Good game, poor Fleet AI

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?

a little = a lot

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..

The point of defenses are not to shred attackers so you don't need to invest in a fleet. The point of defenses is to slow down attackers until a relieve fleet arrives and then to help the defending fleets.

Also you can already do that when you micromanage your fleets. But the devs stated repeatedly that they don't want micro to be necessary, so AI improvement in this area needs to be done.

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.

As i pointed out earlier the dev's want to have multiple simultaneous fleet battles happening at the same time in the full game. It will be impossible for a player to manage multiple battles so the AI MUST do it for them. Which means the AI MUST become smarter than what it is now. If a human player does a certain tactic like move colbalts out of the way of gauss guns then the AI should be able to do the same. As Vandenberg said the planetary defenses are meant only to slow down your opponent until a fleet arrives (if possible) to relive, and re-enforce them. Sometimes a fleet will make it in time to save the world, sometimes not. That is the nature of war.

If you recall the beta 2 pirate AI. The pirates would avoid your defenses altogether, and start hitting your assets like mines, trade ships, dock's, etc, and start bombing your planet right from the get go. The pirate AI was the true threat to you in beta 2. This is something like how the regular AI should be.

In a player managed battle the player will always have the advantage no matter how good the AI is, because a good player knows what to target, or avoid. When to run. When to stay, and fight. The AI is only partially capable of doing this right now (it has the running away aspect down pact). Targeting, and chasing down the very rear gauss gun of an echelon of 10 isn't a very smart thing to do no matter what ship type. We aren't talking about making the AI uber, and impossible to beat. It will never happen unless you make it cheat. We just want the AI to quit doing incredibly stupid things like in the original topic, or sending civilian ships into enemy territory, making LRMs engage at point blank range, using autocast raze planet, or other ability's when there is a big enemy fleet in the cap ships path, or targeting the furthest target from you when there is a whole horde of bad guys shooting at you very close by.

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.

I would like to see an all AI managed battle system put to the test. Play a few games, but DO NOT micromanage your fleets. In fact do nothing at all except send them where you want them to go. Let the AI do the fleet managing for you, and write down both the good, and bad points of the battles. Win, or lose... better yet save the replays. They should be quite entertaining

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.

I agree completely and the devs stated there are BIG changes for AI ahead. I'm pretty sure fleet/ship command will be one of them. I'd like to see a much more lively movement of frigates A LOT. They are supposed to be fast and maneuvrable but use none of it. Yet.

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!

Isn't that basically what Multi did in the game he posted video of? In part 4&5 I saw next to no fleet micro, he just dealt with the strategy. The problem is that he never took enough time to watch and evaluate the battles.

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.

But isn't AI a technical issue?

Unless you mean technical as in connecting computers technical

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

nice new avatar, and ok

(But why are you so eager to defeat that stupid fighter goes after carriers bug?)

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

Thanks. I actually got it off WinCustomize.com.

And what eet said.

Aaaah. Flung poo does suck.

actually it just sticks, and it is quite hard to get off once it dries