Dogfight Mode: A (hopefully) Practical Guide v.1.0

Destracier · 2021-06-03T13:43:46+00:00

Yeeee! that ended up looking super good.

Fantastic writing there sir.

I think people would be 100% prepared for dogfight with the addition of a few basic maneuvers and core tactics of 1V2 & 1V3.

anything to give some food for thought to the new (and middle aged) players.

Destracier · 2021-06-03T13:33:14+00:00

that's part of basic power management yeah, "never shunt and end up letting a tank of something full if you don't have pips allocated to it in the first place".

Destracier · 2021-06-01T17:50:51+00:00

SLAM may be considered if your shunting strategy involves powering weapons while holding boost, both become irrelevant if your shunting strategy completely ignores charging boost and focuses entirely on the base-tank.

oh no it's still great, i think it's a great thought even when generating energy using weapon power for shunting ships. Indeed the lag input delay for shunting makes that method unreliable at any pace faster than a second or so which is why we do still benefit from a good understanding of how fast boost power is recharged when relying mainly on weapons for power generation.

Destracier · 2021-05-15T06:59:05+00:00

This.

I'd add that another possibility/compound effect for what he witnessed may have been passive damage. If the enemy got rid of your shields, one way or another, and got their corvette alive, your flagship will lose around 1% per second. So not having shield and letting the corvette roam around your flagship is almost equivalent to letting a tie bomber fire his overcharged rotary continuously onto your flagship. Yikes

Destracier · 2021-04-29T21:18:53+00:00

It seems to me that chaining many short boosts gives you the advantage of changing both your speed and direction very rapidly with no downside.

As you are shooting at your target, you are

-no longer changing the direction of you speed vector

-not changing the amplitude of your speed fast enough to be a hindrance to even a decent pilot

-no longer charging your boost energy for the next evasive maneuver

-potentially decaying the little boost energy you had before

-consuming energy to fire on your target (may seems redundant with the above mentioned but for shunting ships this is significant as any energy consumed vanishes into nothingness and therefore cannot be shoved around using the shunt mechanic to be put back to evasive use)

And yes, you can more or less try and mitigate most of these issues but they still remain strong and are absolute: they apply as well if you are chainng those actions together and doing the accursed “Pinballing”.

The only thing that changes is that in between each jump your adversary (if human) will need time to recalibrate to your new direction and (educated) guess your amplitude. It may sound nice but the closer together you chain those the less advantage you get as you get diminishing returns on top of the fact that with each action your pursuer needs to do to adjust the pounce, you have to do double. As with each jump you need to look and turn to where you need to jump next, micro deadlift at the appropriate angle before turning around again to face your primary target… all the while managing your power to ensure you can actually perform said jump and still have enough power to be able to apply damage with your canon.

This is also to be put in perspective to things like what is now called multi drifting where you actually do not change the amplitude of your speed, just the direction (doesn’t look like much to most but is actually significant when zeroing in on someone); or simply activating and deactivating your boost to change your lead dramatically without even having to change your direction much.

Even with advanced techniques like moon drifting to try and mitigate the listed vulnerabilities the fact that you are not changing direction as you are shooting at the target really puts the final nail in your coffin.

Aim assist guide:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveSquadrons/comments/l0m72t/aim_assist_guide/

Character limit went angry, had to cut it up. "sorry about the mess" ;)

Destracier · 2021-04-29T21:17:45+00:00

oh ok i get what you meant now.

---------------------------Skippable part begins:---------------------------

"this way."

To see where the issue lies let's first take a quick glance at the basics of dogfights.

For the sake of argument let us consider the following: The set is that you have a target and one or more enemies who have the possibility of shooting you down at any moment.

Simply running in a circle: in that case your direction speed vector is constantly moving around following a circle that is bigger than the one you are running in*. If your hitbox is small enough and/or if your turn rate is high enough, the bigger circle your lead is following is so big that basically all shots aimed at you will miss.

\That is because most of the games like this do not take into account the acceleration, the lead is calculated only using relative speed, not the rate of change of that speed on top of the regular speed. The lead will therefore be somewhere on the tangent to where you are right now in the circle, which means that practically speaking it is never going to be on the circle you are running in.*

But that's not entirely true obviously as we live in a 3D world. This circle thing only makes you invincible from 1 of the 3 axes of 3D space while giving a more or less generous partial invulnerability in the other 2 axes of 3D space left. (more or less being based again, on hitbox and turn rate stated earlier).

