STO - Admiralty System Optimizer

[intrinsical]

So I think I just found a bug in the way Admiralty System calculates Critical Rating. I've documented the bug in STO's bug reporting forum. Basically, Critical Multiplier bonuses gets undercounted when a player slots two or three ships that have the "x Critical Multiplier from Eng|Tac|Sci|All Stats|Events" special ability.

Now on my side I am wondering if I should reproduce the bug faithfully in the Optimizer so the Critical Ratings are identical to the game's bugged calculation, or if I should just wait for Cryptic to fix the bug. What do you guys think?

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Slightly off-topic...
@intrinsical , would it be possible and do you have the time to make another program? I was thinking of a good skill planer, that let's you shuffle skill points around before locking in and gives a complete preview of how each choice effects base stats maybe?
Just because the final build for holodeck likely will not include this and transfering your character to tribble and reloading the entire game each time you want a preview on the test server is extremely bothersome.

 

[intrinsical]

The thing is, STO Academy already has a skill planner that is a lot more comprehensive. It also lets you pick a ship and equip it, station space boffs, pick specializations and traits, equip your ground character and away team boffs too. Yes, the skill planner will need updating but they've already invested a lot of effort into their planner. I am pretty they will update their skill planning section in due time.

 

[intrinsical]

Updates - 2 March 2016 (Version 1.00)

Download link: sto-aso.zip

ASO has been in development for 4 months and have been used by many players without any major issues. Together with the new features included in this version, I consider ASO to be feature-complete; I have added all the features I had planned to include. As a result, I am happy to announce the release of the Admiralty System Optimizer Version 1.00!

• ASO now has an icon. It's the Star Trek logo overlaid with admiral rank pips.
• Support for Critical Chance Optimization!
  • Every assignment now comes with a Critical Chance slider bar. This slider allows you to control the desired critical chance level, from 0% up to 80%.
    
  • ASO will now attempt to select ships that will reach the desired critical chance %.
    
  • For those who are interested in knowing the in-depth reasons for the maximum of 80% crit chance, please scroll down to the bottom of this post.
• Support for hot-keys
  • Alt-L - Position ASO window on left side of the screen.
  • Alt-R - Position ASO window on right side of the screen.
  • Alt-C - Position ASO window in the center.
    
  • Alt-S - Toggles "stay on top" mode.
  • Alt-1 - Optimize 1 assignment.
  • Alt-2 - Optimize 2 assignments.
  • Alt-3 - Optimize 3 assignments.
  • Alt-P - Plan assignment(s).
  • Alt-Comma - View previous planned solution.
  • Alt-B - View best planned solution.
  • Alt-Period - View next planned solution.
  • Alt-D - Deploy ships.
• Updated Ships
  • V.S.S. Tanius
  • APU Cruiser
  • Malon Battlecruiser
  • Kazon Raider
• Known outstanding issues
  • Stats for the Fleet D'deridex Warbird Battle Cruiser is out of date.
  • Special ability for the Jem'Hadar Strike Ship is out of date.
    
  • Critical Rating calculation in ASO can occasionally be different from STO's by 1
    
  • When the assignment has the "Borg Transwarp Gateway!" event, Critical Rating calculation is off by 100.

Critical Rating and Critical Chance
Critical Rating is primarily derived from any "overflow" or surplus stats, for example when you send a very strong ship on a simple admiralty assignment. Suppose you have an assignment that requires 20 Eng, 20 Tac, 20 Sci. If you send ships that have a combined stat of 25 Eng, 25 Tac, 25 Sci, you have a total surplus stat of 15. This 15 surplus stat becomes your Basic Critical Rating value. Certain ships have special abilities that will further enhance this Critical Rating value. Also, some special events have an innate +Critical Rating bonus that will further increase your Critcal Rating for the assignment.

Your chance of getting a critical success on an assignment is dependent on the Critical Rating value. The more Critical Rating you have, the larger the Critical Chance. However, there is a built in exponential mechanic where you need an ever increasing amounts of Critical Rating to get a larger Critical Chance. The chart below shows the Critical Rating required for an example assignment (20 Eng, 20 Tac, 20 Sci).

