So it seems like the light frigate abilities are designed to neutralize utility frigates. But in practice, when I see the enemy build a ton of utility frigates, I start spamming lights with thier ability, and it doesn't seem to matter.
As you can expect, I've used Galaxy forge to run some tests to see what's going on. The results were interesting, and I question why. Here's what I did. I took 20 skirmishers with interference (double cooldown and cost of abilities for 30 seconds) and put them against a mix of Cielos and Hoshikos.
What I expected to happen: Interference has this neat spell effect where the effected unit gets an orange glow around it. As I flew my fleet of skirmishers towards the enemy I expected his fleet to light up in a giant glowing ball of orange nerf. I expected the skirmishers to spread the love around, and make sure that as many cruisers within range were affected by Interference as possible at all times. While at the same time focus firing and assasinating those cruisers 1 by 1. This way, a flock of light frigates would really have an effect on an enemy whose pushing utility cruisers.
What actually happened: My frigates closed into range. The Fleet AI chose a cruiser to focus fire. One skirmisher cast Interefence on that cruiser, all my frigates shot it. And it exploded seconds later. Then the fleet AI chose the next cruiser. One frigate cast interference on that cruiser, they all shot it, and it exploded.
The same resuls occured with Cobalts and their Sabotage reactor skill. I didn't bother checking out disciples because at this point i already had enough for to make a strong post.
Why this is a problem: This is very tactically unsound. For starters, what's the point on casting a debuff on a unit that's going to explode in a couple seconds. But more importantly, I have all these units with abilities and antimatter to use that the autocast is just wasting. In the meantime there are hordes of utility frigates flying around that are completely unaffected by the ability designed to mess with unility frigates. Of course you can force the issue with some obnoxious micro (click-q-click-tab-q-click-tab-q-click, etc. etc.) but this is really not very realistic in a real game, and more importantly doesn't fit within the design principles of the rest of the game.
The utility cruiser autocast AI seems to do a decent job of getting good buff coverage across friendly fleets, how come the the light frigate auotcast AI doesn't do a good job of getting good de-buff coverage across enemy fleets?
I checked the .entity files to see if I could get any info there. It turns out that Sabatoge reactor requires that the cobalt to be pointed at the target... I question this as a design decision, but at least this explains the behavior I was seeing. HOWEVER, Interference does not! So why on earth isn't that thing casting on every ship with an anti-matter pool in range?
This brings up a deeper issue, that is truly concerning to me. This behavior suggests that a unit cannot target one ship with it's guns and another ship with its abilities. That autocast and auto-attack are linked in some deeply hardcoded fashion, which means we can't even mod the game to get the autocast to behave intelligently. This may or may not be the case, but the bottom line is autocast for these abilities really aren't cutting it.
These abilities aren't worth their salt, unless they can get serious coverage across the enemy fleet, and there really should be a way to do that without a huge micromanagement nightmare.
To examine a little further the relationship between auto-attack targetting and auto-cast targetting , I reran the test and turned auto-attack off. And indeed spell-covereage was excellent. As soon as an enemy cruiser flew within range it was immediately de-buffed. Of course then my skirmishers proceeded to be shot to bits by hoshikos!! But this proves that autocast is tied to autoattack. This suggests auto attack and autocast are on the same action algorithm... acquire target, cast available ability, shoot 'til dead. Since the "shoot 'til dead" part was disabled, the entire fleet could move on to the next target so fast as to cover the entire range with de-buffs practically instantly. They really should be seperated. Instead of cast then shoot it should be cast AND shoot. This way we could cast on one target and shoot at another.
But what's wrong with turning off auto-attack when you want the light frigate in Caster mode? Well these abilities aren't billed as "mode switches." Otherwise they would just work and be described that way "unit disables guns and goes into ability mode." Furthermore, the fact that light frigates are designed to be utility cruiser assassins means I want them SHOOTING at the utility frigates too, in a tactically sound, focus firing manner. So the best solution would be to remember to toggle auto-attack off and on every couple of seconds so the light frigates can get their spell off. This is less micro-stupid than casting everything manually, but it's still pretty dumb. Espeically since the game CLAIMS to handle these sorts of things for you.
Now every other time I've come here with issues about how certain things work in this game, I've been able to find impressive and satisfactory answers. It's entirely possible that I'm wrong, that there's somethign I've missed, and that this implementation of autocast for these abilities is actually optimal. If so, please help me bring this reasoning to light.
I'm looking down the ability list now and the light frigate abilities seem to be just one set of several debuffs where we'de want a broad coverage of the enemy fleet. I haven't had time to check if they all function as poorly as this one.
Please advise, comment, and respond.
Thank you.
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