I mentioned this before, I don't fault the AI at all for wanting to survive.
Well, I suppose this is largely academic in any case, since Alex evidently already has decided that the phase ship AI needed revisiting, but I, however, can fault the AI for this.
Particularly since the behavior in question appears to be of somewhat...
dubious value for survival when the ship is in particular danger, and is more likely to result in particularly dangerous situations arising because the ship isn't contributing much to a fight. That phase ships are largely a nuisance that you can mostly ignore until the rest of their fleet is sufficiently obliterated and that, when put in a position of singular peril, likely resulting from the fact that they can be mostly ignored until the rest of their fleet is sufficiently obliterated, they quite reliably huddle in p-space
waiting to die is, in my estimation, a
significant AI problem.
Because, ultimately, the purpose of the AI is not to survive, but to provide engaging opponents for the player to fight against and reliable enough allies to support their space murder hoboing; the defensiveness of the generic AI helps pull this off for (most) ships with shields but I contend the same cannot be said about phase ships. That same defensiveness effectively neuters them. I'm not saying that they shouldn't try to avoid damage, but rather that the way in which they try and do so makes them contribute significantly less (which ultimately is likely to put them in more danger) and, worse, makes them uninteresting to fight against--though it does make them very good roadblocks against other AI ships. I don't think that's super desirable either, though, especially since in both ways (as a roadblock and as a target) it's a fairly reliable way to exploit the weaknesses of the AI.
Doing stuff which makes phase ships vulnerable while in phase or making them less immediately intangible might be something which can be used in conjunction with AI changes to reduce the exploitablity of the AI, but on it's own is, I would say, likely just to sidestep the problem and (depending on the option taken) excessively nerf phase ships and/or possibly end up punishing the player for not having/finding the right weapon to deal with annoying intangible spaceships. Also, if memory serves, the actually invisible spaceships things already been tried and discarded, essentially because it was too much work making the AI pretend it didn't know the phasing ship was there and wasn't very compelling in any case.
Yeesh, this topic has kinda sent me off on a tear, hasn't it? But this has been a thing annoying me about phase ships for a while now, so I guess it had to spill out some time. Uh, sorry.
