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Pilots not improving skills (DF & BA)


sainta117
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quote:

OK, went back to testing DF, I left FC's 7,8,1,&2 with pilot and RIO in close proximity to pixan all night with SAD and escort orders(invulnerability mode on, of course). Today the pilots had increased their kills by anywhere from 4 (roamer) to 9 (scorpion), with rogue scoring 5 and shadow 8. It appears that they were in a continuous dogfight for about 7 hours. No DF or BA increases observed (AI went up though). Incidentally, they all still had five missiles out of their original load.


LOL i'd think after like that many hours of dog fighting they'd got up atleast 1 point i bet SC is hating you right now. LOL.

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quote:


Originally posted by UnderLord:

i bet SC is hating you right now. LOL.


Why? It works as designed and just because you can't get the AI to improve when YOU want it to, is meaningless. If he doesn't know the meaning of the term AI, then he needs to look it up.

Like I said (if I have to say it one more time, I'm going to ban someone), that code has not changed since the original BC3K was developed; so I know for a fact that it works exactly as it should.

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I doubt it. From what I've seen, the most important thing to SC is that this game work properly and that it continues to be the best starship command sim in existance. The only thing that I want to accomplish here is to understand why I've so far been unable to increase DF and BA, and to let others in the community know how it works. Besides, if there is something wrong I'm sure SC wants to know that so he can fix it for the next game. He's always shown a very stong interest in supporting the game and making sure that it is all it can be. However, I'm hoping that I'll eventually figure out a way to train DF and BA reliably, so that I (and everyone else) can go back to enjoying the game. Plus, then I can stop obsessing about this and go back to writing my dissertation.

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Wow, bad timing sainta117 . When I first read your last response, I thought you were telling SC that you doubt it is working the way it should , but then I realized you were replying to UnderLord and SC just replied before you did.

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Look, SC, I'm not trying to pick a fight here. I'm only reporting what I observe. I haven't asked you to change anything, or review anything. I don't maintain that there's anything wrong with this sim, or that it's broken. The bottom line is that I want to find out how to use a feature of the game and I'm conducting testing to find out how to do so, meanwhile soliciting feedback from members of the community who have more experience than I. As I said before, if you'd like me to stop posting my results, I'll stop. So far you haven't said to do so.

I should also point out that I'm not responsible for other members of the community suggesting that I am opposing you or your authority in some way. I'm not. I don't intend to. I'm a scientist; I'm interested in truth, not politics.

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OOPS. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

Underlord, I appreciate your interest, but please don't imply that I'm opposed to the SC on this issue, you're getting me in trouble. Thanks! By the way, how did your testing go?

To the community in general:

This topic is getting way more political than I intended. I just want info from the community on their experiences with DF and BA in UC and earlier games, or their interpretations of my findings. If you aren't here to talk about your experiences with this, or to suggest other ways to test, or to comment productively on this topic, please don't post. If you have knowledge or insight to contribute to our understanding of what is happening (or not happening) with DF or BA, please post. But please, please don't start any fights here, 'cause I'll probably be the one who gets banned for it, and that'll suck.

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You know to be honest, I never really concerned myself with the individual statistics except when it concerned a special function.(Artifacts, auto-controls etc).

I just gave my people their orders, and waited for them to do it to the best of their abilities. However this thread has brought up some old thoughts to my head and since you seem to be doing some serious testing, maybe you had some simalar/dissimalar observations.

When your doing your pilot training, how much of it is planet based?

If/when you do it on planets, what is the average performance of your pilots STA/ATA missle attacks? (Likewise, the enemy performance on them ^_^)

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quote:


Originally posted by Raziel:

You know to be honest, I never really concerned myself with the individual statistics except when it concerned a special function.(Artifacts, auto-controls etc).


Some people are just used to clicking a button and have stats automagically increase.

There are no less than....checking...23 calculations to be taken into account before stats (other than CK which is based on actually kills) are modified.

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Raziel, after SC suggested it I did about 4 hours of testing on planetary targets on two seperate occasions (yesterday afternoon and last night). All of my testing was done using hyperdine ATS missiles. For the first half of the day I tested them against live enemy targets, with a depressingly low kill ratio (roughly 8 missiles launched per one hit, and less than one kill per sortie on average). I did manage to score ten or so kills across both pilot/copilot teams (see results above) on enemy targets.

Since that was going so slowly, I decided to switch tactics. I had read in earlier posts that individuals trained DF by attacking cargo pods, so I tried laying out some cargo pods and having my pilots do bombing runs. That went much faster, as the kill rate was much higher (cargo pods don't dodge, and they take less damage to kill). Scorpion and nightwing racked up quite a few direct kills with munitions(I don't remember the number exactly, I wrote it down somewhere). I would estimate that they hit about one in three of those, at 54% AI and 15% DF and 15% BA for Scorpion and 63% AI, 14%DF and 15% BA for Nightwing (they're my best two pilots, that's why I used them).

I couldn't say how good the enemies are, I haven't been keeping track. I also haven't been testing against air-breathing fighter craft, as I assumed that they would be the same conditions as space dogfights. Currently I'm still testing the "high AI is necessary" hypothesis, but if that doesn't pay off, I may try some atmospheric dogfights to see if they work.

SC, if it isn't too pushy, could you identify some of those 23 variables so that I can ensure that my testing conditions are optimal? If you don't want them posted on the board you can PM me. If there's some factor that needs to be changed then all of my data will have been erroneous, and I'll have to start over, but at least I'll know that I'm really testing under reasonable conditions. I really want to get this right, and I don't want to post specious information here (that would defeat the whole purpose).

Incidentally, I've been re-reading the manuals for UC and BCM, and a couple of online FAQ's, and I was wondering how "AI mode" applied to fighters in UC. I know that it can be set instead of autopilot on the CC, but I'm unclear on whether it's automatic with fighters or has to be set.

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Not a silly suggestion at all; my understanding from what SC said earlier in this thread is that DF generally increases when one's pilots are engaged in a prolonged (at least 5-8 minute) dogfight. After a minute or two most pilots have expended all the missiles they're going to shoot, so usually those kills would occur with guns. Accordingly, making pilots use guns only would seem likely to make dogfights last longer and therefore increase the likelihood of DF increasing. I was actually using this strategy early on, until I realized that it was rare for a pilot to get a kill using missiles alone, and that the result was that most kills in 1 on 1 dognfights happened with guns, and took at least five minutes anyway. So I went back to using missiles, in the hope that the odd missile kill would help to raise BA.

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  • 1 month later...

i haven't seen DF or BA increase at all. but to tell the truth until lately i've been playing GalCom and getting t'd-off and starting a new character when i get exp-points stripped away for reasons out of my control. ie friendly starcarrier kills neutral diplomat or even allied station kills neutral diplomat. But usually I deploy 2 fighters when trouble comes around, and I keep them out and about until their charge levels are around 30% or below, then I call emÔÇÖ back in, and while theyÔÇÖre readying if something goes haywire I still have two fighters I can deploy, and if I do they stay out til their charge is about 30%. Now if thereÔÇÖs BIG trouble I might use all 4 or in some cases 8 fighters (supper carriers) but IÔÇÖll call back the extra fighters asap, so that I donÔÇÖt get blasted because all my fighters are ÔÇ£used-upÔÇØ. Now usually my pilots get about 30-50 kills each, and AI factors of around 50 or so, but no DF or BA improvements.

Oh, and yes I know IÔÇÖm a rambler; sorry, but itÔÇÖs just who I am.

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