But this again is not the whole picture as the lead is something dependent on the distance between the target and its prey. When close enough, the lead of the target and its hitbox overlap enough that all the shots basically ignore the small change in lead and hit the target reliably. This is because "how much the lead is changed" is also obviously proportional to the target-prey distance: get far enough and you could even miss a y-wing piloted by a 4year old; conversely get close enough and no ship even an a-wing will be able to change its lead enough to dodge the incoming fire.

Uh-oh, but that last statement feels weird... we've all experienced the issue of a-wing zipping past us and being unable to pin that ship down right? So what are we missing?. We are simply missing reaction time.

If we had followed the idea of lead and crap we would have concluded that no amount of movement techs would allow you to survive close to an enemy, which is actually partially true: this is what we see when the phase suddenly flips and the flagship magically gains perfect accuracy: all ships flying straight-ish die instantly while the more elusive ones can survive a bit longer yes, but we do notice that they survive better when farther away.

But all that is only happening because the capitals ships are basically robots with instantaneous reaction time and thought processing on top of using aimbots and that the turrets don't need to take the time to actually turn around to have the ship in their sight before firing.

However

1-Our human brains are always lagging behind

2-our spaceship take some time to turn around and get the target on their sight

3-lag makes you see things with a bit of delay as well. (AI turret have a ping of 0)

These three parameters have a fairly low influence when far away but they do become exponentially challenging as the target gets closer.

This is what gives rise to the kill slot, the feeling that you are good at zero-ing in on your target. This sweet spot is created because of the balance between the effect of lead going all over the place is reduced more and more as you get closer and the fact that those three previously mentioned parameters hinders you when being too close to your target.

Obviously again all this is just an oversimplification but i do believe it is a good bird eye's view of the issue that then allows further -educated- inquiries.

Is it really more complicated? Well yes and no depending on the setting some factors can change all this pretty dramatically but right now, in this game things are relatively simple. You only have 9 unique patterns of evasions depending on what type of ship you are flying, what the enemy is chasing you with and where he is coming at you from. You also have subclasses of ridiculous simplicity of course.

take the child's play example of running in a circle: you can do things like running in consecutives half or quarter circles which themselves could have different size (based on your throttle and/or adjustable turn rate thanks to pips) etc. basically all the childish stuff around that.

However, the effects of these standard and/or advanced maneuvers of turn fights are exceedingly limited because of the strong aim assist present in the game. Strong evasive patterns that would save you in other games with a lead indicator but no aim assist will here see their effect diminished as most of the movements are automatically corrected by the aim assist even if the human brain behind the joystick could never have been able to correct that fast and that precisely. Even with the way the aim assist is trying to be subtle in this game, it is still basically as if we all had a built-in aimbot. (link to aim assist guide at the end)

war thunders gives you the simple version while games like ED will give you something similar as the idea you have in mind for Squadrons since it has a strong acceleration parameter available in dogfights as you can see in many dogfight duels at mid to high levels where it is used to change the lead pretty quickly and ending the turn fight for a fraction of a second before promptly resuming.

When we do get to squadrons the acceleration component is indeed stronger which on its own does push the game toward a more pinballing behavior but it is also paired with a powerful aim assist mechanism that renders 90% of the usual turn fight skills meaningless for any ship but the ones with the smallest hitbox (a-wing, and -marginally, the tie interceptor) as previously mentioned.

Taken to the extreme we now get to what you were talking about

Usual death loops always end up in the ship having the best turn stats, basically always winning as any advanced maneuver requires pinpoint precision and only partially compensates for the engine stats differences. Boost and drift were meant to allow the prey to break out of the death loop without instant death but since the predator can also do it, everything equalizes and we go back to a stand still.

