Chained Intercept Has Now Been Released

We are pleased to announce the release of our "chained intercept" implementation, which changes the order that intercepting ships move in to better match player expectations of how intercepting should work.

There were 2 main goals when working on this:

• Make the intercept mission more intuitive and logical for new (and not so new) players
• Minimize exploits of the mission and refocus it towards its original intent of pursuing ships, not evading them

How the the current (non-chained) intercept works

All intercepting ships move in order of ship ID, regardless of what they are intercepting. This allows for the "trick" where a higher ID ship can avoid being intercepted by a lower ID ship simply by using the intercept mission itself: first the lower ID ship moves to the higher ID, then the higher ID moves away to chase its target. This creates confusion and frustration for new players, and is not really in keeping with the purpose of an intercept mission, which is to try and catch your target.

How chained intercept works, and why it is preferred

If you are intercepting a ship that is not also intercepting a ship, there is no change. Your target will move in one of the earlier movement phases, and you will just move towards it in the intercept movement phase.

If you are intercepting a ship that is intercepting another ship, this is where the change comes into play. You will wait for your target to move before you pursue them. And any ships intercepting you will wait for you to move before they move, etc. This gives us a nicely ordered "chain" of interceptors, each waiting to see where their target goes before chasing after it.

By moving intercepting ships in this order (instead of by ship ID), we should avoid the frequently occurring beginner frustration of "I set my ship to intercept the enemy, and I flew to where they started the turn, while they moved to the planet I started at and attacked another one of my ships." You can no longer avoid being intercepted simply by having a higher ship ID and using the intercept mission yourself.

But it brings us one sticky situation - how we handle chains of interceptors that are actually loops. We decided to pick one ship in the loop to go first, and then have the other ships follow as if it were a normal chain described above. When picking that lead ship, first we look for any ships who's targets have become invalid (ie. by being cloaked or getting destroyed earlier in the turn). These are easy picks for ships that move first, as they don't move at all. If there are none of those, we look at ships using a concept we call "ship agility", with the least agile ship going first. Primarily, we look at "time to target" (based on distance and speed), with ships having a longer "time to target" being considered less agile. Other factors can include lower warp factors, higher masses, and less fuel all making a ship less agile.

Our thought is that loops of interceptors should be a rare and mainly accidental occurrence, as long as there is no easy advantage gained from forming them. We looked at a good number of different options on how to handle this, but think this implementation makes exploiting loops much more difficult, while still giving logical results in the vast majority of cases.

Chained intercept will be used in all Single Player Training Levels, New Recruit, Beginner, and Bleeding Edge Games to start, as well as being available as a setting for custom games. We hope after an initial trial period to move it into all standard games.