Please fix autocast for when I come back

not an unreasonable request, and the coding already exists, ive seen it in at least one game already

and you could also use it as a target preference for all things, HC's attack caps and other HC's lights target lrfs and supports, etc etc

probaly wouldnt be more than just a few tweeks in the AI to set up a target cordination for ablilitys

(its also anoying to see my repair ships waisting antimatter on repairing ships with almost no damage, wile others are about to be distoryed)

i also find a lot of abilities not autocasting at all

thoought that problem seems to be the fact that they dont like aquiring targets to cast on while moving (ie reforming fleet)

I have noticed that as well, somthing that came with a patch or entrenchment: when a fleet is static, waiting for orders, and auto attack is set to all, when somthing jumps in system, the lead ship of that fleet auto attacks but the rest of the fleet just trys to keep up with the lead, only attacking as the enemy comes into range, but not manuivering to attack, they just keep trying to reform with the lead ship.  This happens till I manualy tell the fleet to attack.

If you look codes, conditions and modifiers, there are really few things can be done.

Imo the guardians are ok infight. And I do not have a problem with the Illuminators either. Its not perfect, but It works for the most part.

But I really hate it when my Subjugators try to heal a ship that has just lost a few health points through a single phase missile.

I also don't like the constant Malice spam of the Mothership. It drains precious AM and when you want to cast shield restore  nothing is left. It is best to  manage all the Capships abilities on your own with afew exeptions.

The second situation is nothing that could be coded. If you want to save AM for shield restore don't cast malice...

I keep two progenitor ships just for that...I mean..motherships...wow i forgot what they're called. Are they called progenitors? That sounds too Homeworld for me...

really it comes down to mico manigment, but it really would be nice to have a tweek done to the AI on how it uses each ability with diffrent situations.

But it's not reasonable to ask a player to micromanage 20+ units at a time throwing powers all over the place. That's just impossible; and it breaks units because of that.

The problem exists with many (possibly all) units, not just the iconis or domina.  Try getting a vasari subverter to do the right thing sometime, i.e. not jump and disable a trade drone or a civil lab when there are actually enemy ships that need shutting down.  Or, try getting them to not all jump and disable the same damn ship.  It's why nobody builds them.

Are we talking Sins or Entrenchment? Which versions?

It's true the autocast is silly.  The guardian is probably more annoying than most.

I would be just fine if the frigate factories has a toggle to switch on/off autocast on future ships for Entrechment.

and vanilla sins to??

i do believe some basic casting rules should be applied, hoshiko's also tend to behave strangely in some situations "all breaking formation to repair some damaged turret whilst theres a heavily damaged capital ship olmost inside the casting range

guardians shield ability,  whenever i use them i always manually put them online...

it's a problem for all support cruisers with castable abilities actually... at a low ship count it can sometimes get frustrating.. as "i was 2 seconds to late to activate that ability otherwise (fill in complain here)"

now just compare it with a high unit count...  microing becomes impossible.. and i do actually.. in huge battles manually place some ships "hoshiko's" and then manual target as many ships as possible, just in case it prioritises a ship with 100 healthpoint lost over a ship with 200 healthpoints lost, a similar problem being the case for most other ability's

capital ship autocast abilities.  whenever i get a capital ship i have to remind myself not to upgrade abilities in-battle   or it'll immediatly autocast and use up valuable antimatter.. not even considering the way they autotarget ...manualy activating capital ship abiities is much more effective / easy anyway...

I play entrenchment, but the subjugators never behaved usefully, and that goes for all ships with autocast abilities except for LFs because their autocast is so straight-forward.

Iconis Guardians never stayed near the fleet properly, and they should cascade their shields, as they don't stack. Too many times i've had a bunch of iconis' use shields and then none have antimatter to cast them when i really need them.

I think it could be fixed by having minimum targets threshold or some extra condition as to what count as a valid target for the ability. There should be some safeguard against casting abilities when there is no need to (ion bolt on a near death ship while healty ones are nearby), or do it when the fleet can go on without it (casting buffs to kill a few scouts). 

That would be nice, but that's asking for a LOT more than i am expecting from them. All i want is a simple follow command available so i can have my guardians follow a group of ships or a capital ship, and the AI intelligence to not cast redundant abilities on the same damn ship. It's frustrating to watch.

I know your pain.

In Entrenchment it is still next to useless to leave stuff on auto cast.  Almost all skills as Vasari can not be trusted to be auto cast even in single player.

While you may think that this is fine because a certain amount of micro should make a good player we have to remember that the AI uses this auto cast so the AI is as stupid as these auto cast decisions.  It would be nice to see the AI not crippled by this stupid ability usage.

Some examples where there is obviously not enough conditional checks where skills are just wasted:

Kortul Devastator

-Power Surge = Fine to auto cast

-Jam Weapons = I can't really tell, I don't watch this much

-Volatile Nanites = You would have to be mental to auto cast this, a Kortul will happily target the single cap it wants to attack rather than the group on the other side of him that includes another cap.  It prioritises whatever it would normally prioritise as it's main target and that is more often than not not what you would want.

