Anyone that PvPs in Empyrion knows about decoy turrets. For those that don't, it's where you bury turrets near the front of your ship behind multiple layers of armour. That way, enemy turrets target the layers of armour, which distracts their fire for a long time, rather than your more valuable turrets which you stack further back. This isn't very immersive and makes for weird PvP ship designs. It is also usable in some PvE situations, which again kinda sucks. Is there any plan to fix? Is it hard to implement. I assume you would need to add a check for turret targeting code, to say for each turret, is there any blocks in a line between the source turret and target turret, and if so ignore it and move to the next one. Discounting or destroying buried turrets isn't enough, because you could just place a wall or hole with a turret behind it. Fixing this would greatly reduce the length of fights, although perhaps you could compensate by making turrets have more HP than before. Does anybody know does Eleon plan to fix this is near future?
What you asking is, in the essence, what "those people" would call this a restriction in Build design by ELEON and that would lead to further, lengthy discussion about that theme that already has lead to 100 pages pro and contra. What for you is an abomination in PvP is for others a Design-Model after which they can survive longer, even if they, as once a Moderator has put it, EXPLOIT the targeting system. Let me ask you something. If Player know that such Builds are in use on their PvP Server why not counter it by only targeting Generators? Yes, you take a massive beating, yes you could loose your ship, but without a power source the "exploiter" will be dead in the Water.
I see this as a legitimate tactic, personally. It works within the system and isn't cheesing anything IMO. On the opposite side it's no different to you being able to target generators through armor. If you couldn't target through blocks then how would you target generators or fuel tanks? As it stands the server owner has all the tools at their disposal to do something about this already if they want. Many different options actually. For one they could activate CPU and make those weapons hiding behind armor cost a lot of CPU. They have the size class limits. They could also modify the config file and restrict how many weapons could be placed/add more damage to weapons/etc/etc/etc. They could use the EAH server tool and restrict all kinds of things such as max allowed blocks per structure type (make the vessels smaller and therefore have less armor to hide them behind). Or they could use a combination of all the above. These may not be good solutions per se but they can stop that behavior in it's tracks. Personally, I would really like it if my turrets gave priority to exposed threats. As in they target things that have an actual firing angle on them first and then focus on the things behind blocks afterwards. This would likely introduce all kinds of new performance issues though with all kinds of constant checks happening. I would also like it if my turrets could target things individually instead of all focusing on one thing at a time. Again, likely to cause new performance issues though.
So, I PvP quite a bit, and I ALWAYS use this, because you using it I am able to fight around 3 "PvP" workshop ships and win. It's insanely effective, so there's virtually no PvPers on the servers I PvP on (HWS and Venatus - both in top 3 server populations I think) that don't use it. You suggest targeting gens. Most PvPers design to bury gens in the same way, and make gens all over the ship. What you suggest would not be an effective PvP strategy in most situations. Multiple people that have been playing pure PvP for years have told me to target weapon/turret, or warp if you have the advantage and want to prevent their escape. My own experience of around 30 PvP CV space battles tells me similar. I say it is immersion breaking because it's odd that your turrets would shoot something, even if they could detect it, buried deep within armour when it would logically shoot at a valuable target sitting on the surface. At least have the option to do so is logical and more immersive. It certainly would reduce the advantage of massive sath bricks. You're right, I do too. I use it for all space battles, because you get crushed every time if you don't use it. I'm not saying its cheating, I'm saying its a negative for the game (PvP also PvE). I'll try to respond to why I'm not in favour of your specific alternatives. A single minigun turret behind many layers of combat steel will massively increase your other turrets survivability. Combat steel obviously doesn't influence size class much, because its a measure of lag not size. Perhaps if they changed that it would help, but then it's hard to armour your cockpit, gens, warp drive, fuel tank etc etc too. I'd prefer a simpler option. If I could place 5 turrets, I'd still be far better off using 1 decoy turret. Changing damage just makes the battle take longer, or less time, but doesn't change the decoy effectiveness. Restricting maximum steel blocks for example will invalidate many PvE builds, and will again make it impossible to armour things that we do indeed want armoured in a big ship. All in all I don't think there is a practical way to prevent decoys unless you either disable decoys as I describe or you ruin many other aspects of ship design, both PvE and PvP. I also want to add that it places newbies who don't have a PvP design handy, or people that like pretty workshop builds at a massive disadvantage. They often don't know why they got utterly wiped out too. I'd like more people to be comfortable in PvP. This seems like a valid concern to me. I'd be curious to hear from the team whether this is a no-go because of this reason, because they don't consider it immersion breaking, or because it hasn't been the priority yet.
Sounds like a targeting system issue. They could make turrets prioritize targets based on having a clear line of sight, or at least switch targets after a few seconds if the attacks didn't result in any damage to the previous target, if there are performance reasons why not to do those sight checks. Or perhaps it should be possible for a turret or player to 'grab aggro' from an enemy by damage or other factors (such as making damage to an ally nearby). This could also fix the issue of a sizable drone base attack force ignoring you completely while you obliterate them one by one.
You can also use manual weapons to snipe "real turrets" outside. It works well. Just requires some skill and of course... aim.