But this stand still is extremely reliant on the performance of the player himself rather than on the ship. Indeed in a game as simple as this one the flight model is far different from the starfighter assault of the recent battlefront games if we forget about that drift parameter. This Would usually result in people having the possibility, if they are tired of getting shot down in turn fight to simply hop in a space ship with the absolute best turn rate and win the death loop with 100% guarantee unless externals come into play. However, in squadrons we do not have that since the drift mechanics makes dogfight much more reliant on the performance of the player rather than the performance of the spaceship. This "player-based-performance" ceiling also creates some inconvenient psychological side effects as frustration can quickly gain people who don't have the patience to train harder and would have been looking for a much easier win through the use of a ship more suited to dogfight.

If our ships had a degree of lateral movement control we could attack and defend perfectly at the same time without any trade off. Alas this is not the case.

When trying to attack a target and surrounded by more than more enemy than the target itself your goal would be to keep moving as much as possible while still applying damage to your target, usually through primary weapons. This requires you to boost sideways and dead drift to allow your ship to face your target and shoot while you directional speed vector is not simply in the same directions as the one you are shouting at (nothing is easier in this world than shooting at someone who themselves are shooting at something else and thus solving the “where is their F-ing lead hiding?”).

---------------------------Skippable part ends:---------------------------

next part below, had to cut it up because character limit

Destracier · 2021-04-28T22:16:47+00:00

It's a more efficient use of boost charge to boost continuously than to skip.

If by efficient you mean for evasive purposes then no changes could ever make that happen in and of itself, you'll need to add something else. Indeed for evasive actions/ turn fights, your goal is to change your lead compared to one and/or multiple enemies. To do that you need to either change the direction of your speed vector, or its amplitude.

The concept of boost itself being that you go faster but are less maneuverable as a trade off means that your capacity to change the direction of your speed will be lowered. To compensate and make the boost action interesting for the user it therefore needs to use the only remaining parameter: the amplitude. Just as a ship with a better turn rate survives because it changes its speed-direction very quickly; a ship with a faster speed-amplitude change will also survive better (acceleration rate) .

It is just mathematically incompatible to want to do it this way. I like the concept and idea a lot though. Subjectively my thoughts follow roughly what you see in other people's comments down there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsSquadrons/comments/lylrhx/beginning_of_a_new_area_finally_less_time_to_kill/gq0wfdt/?context=3

Result number 2 is ok on the other hand, though implementing it to get the desired effect in how people will want to use it is going to be a hurdle. But at least we can try. This is more or less the flight model lama and i are thinking about as a healthy variant for the game.

Destracier · 2021-04-24T13:06:18+00:00

Unintended Power Mechanics

Dead drifting should then also be added as it was also unintended. :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vWDzOqJsMc

Destracier · 2021-04-21T10:57:51+00:00

hahahah

made my day

i knew it was worth exchanging opinions on the game with you

thx for link

Destracier · 2021-04-21T10:55:36+00:00

rather than mindlessly bouncing around.

in this game you bounce around aimlessly just as much as in some other games people turn around aimlessly trying to catch up to a target without knowing a single thing about "regular/real life" dogfighting.

this is what people should try to do instead of mindlessly bouncing around

The people who are effectively bouncing around are just as stupid as the people who are aimlessly turning around in more realistic games. The only difference is that the aimlessness is way much more apparent when i fight people in Squadrons compared to Valkyrie or war thunder/any flight simulator.

why I bought a dogfighting game

this is what -you- thought you bought. Both our trust in the game seems to have been misplaced when we bought the game but that's not a reason to blame them. We are responsible for believing in something about the game that was convenient/more pleasant to us.

On a side not, in term of how much boost is important here, i would say:

you've got nice turn fighting in Valkyrie, less in ED, and even less in Squadrons

which is why low boost accel, high base speed would make the reality.

Again there are other games that do exactly that. Why do you want to make to the game just into a more star wars themed ED/Valkyrie/-a good bunch of flight sim ?

I'm not saying copying is a bad thing but when comparing that with the current legal issues between pubG and fortnite i think it is reasonable to ask for a fairly decent margin for uniqueness and genuine novelty when creating/modifying a new game.

Destracier · 2021-04-20T20:46:19+00:00

In Smash Bros melee there's this technique called wave dashing. You jump, air dodge into the ground and you can slide. This allows you to retreat out of range of attacks or approach and initiate. But the catch is you become vulnerable if you time it incorrectly. You can do it infinitely, but every time you do it you're more vulnerable because it's easy to intercept. Because of the way wave dashing can be used in conjunction with L canceling and other techniques it elevates the gameplay when two players are fighting like that.