Skirantra Carrier

-Repair Cloud = fine to auto cast from what I can tell if you aren't worried about efficiency (it will cast if one ship need 10 hull)

-Scramble Bombers = auto cast = 0 AM but I believe that's an issue with the skills usefullness rather than the auto cast behaviour

-Replicate Forces = No way.  I tried it once and my Skirantra duplicated some carriers.  You would think great right?  It wasn't till I clicked on them I noticed the duplicated carriers didn't have any strike craft set to make....

Jarrasul Evacuator

-Colonize = Mostly ok, I manually set this off when I really don't want it to do it.

-Gravity Warheard = God no, it spams it on it's target, it doesn't consider whether it is fleeing or not, why waste AM on a target that is standing there shooting back?

-Nano-Disassembler = Haha no way!  Same as Volatile Nanites it just shoots it when it's off cool down at whatever it is targeting.  A LRF with 62 hull and no shields left?  Yep that's fine for auto cast.

-Drain Planet = No problems there really, not seen it do it in combat

Antorak Marauder

-Phase Out Hull = Auto Cast is detrimental to your own fleet, rather than locking down a single cap it will hit a cap, then as soon as CD is up use on another ship as the original isn't phased back in yet.  The net effect is your fleet is forever changing targets as the current target is phased out.  Just takes longer for you to kill stuff, useless.

-Distort Gravity = I leave this as auto cast, it's fine mostly, only falls apart when your Marauder is targeting something that is away from what the rest of the fleet is targeting, no big deal.

-Subversion = Don't know why you would want to auto cast this so who cares anyway?

-Stabilize Phase Space = Same as subversion

Vulkoras Desolator = I am forever microing auto on and off on my Desolators

-Phase Missile Swarm = Generally fine just have to micro this if I need AM for Disintigration.

-Deploy Siege Platform = Pretty useless to auto cast this, the Desolator does it in combat, often flying far away from combat to cast then fly back.  Maybe you want that sometimes but in 90% of cases I would prefer my Desolator to only auto cast this if it is not engaged in combat.

-Disintegration = The auto cast is useless, it's as stupid as Nano-Disassembler and I've not noticed if it only uses it when it needs hull?  Personally I save this for SBs so I don't auto cast it until it's time to clear one of them.

Your post is the perfect illustration of why it's impossible to have good autocast. Everything is specific to each individual ability, pretty much.

Compare Gauss Blast with Radiation Bomb. Both are mainly DD, but Radiation Bomb has an AoE component. A human player could easily decide to wait a few seconds for Radiation Bomb so that more ships would enter the affected area around the intended target, but it wouldn't matter for Gauss Blast.

Similarly, compare Hoshiko repair with Overseer. Hoshikos don't stack, but overseers do. So for one you need to make sure no more than 1-2 try to cast on the same target, but for Overseers you usually want a bunch of them to cast on the same target.

I could go on. There are way, way too many conditionals for some of the stuff people are asking for. Each ability is not going to get its own AI routine. There is room to improve the overall autocast behavior. For example, it should much more feasible to have the game check a buff's stacking limit versus how many ships are attempting to target an entity with said buff and reset the targets on a percentage of extra ships (so they go pick new ones) than it is to have the AI prioritize AM usage of specific abilities according to what you might want for any particular fight.

Just to be clear, this is not what I'm asking for. Simple parameters is all i want, these people want modern AI geniuses.

Cap ship abilities can and should be micromanaged.

Yeah, I was referring to the post directly above

Nobody's going to deny that the general auto-cast has some room to grow. Right now it's mostly "if anything's in range, shoot off the ability" on many things. But some of the stuff people are asking for is insane.

No, it's not insane, just poorly defined. Many things could be fixed if we had a few more parametters the ability could check for before triggering. Of course, coding thoses extra parameters can be tricky, especially if the engine does not keep track of what we need. Also the autocast doesn't need to be as smart as a player, just smart enough so the AI isn't seriously crippled by it.

I would argue smart antimatter usage is insane (ie, don't cast this but save antimatter for this other one in this situation sort of thing).

The others are less so. The other issue of course is cpu load, which usually isn't thought of as a limiter. You know how large games start slowing down that has nothing to do with graphics? Making autocast smarter will require adding extra instructions for the cpu to execute. Pretty much everything would require a bunch of extra comparisons, per ability, per ship (in most cases). At full fleets and 10 player games, it does add up.

But yes, for the most part I can agree.

my request for an autocast change is actually a much simpler one having nothing to do with the AI at all.

when you assign a skill point on a cap ship so it learns a new ability, that ability is immediately set to auto-cast on. if the cap ship has enough AM and is in range it will automatically use it before you have a chance to instruct it not to. this is obviously a huge pain in the butt.

please change the default settings on newly acquired cap ship abilities to auto-cast off. that's really all i want.