Just a thought but if the 'line of sight' checks are too expensive, which they might be, maybe? Then simpler checks like, 'is it loaded?' & switching to target the most powerful, in range, weapon might help a bit. Even in PvE the primitive targetting is an issue. On both sides. For Bases I can do the same trick and put Sentry Guns inside concrete boxes and the drones will always target them. While 'my' turrets are dumb as rocks as well, heh. They usually all gang up on 1 drone at a time, almost always a Red-Shirt Minigun Drone , leaving the powerful Rocket drones alone to fire at will. It's pretty clear from just looking at larger builds if the builder recognizes these behaviours; actually even for small SVs. So I do hope Targetting gets some love like the Drone attack behaviour has. Another, possibly cheap, thing that could be useful would be degredation. If a turret lost say more than 25% of it's HPs it's traverse & rate of fire could get reduced. Though that would prolong PvP battles I guess... I'd been thinking of how cool a damage control system could be...
Targeting on turret 'threat' level, based on how much damage it has done recently compared to other turrets, seems like a way that my be less resource intensive for the devs than checking LOS. Although you do have problem of any turret facing away acting a bit as a decoy. Perhaps you could weight it heavily to only ignore turrets that have done 0 damage.
yeah, this is a tough one if LOS is really not doable... heck even rolling your ship would very effectively spread damage around if the enemys weapons kept firing at the same target. Just came to me that folks have been requesting a Grouping & 'Lock Target' function for quite a while now. So player could manually select a target for a group and lock it in. If that were added, and the group wasn't a pure 'player controlled' thing; so once designated target was destroyed the 'auto-targetting' would resume, then at least some of the 'dumbness' could be overcome.
LOS checks may be doable, I don't know, I'm just guessing they would be resource intensive. I think of it like a 1 on 1 vessel battle. Both sides are constantly going to be changing direction and angle to one another, and this would mean multiple LOS checks would have to run non stop. Now imagine a 5v5 or 10v10. How resource intensive would it really be? I don't know because it hasn't been coded into the game, lol. I do know that we've been asking for LOS checks and other similar things for a long time now and it's never happened for one reason or another.
And what if the line-of-sight check has to be reciprocal ? The game already makes a "line-of-sight" check to align turrets towards their "target" turret, it's just a "blind" check because it has no means of knowing if there's anything between. But if any turret has a block in front of it on the same ship it can't fire, so this "flag" could be the one sent back to the "attacking" turret to indicate it is not a valid target.
That is a really good point/idea @Kassonnade ! Could apply the same logic towards whether a weapon has ammo or not. And there has to be back & forth info that rec'vs/sends updates; when an enemy weapon/block/whatever is destroyed the attackers turrets select a new target. Somebody had their coffee this morning
In fact these "checks" for turrets may even be done before the turret wastes time turning towards its target, so every turret can "weight in" turning costs (radians) to choose a better target. And since the check is done independantly from the turret's aim the "I can see you" flag is always available both for turning cost and opponent's line-of-sight. Edit : found a problem with this though. If a turret is aiming at the underside of another turret, the targeted turret can't return the " I see you too" flag as such, although there is a "line-of-sight". Solution could be that the checks be done independantly of any turret's aiming restrictions: line-of-sight between turret blocks. The "ok to fire" would then be tied only to the condition of reticles (aligned with line-of-sight). Turret then has to compare aiming costs to choose best target.
That may already be happening..? thinking of how turrets still track things like spiders even when they can't depress far enough to fire on them. Which is another basic flaw; once a turret is locked on to something it won't give up so long as that target remains within range. Like a troop transport flying overhead. Turrets elevate as far as they can then they just swivel until transport descends enough for them to shoot it again. Regardless if other, engageable targets are also within range. Maybe there's a cool-down timer for this, but if so it's lengthy enough that I can't think of a time where I noticed turrets 'giving up' and switching targets...
I was just cautious not to assume too much. But if what you mention is accurate, then it's one less "change" to code. The remaining stands : have a "costs comparison" (like AI bots checks for routes and different POIs like weapons spots) based on radians to travel to get the reticle aligned. If no other target available then it's not a problem. Maybe the current system is one of "choose closest target and leave it like that until target removed" and it needs a solution too. There could be a mechanic that removes a target from the list when already selected by a turret. Should not get too complex though, so maybe a 2-choices thing like "concentrate fire" (grouping) or "let the turret AI decide" (remove chosen targets from list and choose another one, default back to group method if no other available). But all these checks are costly for the PCs, so we need to know how it is done presently to see if what is proposed amounts to little or much more strain. The "programming translation" of "remove target from list" is just to attribute a flag to a target when selected by at least one enemy weapon.
They could change targeting to exclude non operational turrets, retracted or inside blocks/terrain, they can't shoot back, it's the best option.
That's what we're saying, except for the "retracted" part because the "block" can still be targeted. If block is exposed but turret inactive, than its "targeting cost" is higher, so turrets will prioritize other targets with lower costs.
Definately agree @Kassonnade We'll just have to trust Eleon not to start the marble rolling down the slope towards Skynet joking aside I could see this being taken too far. On the PvE side if player turrets get really smart, then drones & transports will need another upgrade.. plus, gameplay wise, it's likely best to leave turrets 'dumb' enough that a player can do a better job; assuming some sort of 'target-lock' &/or 'grouping' is added. I don't think the above suggestions would be too far, though they'd need testing of course. The 'decoy turrets' bit really does need addressing imo. Not super high priority, but hopefully when it comes up on the list a couple few other targeting bits may get added.
Yeah it can't get much worse for the player turrets currently. I'm still seeing long pauses before my turrets will engage a target well within range. Then when they finally do wake up they all fire on one target, pause again, readjust, then all fire on the second target. Rinse and repeat over and over. Sometimes these individual pauses get into the minutes range if I've been playing long enough.
