The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird)

Just diversity ideas in response to the post before.

@stlng said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Sera strats should drop ion storms. Or, leave ion storms when they die.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Neither of those ideas are intel based buffs. They're just literal straight stat buffs to already strong units.

What about leaving intel wherever it dies similar to the T1 air scout it has, Or it leaves a lasting vision where it drops its bombs?

-Stryker

A weak ion storm with vision would be interesting. Would have to adjust bomb damage to compensate for the ion storm damage.

@comradestryker said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

@stlng said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Sera strats should drop ion storms. Or, leave ion storms when they die.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Neither of those ideas are intel based buffs. They're just literal straight stat buffs to already strong units.

What about leaving intel wherever it dies similar to the T1 air scout it has, Or it leaves a lasting vision where it drops its bombs?

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-Stryker

I don't think it's very useful for a strat bomber compared to jamming or stealth. Best thing I could come up with for Aeon/Phim is something where they had some "drone" ability that produces like 5 hp aircraft that shows up on vision but not radar, but I don't know if it's possible to assign something no icon on the radar map. That way it punishes no radar coverage/makes sniping radars more valuable while UEF and Cybran are more about abusing people that only rely on radar.

Sera does have the Selen for that

Vision after crash for Aeon is on theme with Eye of Rhianne but @FtXCommando makes a good point that it's not directly useful to the unit. Could be useful if you weren't sure you actually killed what you thought you did though.

These are all awesome ideas, however, in order for those to be taken into consideration, something about the UEF air & jamming needs to be done, first. Hence the post.

I'm glad this post has gotten a lot of attention, most of which people seemed to enforce my overall point - UEF Air is lacking a little. Sure, this is a controversy, but as we can see, it is a topic that needs to be discussed further.

At some point, I even thought about offering a suggestion to add Jamming to ASF, too... but figured that may have been too much. Now that this post has had some time to settle down a bit, perhaps we could talk about this further?

~ Stryker

This has nothing to do with buffing UEF air. UEF air isn't bad beyond stinger being a terrible unit. It's about expanding the game into the counter-intel sphere that has been criminally underused since the days of GPG balance. ASF won't get jamming purely due to the performance issues that it carries.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

This has nothing to do with buffing UEF air.

It's about expanding the game into the counter-intel sphere that has been criminally underused since the days of GPG balance.

Counter intel plays a large portion of this game due, and so, it should be looked at from all sides. Including from the UEF side... but not just intel & counter intel... we need to look at the overall picture, too. It's not about 'buffing' UEF air - yes, I agree... but it should still be a little more viable as every other faction has better alternatives.

UEF air isn't bad beyond stinger being a terrible unit.

What's wrong with the Stinger?

ASF won't get jamming purely due to the performance issues that it carries.

I feel that @Jip would be able to answer this directly. But from what I know, fake signatures shouldn't be an extra load on the processing side. Sure, it'll be a pain to look at, but look at frigates - I'm sure you've seen the games in which there seem to be thousands of them? Yet, no performance drop is noticeable.

~ Stryker

You don't make 800 frigs in a game. Stingers suck because they have no aoe and they shoot slow so literally anything making circles dodges 90% of dps forever.

@comradestryker said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

fake signatures shouldn't be an extra load on the processing side

Then how are your units shooting at fake signatures?
As long as the signature is visible it's considered a unit. Sure it doesn't have weapons itself, but it can still be targeted. I'm not sure how much movement needs to be calculated for them or if they just copy the original, but targeting is already a very performance heavy calculation.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

You don't make 800 frigs in a game. Stingers suck because they have no aoe and they shoot slow so literally anything making circles dodges 90% of dps forever.

Ah, I see. Though, I thought this was being fixed by increasing the projectile speed?

~Stryker

@nex said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

@comradestryker said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

fake signatures shouldn't be an extra load on the processing side

Then how are your units shooting at fake signatures?
As long as the signature is visible it's considered a unit. Sure it doesn't have weapons itself, but it can still be targeted. I'm not sure how much movement needs to be calculated for them or if they just copy the original, but targeting is already a very performance heavy calculation.