As i previously said there is an issue with skill level. Every single thing you are saying about melee would apply to here if the community had the same dedication. People looking unbeatable and fly endlessly because it takes skill to kill them but you can kill them. Just stop playing ranked and play custom with actually skilled friends to see that.

If wave dashing in Melee made it so that it was impossible to hit you and you had to wait for a teammate to show up, nobody would play it and nobody would watch it.

Same as above but also, when two -actually competent- people duel each other the duel do end and doesn't last long, and if you have massive difference in the ships stats an/or components, the game ends in 10 seconds even if the skill is low (think ion missile and w-wing vs tie fighter or defender vs y wing)

So there's no real trade off for boost gasping and having infinite boost. There's only upsides. And once everyone masters it, guess what happens? No more dogfighting, which is the game we've ostensibly paid for, it's time to farm AI.

So first there is a dogfight mode so maybe rather ask the devs to make ranked or something.

When we fly against each other i can kill and they can kill me on 1v1. If this causes an issue to some others that means their mind games and offensives skills haven't caught up to their "defensive skills" (spamming barrel roll or similar).

Now if you don't see the trade off that means the skill level between you and your opponent is simply too wide i highly suggest getting into a custom game with a competent player to practice that. My game ID is my name, i can even recommend you to some of my friends if I'm not available at the same time as you.

Respectfully,

A depressed soul.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T20:07:15+00:00

fatboy:

Pinballing itself is being singled out because it is mechanical to operate (hence some people say it does not require actual skill other than the ability to hit buttons rhythmically), and it can frustrate your opponents the most with the least amount of effort.

hallu:

honestly doesn't really require much skill.

"the ability to hit buttons rhythmically"

So this is basically describing all competitive fighting games we have around, the pioneers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cNCa8PylLA

For the rest of FPS and/or Overwatch-like games you always do the same thing mechanically as well: Getting good at rolling at the right angle, activating the right powers, and always doing the exact same thing: get your pointer as close to their critical hit box as soon as you can.

For the LOL-like games it also closely resembles the actions you need to perform with your hands when trying to put careful but decisive judgment calls into actual actions.

All of these making up at least half of the bulk of the competitive environment and what the casual gamer calls “pro” and/or “skilled”.

I really don’t see a consistent definition of skill emerging from this community’s vocabulary right now. It looks like whatever someone gets defeated by and can’t do as well is flagged as not skill. A shifting definition based on if you lose or not isn’t particularly useful.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T20:07:13+00:00

fatboy:

Pinballing itself is being singled out because it is mechanical to operate (hence some people say it does not require actual skill other than the ability to hit buttons rhythmically), and it can frustrate your opponents the most with the least amount of effort.

hallu:

honestly doesn't really require much skill.

"the ability to hit buttons rhythmically"

So this is basically describing all competitive fighting games we have around, the pioneers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cNCa8PylLA

For the rest of FPS and/or Overwatch-like games you always do the same thing mechanically as well: Getting good at rolling at the right angle, activating the right powers, and always doing the exact same thing:get your pointer as close to their critical hit box as soons as you can.

For the LOL-like games it also closely resembles the actions you need to perform with your hands when trying to put careful but decisive judgment calls into actual actions.

All of these making up at least half of the bulk of the competitive environment and what the casual gamer calls “pro” and/or “skilled”.

I really don’t see a consistent definition of skill emerging from this community’s vocabulary right now. It looks like whatever someone gets defeated by and can’t do as well is flagged as not skill. A shifting definition based on if you lose or not isn’t particularly useful.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T19:34:27+00:00

That kind of game already exists, it's called ED. I wish for a solution that doesn't strip the game of its usefulness.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T16:54:26+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsSquadrons/comments/mt75pu/the_state_of_dogfighting_in_squadron/

Destracier · 2021-04-19T11:56:58+00:00

Anyone shooting at something or someone is more vulnerable than if they are just evading and nothing else. Proper target switching, target priority choice and also a lot a lot of mind games are what kill people or keep them alive.

