Gameplay bug? - unresolvable situation

[BrianD]

I am caught in a situation that I don't believe has a resolution, and will cause me to have to commit suicide, or just quit the current game.

I am in a battle where neither side can win. Neither ship can beat the other's shields. I would jump out of the system, but I am out of fuel. Since I can't resolve the batter, I can't activate my emergency beacon and try to get additional fuel. There appears to be no way to exit the situation other than quitting and starting over.

[StebCH]

Sounds pretty strange, would you post a screenshot of the battle?

[Vaansinn]

I think that might actually intended and can happen in other scenarios as well. Just imagine having your o2 generator destroyed and you ran out of oxygen and the only place where you crew would survive is in the med bay. In that scenario your crew would die leaving the med bay to fix the o2 generator but you can't jump because they would die in the cockpit too. Only option left is the restart.

[H@buster]

I've had that happen to me, too.
I eventually just opened all doors on the ship and had everyone suffocate at the same time.

So yeah, being too defensive kills you.

[BrianD]

I didn't think to take a screenshot of the battle. Both ships had two shields. My only weapon was a 2-power laser and their only weapons (after I took out their boarding party) were ion cannons. They couldn't deplete my shields, and I couldn't shoot through theirs.

I wouldn't mind if we are intended to call this a stalemate and game over, but it just seems like the other ship would eventually realize the battle was pointless and leave. If we could activate our emergency beacon in this situation, I'd be happy with a coin flip. Heads, friends drive the other ship off, tails, I get destroyed.

[johnkangla]

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[Icehawk78]

I had something similar to this happen on the final boss.

I was flying the Nesasio and was outfitted almost solely for boarding parties, and didn't upgrade any of my weapon systems from the base 2-shot/small beam. Otherwise, I just had a boarding drone and a defense II drone. After taking out each of the main weapon systems, I realised that both of my weapons were too weak to penetrate the shields, but that I'd left enough main crew on to repel any boarding parties I had, especially without having taken out their health bay, while being unable to jump away due to having used my last fuel to get to the boss in the first place.

The problem with BrianD's solution is having a programmatical way to determine whether or not a situation is a stalemate. Assuming the AI is programmed to maximise win rates, there's not really a way to tell it "in this situation where you're guaranteed not to lose unless you retreat, you should retreat". On top of that, the "run away vs overwhelming power surge" situation, while able to be described in English, is not easily determined in code, short of just having a long list of "this is a stalemate, that is a stalemate, etc" descriptions of possible game-states, which is both really terrible programming, and also still likely to contain vulnerabilities.

Given that at (almost) all times you can always choose to lose in a situation (ie remove power from all stations, including O2), I don't think it's necessarily a flaw that needs to be corrected. (I think I remember reading that Crystal crewmembers don't need to breathe, so it's probably possible to literally force an unendable battle by selling all weapons, equipping boarding drones, and getting "lucky" enough to take out all of the main boss's first-stage weapons and then using up the last of your drone parts without finishing off the main crew/ship, while (somehow) keeping a Zoltan Shield intact to prevent any boarding.

[BrianD]

Good point on getting the AI to recognize a stalemate situation. About the only thing I can think of is either counting the length of time for the battle, or having the AI count the number of shots that impact the ship. That is if you want to address this situation. I am fine with creating my own "house rule" that a tie is a loss for me and I suicide if I can't win. The only other consideration is whether anybody cares if people manufacture this situation to train their crew. One could power down their own weapons to let the enemy keep ineffectively fighting in order to train shield and pilot skills. This isn't a huge exploit since skill mastery is a help, but not a game-changing bonus.

[ARTRED]

Situation is:

My ship got weapon disabled by slug enemy.

No fuel remain.

Weapon don't come back online, so i cannot damage them, but the slug ship got weak weapon so cannot destroy me.

It's a draw... i've added an image

http://s16.postimage.org/hnjyunpo5/Draw.png

[Vind]

Yeah - sometimes game generates AI ships with only 2 lvl 1 beams and defense drone - which cant penetrate lvl 1 shield at all. AI ship just firing beams and never retreats - you can max your crew gunnery skills with ion guns on such target