next to the gate. I also added a very minimalistic DefenseStation a little behind. The 3 Destroyers do fight very well against all Xenons coming there - even killed 2 Xenon K with escorts at the same time - without even sending out their Fighters. But this is "out of sector combat"
ah i have to say i forget to mention that i use a mod that boosts turrent range and damage by 10%
Meanwhile terran syn:
1. TOSS COIN
Heads: yolo dakka dakka spin
Tails: spin dakka dakka yolo
MEANWHILE IN NIPPONSHIPLAND:
Haha im in danger.
Kind of shocked at the destroyer vs station as fleet result. It always looked so nice to see them automatically spread with the "coordinate attack" command.
But I will stop doing that when it's really hindering their movement during the rest of the fight 😐.
Maybe go for coordinate attack as fleet to set it up and then disband the fleet for the fight. 🤔
Yeah, I do like the way ships move with Coordinated Attack. I still use it vs stations sometimes, just for the aesthetic value, even though it's not the "maximum efficiency" method and I frequently take a loss or two.
Btw the ai inability to point main guns at target and shoot, especially in a multiple on one situation where dps rules supreme is what made the design decision to even have main batteries an idiot move. The devs gimped turrets for this.
Meanwhile, in botboiland, the xenon looked at that decision and said "naw." In beepboop language. And designed warships.
I can dakka down 2 to 3 k with a syn easily.... when i am in command.
First of all: Thank you very very much for getting me to understand AI and what it 'thinks' for the first time in nearly 1k hours of time played. It ain't by far as stupid and untrustworthy as I had supposed. So far I never trusted it and rarely let it do an attack all on its own. I usually am in command myself and tell all participants what to do.
That leads me to my question:
How did you set up the turret behaviour of your destroyers?
In my experience if you set all M turrets and maybe one L on "Attack fighters first" (I like beam turrets for that) even waves of twenty PE's won't do much damage to the shields. All the rest of the turrets can attack the big target. Probably not the fastest TTK, but a rather safe (and also cheap) one without having to have dozens of escort ships to protect your a$$.
Would my "player-controlled-fighting-set-up" also be valid for pure "AI-fighting-set-up", what do you think?
Yep, for flak and similar anti-fighter turrets, I usually have half or 2/3 on Attack Fighters First, and the remainder on Shoot Missiles First. Plasma and similar turrets are set to Attack Capitals First, and missiles are set to attack only their intended target (usually Attack Capitals Only). That's how the turrets in this video were set up.