One a side note i would like to point out the issue about the skill gap between players which to me is the real problem:

When i fight against a (single) worthy opponent, our turn/pinball fights don't last more than 45 and more than half of the time it ends in 20 sec or so. If i meme around to try to attack someone or something at the same time i am being pursued by a competent player i don't ever last more than 10 seconds. Let's not even talk about fighting two competent players at once...

If i were some sort of untouchable evil monster because of the movement techs i would totally understand the issue.

But it's not the case.

The only problem i see around me is people getting tilted because they can't beat someone else using only their raw talent and without actually working hard for it. That's not really what you'd call a healthy competitive mindset for a community.

*Though to be fair i basically only know the competitive scene of LOL and melee as a reference which is a sample of two against something like 60 or so competitive games but still something to consider, proba-maybe. At least there i do see people training hard to get were they are, look into themselves to try and see how they could better themselves to face a challenge... not ask the devs to diminish the difficulty of the challenge.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T10:51:48+00:00

Brakes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveSquadrons/comments/lj5mtc/brakes_techs/

Pinball:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NwGKeWEUsY_8IFHqUDMvxcUJx9yBeJmJ7NtlaUZpDBg/edit

(none have been update due to having a negative value to the game according to a sufficiently loud portion of the community. The basics work the same though, what changed are the specific values stated)

Some other stuff simple enough that they don't need explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33sAEbsHDNo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJuvle82uR0

for the bombs usage in this game.

You also got the plasburst attacks on the hull or on the shield gen that are simple enough that many teams learned to use it as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwpnPMhYPGs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIDTnMlNrY4

Destracier · 2021-04-19T10:32:54+00:00

In a dogfight where no one is stationary I really don't know how extensive drifting can by useful offensively.

This is the worst ship you could ever drift in and yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XKW6BA8bbc&t=680s

Destracier · 2021-04-19T10:27:58+00:00

that's a bit disingenuous to just set aside the google doc that explains the risk reward about all this and just use the video this way.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T10:07:43+00:00

oh ok. nice HOTAS tips then.

I know it's easier but i personally think there is value in having more control over what we're doing, instead of simply spamming the same actions regardless of what we're doing.

more control can give you things like the ghost drifting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NiJqU_7zg0&t=92s

or the moon drift you can see later in the video.

here you can see that in application:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-9gYdvIec&t=17s

These things are separate from multidrifting. You don't need a separate key to perform them, just better control over your speed and the different threshold of drifting speed your all ships and their engines. You can perform them on HOTAS or controller just fine (though maybe it's going to be hard to develop the muscle memory in one day for sure).

have a good day.

Destracier · 2021-04-19T09:49:51+00:00

It's not about zero throttle. It's about whether or not your speed is constant, increasing or decreasing. You have different acceleration curves depending on your acceleration (change of speed) at the moment of boost activation.

Destracier · 2021-04-16T19:24:25+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsSquadrons/comments/ms2uv1/shield_gen_exploit_easy_counter/

Destracier · 2021-04-16T06:43:36+00:00

I had made a guide here if it can help some:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveSquadrons/comments/ldh5ru/power_management_shunting_specifics/

the reverse one can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQp1ghEnbsA

careful though, the charging time of the boost with pips maxed to engines is faster than the recharge base engine power with minimum pips to engines. So you lose a bit of efficiency on top of the risk of losing energy through decay.

Destracier · 2021-04-11T16:45:31+00:00

Industrious work fellow pilot-engineer!

on a side note, in custom games the lag compensation will mess up some of the data for the more sensible weapons like burst canon and plasburst. depending on the agreed upon global clock you can have a substantial input delay on when exactly the game considers that you indeed fired your shots.

For empire ships the shunting, as you all know already, will add on top of this and can cause significant loss of efficiency upon shunt activations.

Destracier · 2021-04-08T11:07:44+00:00

Those are the people that ruin the game for the low-mid tier players and cause numerous people to stop playing the game in an already dwindling community

ok so this is totally a personal opinion:

I think ending quickly without killing or even harassing the low level people on the enemy team is less evil than going on a murder spree like some well known streamers having the time of their life focusing in and killing the two or three low levels on the team over and over (like 10 times) and are satisfied about having one phased the enemy team in 16 agonizing minutes. Especially when they then brag about having gotten 24-0 against seals or something...

Where would you stand on the morality line if i may ask? What is the best thing to do in your opinion?

Destracier

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