threat - treshold calculation for ai ships

[EliteMikko]

Hey

I've got to a point of having asgards going for xenon sectors. As i'm attacking several sectors same time I noticed that i cant leave even 5 star pilot attacking station as it doesnt react to arrived K blasting it with anything but turrets.

So I'd like to see better pilots do this threat calculation on attacking ship - if it's dangerous enough (like K) it goes over treshold and captain starts to attack it overriding the given attack station command.

Another thing I noticed with asgards and ai attacking stations, especially xenon def station, their shots tend to leave a tad short. And then the main weapon is shot on move, hitting like 50 % of the burst. This means I can take out 1 station out with one asgard by myself and 2 ai asgards may have done like 20 % of damage to another station.

-M-

[KextV8]

AI pilots are just plain bad.

I'm not sure if it's intentional because they want combat to be easy so trade players don't get upset, because they want the player to feel powerful, because they don't want to take the computational resources it would require to make the AI pilots work better, some combination of the above, or other.

Afterall, better decision making would require more cpu cycles, which this game is already running up against. So its kind of a zero sum scenario. They could make the ai better, but where do they take the cpu cycles from to do that, and does doing so make the game as a whole better, or does it hit other parts of the game too heavily.

I don't have an answer. I'm mostly a combat pilot so I'd be perfectly fine with the economy modeling going into full cheat dummy mode to recover computational power and make the combat better. People who love the trade empire aspect of the game probably wouldn't agree with me.

[Alan Phipps]

Another issue might be that while breaking off the Xenon station attack and manoeuvring awkwardly to meet any and every incoming Xenon capital, the cumbersome Asgard strays and gets too close to the station it was attacking and is melted by the station defences. It might have been better for it to concentrate safely on the station as ordered and allow its flank escort to worry about incoming enemy ships (you did give it a suitable escort screen, didn't you?)