Fighter ai

from Sins Forums
While I find the battles very cool looking and fun and all that other junk, I find that one thing pulls me away from the management of my empire, even when I can't afford distractions: the fighter ai. Put simply, whenever I enter a battle where I have fighters, I need to micromanage them far more than I should. Why? In a defensive battle, this problem is especially pronounced, since the enemy fleet comes into the system, my fighters decide to attack a ship (all good and well for now), but when the enemy launches their fighters and bombers, my fighters will blithely ignore them as the enemy fighters eviscerate my bombers, instead of reacting and shooting down the enemy fighters and letting my bombers do their job. Because of this, all my fighters and bombers will get shot down if I don't drop any strategic tasks and immediately manage my fighters. If this were fixed, it would make commanding a battle a far more interesting choice between getting just that little bit more performance from your fleets or managing your empire on a strategic scale. As it is, I find that it isn't much choice at all. Otherwise, I mostly like the ai, and it would be able to perform well enough to make multiple fleets easy to manage for those of us who aren't devs or lucky enough to have four arms and two monitors. It shouldn't be that hard a tweak to implement, and it'll have major benefits.
5,510 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
It was mentioned in another thread I believe that the devs are aware of the poor target choices of fighters and intend to prioritize enemy bombers for them. In general, everyone knows the AI needs lots of work but we're not supposed to expect very much improvement in that area until beta 4, since this phase of the beta is testing MP issues primarily!
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Otherwise, I mostly like the ai


You're joking, right?

The path finding is very bad. Trying to fight around resource asteroids makes your ship collide and get stuck with the asteroids. It sometimes takes minutes for them to get free again.

I gave move order to fly to the other side of the planet. That's how it did it:


Again:


Giving move orders to already moving ships makes them make a full stop, reorienting and then moving again. Especially very nice when you try to flee from the enemy, ie. certain death.

Giving orders to move and then orders to jump out is a bad idea. Here you see why:


Ships and especially fighters/bombers are unable to intercept other ships, they just tailor behind, never reaching them.

If you give a ship a mover order which makes the straight line going through a planet, it tries to do so.

Ships autocast their abilities (I'm looking at you Kol's shield ability.) as long as they've antimatter. It doesn't matter if the enemy is next to them or on the other side of the grav well, thus making autocast in a multiplayer match useless and forces you to babysit your capital ships.


Ship AI and pathfinding AI overall need much improvement, not just the fighter AI.


Even though, AFAIK the devs are aware of this issues and promised a better AI for beta 4.
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
In the ideal situation you would have 2 primary choices with your fighters:

-Attack enemy fighters
-Ignore enemy fighters and attack enemy bombers

Once the enemy fighters and bombers are gone, I would like them to attack enemy carriers then enemy hangars inorder to maintain air superiority.

Finally attack enemy ships in which they appear to be less effective than bombers as they should be.

They seem to be really attracted to trade ships, which is really distracting during a battle. This would probaly be one of last choices for them.

The game developers in another thread explained a way that fighters can hover around your ships as defense, I would like to see this as a clear option.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah, when I said AI I meant battle AI, not pathfinding (stupid me saying stupid things) , but still, the pathfinding is pretty hideous at times, even though I haven't noticed any of those hideous circles, but I'm still in the habit of manually giving pathfinding after a total war bender, so I haven't noticed anything as odd as your screenshots. Also, in the current AI's defense, I think that some abilities are impossible to run autocast on without knowing the players' plans (cough, armistice, cough), and most of the abilities autocast at pretty reasonable times, but if fighter behavior (fighters and bombers should jump to the head of the priority queue immediately, and it'll be just fine) and the autocast and pathfinding flaws are fixed the AI will be quite good. Target selection seems to be generally good and the AI performs pretty reasonably at the strategic level, from what I've seen.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah, the AI isn't as bad as I make it sometimes (hey, the AI's focus fire destroyed a capital ship of mine once!) but that the combination of it's flaws (pathfinding, priority attacking, autocast) make it pretty bad.

There are other RTS with worse AI and worse unit behavior but with a higher budget, but still, I'm a sucker for good AIs, so I'll whine until I get one.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
I'm personally a fan of games that let me just have control of the force. No AI is going to do anywhere near as good a job of running a fleet as I am unless there are no tactics in the game whatsoever.


So what I want is a responsive AI that does what I tell it, when I tell it, how I tell it.


Sure... many people won't be able to function in that environment... well, give them some nanny AI to babysit the player then. Because that's really what those AI's are for... babysitting the player. Personally, I don't need a babysitter.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
I find the A.I. entirly useless. Not to say I want to have to command all my fighters manually, that would just take away from the time and tactics I can spend on the more important ships. I find that the A.I. is not smart enough to take a planet much less a star system. Their main tactic is to enter my grav. well and scatter, attacking different targets without much of an objective. I just think the A.I. has a long way to go before the game really becomes a challenge.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
I agree with you fully Vanderburg.

The AI in general needs improvement, I am beggining to see more and more and more of the AI expansion problem as well.