I agree that the AI needs just a little more work, but IC is working on it, and i have faith that they will pull it off. You should have seen the beta 1 AI

What you are referring to is AI threat assessment, and AI fleet managment. I can see how the cap ships would go for whatever gauss turrets are in the way (for the most part cap ships can take quite a pounding). However you are right the frigate AI (minus the LRM's) should try to avoid gauss guns at all cost. The LRM's, and light carriers should use their range advantage to its fullest.

There is no easy answer as in how to fix this. As a player i would prolly micro the whole battle to avoid the gauss guns altogether, but this is a non-player managed situation. Which is the heart of what IC wants to do with sins by making multiple hands free fleet battles possible. Dev's any opinions on this?

The problem is, if you make the combat AI too "smart" and allow it to around your defenses, then what's the point of even having them? It's very rare to have a planet that you can't jump into without engaging the full defensive line. So, if you make the AI all go around (or Cobalts go around while LRMs engage, whatever), then that makes the job too easy for the attacking player and almost impossible for the defender without having a mobile fleet around the same planet.

So yeah, on the one hand it's silly that Cobalts rush in front to get shredded by the gauss platforms, but on the other hand if every ship that isn't so effective against them goes around automatically, gauss platforms become largely pointless if focused in one spot (and ineffective if spread out too much).

On the flip side, if the AI knew how to avoid Gauss platforms, it still probably wouldn't be smart enough to gauge the friendly fleet strength vs the number of present turrets, and you could actually funnel the AI where you want it to go. Don't want them touching your shipyards? Just throw 2-3 Gauss around the the AI will avoid them. Same with your research stations and mines.

Very tricky beast..

I know the point you're trying to make, and generaly I agree with it. But:



Letting the AI bypass defenses won't slow anything down long enough until a relief fleet arrives, really. Your statement is true, but that's done by making defenses destroyable without that much hassle, like LRMs and bombers. They can't shred what they can't touch. So making the AI send in capital ships first to draw the gauss platforms' fire and *then* sending in cobalts so they wouldn't be harrassed would be a perfectly reasonable AI change in that regard, but getting the AI to bypass defenses entirely is a bit much, I think.



There's a difference between 'necessary' and 'fruitless'. Right now, generally, it's not necessary as it is. The AI knows to focus fire on defenses, and usually it picks the closer ones. There are other things that could be done to make it a little less necessary (better ability auto targetting, for one thing) while still giving a slight 'edge' to people who can/want to micromanage a bit. The gap between the two right now is fairly large, as evidenced things like the Cobalts charging first and drawing all the Gauss fire and getting shredded in the process, while any player who micromanaged the battle wouldn't send Cobalts against them until they at least had a capital ship targeted. And yes, that gap can and should become narrower, but it should never be eliminated completely.

Making the AI too smart will take any sort of skill out of combat, all it will boil down to is who has more of what ship. I think of micromanaging as sort of being the general of a battle. Without the general, your troops can still fight pretty effectively, but with the general's presense they gain that last bit of organization that they don't have on their own. Same here, without micromanaging fleets should behave intelligently, but not by default use pretty advanced player strategies, otherwise what's to separate a human from AI? Or a skillful human player from a less skilled?

There should always be a slight advantage to letting people micromanage battles, in my opinion.

Edit: Using this same situation to create an example of a slight advantage. If you let your AI engage defenses, they can destroy them smartly with no/few losses (assuming you bring the necessary ships, like Gardas for enemy hangars), and then move on to other targets of the system. If you micromanage, you can guide your fleet around the defenses with no/few losses and engage other targets. Both ways get you past the defenses, but your slight advantage for micromanaging is you have a little more time to destroy the infrastructure before the enemy fleet arrives.

It sounds like we're talking about the same thing pretty much, we just maybe have different ideas of what an 'uber' AI may be. I fully agree that the combat AI needs to stop doing stupid stuff and fight smart so you can manage multiple battles easily.

I just think that the limit to the smart AI should be to be able to knock out defenses in an intelligent way like players do now, and maneuvering around should be left to players. Having the AI destroy defenses would only take a little while longer than bypassing, so in the scheme of things if you're managing multiple battles it wouldn't matter if AI destroys them or bypasses. But the attacker already has enough of an advantage without a defending fleet in the system that allowing it to level all the infrastructure before the defending fleet arrives while the player behind the attack has to do absolutely nothing lopsides it a bit much. If you leave the maneuvering to humans, at least they'll have to focus on that for a little while, and give the defended a little more time to react.

It's suicide, they run in and engage the static defenses before killing the ships that run to engage them, and they engage the wrong ones. Ship to ship isn't intolerable though, I usually just set mine on hold position till the enemy fleets are gone, move a kol forward for a meat shield, and set them to gravity well.

That's a crazy idea, crazy enough that I like it. I think the devs are very aware of the limitations of the current combat AI (note: everything I'm talking about in this thread is combat AI only that kicks in when your fleet needs to attack something, not the general empire building AI), but it will put it all into one spot so to speak. I think I'll do that

Just start a large enough game, research all the ships, save, load so the replay starts from the time I'm ready for major combat.. and let the chuckles commence!

We are very much aware of the AI issues and as we have stated, Beta 3 is a technical test of multiplayer. Gameplay issues are not going to get much attention until Beta 4.

Yes, that's exactly what we mean. AI is considered a gameplay issue.

because blair is tired of having poo flung at him by his nephew

Aaaah. Flung poo does suck.