Undo 1.37 Change # 9/related comments

Description

In my new 1.44 stock game, things are going badly in combat. Ships which run out of ammo or lose weaponry due to damage retreat just fine, but ships which begin combat out of ammo never run out & trigger retreat. Same for those that begin combat with no weapons.

Now one could change all the retreat when's to "All Weapons Gone", but that defeats the purpose of having multiple choices.

I have set both the AI and my own ships to use the same doctrines, and I note that the "retreat whens" aren't yet working correctly. My impression is that retreat when damaged x% may be working, but retreat when enemy strength > x% does nothing.

The strats are my thing, and I work with them a lot. While I'm here, I'll suggest a few things that would be helpful.

1. Multiple retreat triggers. Might want to bug out if you're outgunned OR heavily damaged.

2. Sensible retreat. Go to the border and hang out unless the enemy pursues. This would also alleviate a lot of player headaches & AI problems associated with fleet break-ups.

3. Anticipation. It'd be good if a feature were added allowing ships to maneuver against enemy ships in advance. Simply project the enemy ship's position, with a menu allowing player to choose 0 to 5 second "lead times" in 0.5 sec. increments.

4. Flanking. Similar to # 3, ships could be instructed to offset the enemy's position left or right for maneuvering purposes. Say 1-10 ls in 1 ls increments. Or proportionally to the enemy ship's speed. The result would be that they would move to the side of the enemy rather than head-on.

5. Formation leaders need to be dropped when engines are damaged and speed is reduced. Maybe an option to allow some tolerance like 25%, but whole formations are stopping and becoming sitting ducks. It may be that the slowest ship in the formation determines the speed rather than the leader, now that I think about it. Either way, they need to be dropped when they lose their engines.

6. Players and AI need to be able to choose TF leaders. My last game I was attacked every turn by two AI fleets which always ran away because they had transports for leaders. An easier stopgap would be to reverse policy and instead of the oldest ship being the default leader it would be better if it were the newest. That way AI fleets would get new leaders as new ships joined the group, instead of being forever useless.

7. The AI needs to use other strats besides just "Optimal firing range". Troop transports, boarding ships, ramming ships and several others simply can't get by with a default one-size-fits-all strat. Until this is corrected the stock game is a joke.

My use of the "critical" tag is a bit of an overstatement, but all of the progress made by 1.37 changes 9-11 has been undermined and the situation is actually worse now than it was before. I imagine it'd be quick & easy to reverse this one change, and then we'll be able to see and appreciate the improvements.

I'm not sending a savegame because I'm on 56k and it takes a year for the thing to get through. The last two tries failed- I'm guessing because they took too long. This can be verified easily enough in the simulator or by taking any 1.44 game and putting an unarmed ship into combat.