To get 10% Critical Chance, you just need 13 Critical Rating. To get 50% Critical Chance, you need 120 Critical Rating. However to get a 80% Critical Chance on the assignment, you need a whopping 480 Critical Rating. Beyond 80% Critical Chance, the Critical Rating requirements get larger at an ever increasing (exponential) rate. In fact, it is impossible to get a 100% Critical Chance as you will need infinite Critical Rating.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

It's like a Warp Chart

 

[intrinsical]

Just one hour after posting v1.0, Cryptic announces two new epic ship cards and a whole new set of Romulan assignments. My job is never done!

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Haha. What did you expect? It is the same logic that let's Cryptic make the Respec officer on the starbase redundant just when we are about to unlock him finally after years of upgrading.
Is it really that much work to add one more ships?
And the Romulan assignments are just a copy & paste job, right?

 

[intrinsical]

Is it really that much work to add one more ships?

It's not much work IF I have the ship's stats. Last week, Cryptic changed the admiralty stats for the Fleet D'deridex and Jem'Hadar Strike Ship. I have been begging in-game ever since then and so far I still don't have any luck getting the updated stats.

And the Romulan assignments are just a copy & paste job, right?

If its anything like the Federation and Klingon campaigns, the Romulan Admiralty Campaign will have its own set of brand new assignments. Common assignments will be easy to spot and update. However even playing 10 characters daily, it may still take a week for me to stumble upon a brand new "Very Rare" assignment.

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

^ I know that it was planned to be with the Federation and Klingon Campaigns when they launched. Yet to try any of them.

 

[intrinsical]

Download link: sto-aso.zip

Updates - 2 March 2016 (Version 1.01)

- Added V.S.S. Tanius
- Added R.R.W. Zdenia

Updates - 10 March 2016 (Version 1.02)

- Fixed Mirror Guardian Cruiser (T6). It is now a Rare ship
- Fixed Aelahl Light Warbird Battlecruiser (T6). It's special ability is now +15 All Stats when Alone
- Added a missing assignment, Negotiate for Return of Salvage

 

[intrinsical]

Download link: sto-aso.zip

Updates - 8 April 2016 (Version 1.0.3)

• Added Autocomplete functionality for Assignment and Event comboboxes. You can now type in the first few characters of the assignment or event to jump directly to it.
• Added Phoenix Replica Smallcraft and Assimilated Assault Cruiser (T6)
• Added Romulan Campaign Assignments.
  
  • There may be assignments missing from the Romulan Campaign.
    
  • If you find a missing assignment, please send me the following assignment information to @intrinsical via STO's in-game mail system.
    • Assignment Name
    • Rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare or Very Rare)
    • Eng, Tac, Sci requirements
    • Maintenance duration (X hours, Y minutes)

Note: I had hoped to include automatic software update functionality in this updated, but it currently still has a few major bugs and missing functionality. So instead of pushing out a buggy auto-update, I have decided to delay the roll out till the next version.

 

[intrinsical]

Download Link: sto-aso.zip

Updates - 26 April 2016 (Version 1.0.4)

• Added new Na'khul lockbox ships
  • Na'kuhl Acheros Battlecruiser (T6)
  • Na'kuhl Daemosh Science Vessel (T6)
  • Na'kuhl Tadaari Raider (T6)
• Added missing assignments
  • Escort Colonial Convoy through Pirate Territory
  • Evacuate Refugees from Destroyed Colony
    
  • Field Test New Singularity Drive
  • Protect Allied Diplomats Marked for Assassination
  • Supply Run to Reman Settlement
  • "Diplomatic Show of Force" has been renamed to "Provide Diplomatic Show of Force"

 

[TheRoyalFamily]

Could I make some suggestions/requests/observations?
1. Could you make it so it weighs 101% success higher than 99.5%? The optimizer will pick three under before five over, and that's kinda annoying.
2. It will put in "ignores +/-" ships if there is an event that lowers stats (like Miracle Worker), if that ship will get closer to 100% than some other options. This seems like a real waste to me. The Phoenix Replica shuttle in particular really messes with a lot of events, and will often enough eat up most or all of the ten or so options you let the program give us.
3. If an assignment gets into negative stats with an event, the optimizer treats it like it was the normal stat, rather than zero like the game does.