Jip could probably explain it better than myself, so this is a post I recall about this.

@jip said in Jamming ability should reset when vision of unit is lost:

@e33144211332424 said in Jamming ability should reset when vision of unit is lost:

though again having 100's of frigates do it every 5-10s sounds like a small tactical attack aimed at performance.

It is not.

The complexity (with respect to the input) is linear. We denote that as O(n) . Linear algorithms are usually a good candidate when you're on a budget (and we are).

Some of the performance improvements that we've been having is because there were operations implemented using a complexity O(nlg(n)) or O(n^2) while there was an O(n) or even an O(1) implementation possible. To give you an idea of the growth, see these graphs:

See also on desmos

To pick one x coordinate on the graph: if we have 100 (n = 100) units then it takes the algorithm:

• O(n) = 100 steps
• O(nlg(n)) = ~664 steps
• O(n^2) = 10.000 steps

This is by all means a simplification - there's still a constant factor that can make things expensive. But jamming is not one of those.

@comradestryker What are you trying to tell me?
This graph shows that all units resetting the jamming blips every 10 seconds is not very heavy, because it's just one short (constant complexity) calculation per unit, so it scales linearly with the number of units. targeting has to be calculated per unit, per weapon for each possible target. Assuming the number of weapons on a unit to be fixed (there are not that many differences between units), the function is still quadratic in unit count. So each additional blip will cause an additional computation step in each units(weapons) targeting calculation. Only if they are in range of course and the blips will probably disappear quickly, once the unit gets into range, but i would still expect some noticeable performance impacts.

@nex said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

@comradestryker What are you trying to tell me?

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding this chart and its contents, but based on this, Jamming isn't a load on the CPU or processing. Even with the new update having it refresh.

~ Stryker

@comradestryker No the concern was, that if you have to run a script (resetting the jamming blips) on (possibly) every unit it would be quite performance heavy. But since the calculation is simple and takes a constant (and small) amount of time per unit it won't have much of a performance impact. At least not the function that is resetting the jamming blips. The blips themselves might be more heavy, because it doesn't just add a small computation to each tick, but it adds one small computation per weapon that could aim at it, per tick. So putting jamming on units, that come in the hundreds in an average game will have a noticeable impact on performance.

@nex said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

@comradestryker No the concern was, that if you have to run a script (resetting the jamming blips) on (possibly) every unit it would be quite performance heavy. But since the calculation is simple and takes a constant (and small) amount of time per unit it won't have much of a performance impact. At least not the function that is resetting the jamming blips. The blips themselves might be more heavy, because it doesn't just add a small computation to each tick, but it adds one small computation per weapon that could aim at it, per tick. So putting jamming on units, that come in the hundreds in an average game will have a noticeable impact on performance.

I just double-checked this with @Jip, the question was "Would jamming (in large quantities) affect performance?"
And I quote their reply "Not to the degree that it would cause a (significant) slowdown."

They clarified that they are in fact, still entities, yes, but based on their direct reply - no, they would not affect performance as much as you may think.

~ Stryker

They would affect performance if you gave it to units that you spam a lot and are densely packed - ASF. As Nex has stated each weapon of each ASF needs to go through all possible targets within its range every x amount of seconds. If you increase the number of targets by introducing jamming blips you will notice the performance hit. The whole point of: Reducing target check intervals, simplifying target priorities and decreasing the formation density of ASF was to reduce the impact that weapons checking for targets have on the game during air battles. If you were to introduce jamming for ASF even with just a couple of blips you would probably increase the sim cost of ASF battles by between 50% to probably well over 100% depending on the number of blips.

OG post: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3808/weapon-target-check-intervals?_=1663704360328

Does the range of asf extend past their vision?

@veteranashe no, but vision is kinda fuzzy and i'm not sure if they start targeting/considering units before they get into range.