 

[intrinsical]

1. Could you make it so it weighs 101% success higher than 99.5%? The optimizer will pick three under before five over, and that's kinda annoying.
2. It will put in "ignores +/-" ships if there is an event that lowers stats (like Miracle Worker), if that ship will get closer to 100% than some other options. This seems like a real waste to me. The Phoenix Replica shuttle in particular really messes with a lot of events, and will often enough eat up most or all of the ten or so options you let the program give us.
3. If an assignment gets into negative stats with an event, the optimizer treats it like it was the normal stat, rather than zero like the game does.

Since version 1.0, a new scoring ship formula was added. This formula is not only much simpler but has also proven to be far better at avoiding the problems you've listed. Note that ASO only uses the new formula when you set the desired critical rating for an assignment above 0%. If critical rating is set at 0%, the old scoring formula will still be used.

For those who are interested in the details, both formulas are used to score how well a set of ships matches an assignment's requirements. An example of a ship-set would be the Delta Flyer, Presidio Command Battlecruiser (T6) and U.S.S. Rhode Island.

Under the old ship-set scoring formula, the ship-set scores well if the set is able to match the assignment's requirements. Which means the ship-set must match 3 conditions, namely the assignment's ENG, TAC and SCI requirements. This isn't an easy requirement to meet and with my Fed characters who have 80+ ships, only 2-5 ship-sets actually come close to matching these requirements. And out of this small handful of ship-sets, there are invariably a few that comes in a few points shy of meeting the assignment's requirement. This happens despite of having x3 weighting against "coming in at 99.5%" of the assignment's requirements.

The new formula came about because ASO had added support for hitting specific critical rating values. So instead of having to hit ENG, TAC, SCI targets, there's only one target now - critical rating value. This turned out to offer several huge and unexpected advantages.

The biggest advantage is really that a ship-set has to exceed the assignment requirements before it could even match the critical rating value requirement. Because of this, I could give a huge x10 negative weight to ship-sets that don't even meet the assignment requirements. There are other advantages such as a much simpler formula that mostly only consider critical rating and a much bigger number of ship-sets that meet the simplified requirement. All of which greatly reduces the chance of problems 2 & 3 actually being a real problem.

So all things considered, the new scoring formula turned out to be a much greater boon than I had anticipated. It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering removing the old scoring formula and just stick with this new one.

 

[TheRoyalFamily]

Oh hey, an easy fix that's already there and only requires me to click an extra box. Why didn't I even think to try that?
Though, you say the new formula only cares about the crit chance. Can't that be reached without fulfilling all of the assignment requirements, especially if there is an event that gives a ton of bonus crit? Or does your formula only take crit into account after fulfilling all of the base requirements?

 

[thealexofevil]

Your numbers are off for the R.R.W. Zdenia. You have the last two numbers switched.

In the software, it is:

In-game, it is something else:

 

[TheRoyalFamily]

You can change that yourself: you just open up the relevant spreadsheet in your favorite spreadsheet program, and modify it yourself. (If you get the choice, use Unicode 8, I believe.) Though I'm sure intrinsical appreciates knowing this stuff.

 

[intrinsical]

I had gotten the stats directly from Borticus and did a double check when season 11.5 launched, but I guess it was stealth changed later. Anyway, the next version of ASO would contain the change.

There is no ETA on when the next version is going to be released as my primary hard disk of 6 years just died last month. So I've had to reinstall the entire OS and all my programs first before I can go back to any code development work.

 

[intrinsical]

Just a head's up. I will be releasing a new version of ASO some time this week. I just need data on all the Agents of Yesterday and Kelvin Lockbox ships.

In other news, the automatic updater code is finally at a stage where it's mostly working. The only potential showstopper is that it can't update itself. I'm hoping I can do without that functionality... fingers crossed.

 

[TheRoyalFamily]

Are there going to be any code changes, or just adding ship cards?