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[xenoargh]

I've written a Broadside AI for the next build of the AI mod, accessible via a Hull Mod.  It was pretty easy to write a simple one that handles the base case (i.e., which is the "strong" side, or handling two equal "strong" sides by engaging in a loop pattern).  It won't be available until I get more feedback about the AI Mod, though, as I'd prefer to get the bugs out of the core of it before releasing new features.

[Dri]

Yeah, failure to close in on the target is a major issue even with vanilla ships - I made a post awhile back about an Enforcer build that would stay out of weapon range for no good reason. It is infuriating to see and apparently it never happens to Alex which is also rather annoying.

[Morrokain]

As I mentioned earlier, according to version control, I'm not seeing any changes in the files I believe are relevant. But I could be forgetting about something else that factors in here and not looking at that, so I'm guessing that's what's happening here.

Obviously I *could* dig into this and figure it out 100%, but it's a question of how much time I want to spend investigating.

(Edit: the main thing, from my pov, is that what's in the dev version is working well. The rest is fairly academic... I mean, I did check into the change history etc, but digging further doesn't seem worthwhile.)

Yeah, failure to close in on the target is a major issue even with vanilla ships - I made a post awhile back about an Enforcer build that would stay out of weapon range for no good reason.

Interesting discussion here and just wanted to chime in and say I have myself experienced the "failure to ever engage for no real reason" issue that others are reporting (though fixing the AI issue with over targeting drones helped a lot and it happens much less often) and this along with the broadside issue reported here suggests that there may be some kind of difference between the dev AI and the AI of released versions. So maybe at least worth a cursory glance into those other things because there may be something that's not very obvious going on there that affects things on our end. Hard to say because as a whole the AI is great there are just some cases in the larger battles where it can stagnate because ships are unwilling to just trade out damage and endlessly circle each other waiting for an "opening" that will never realistically happen because the fleets are evenly matched and no one is willing to take the hull damage.

That is a downside of inherently cautious AI. You can have a couple "unfun" results in situations that theoretically should be the most fun.

**important note** My experiences with this issue concerned modded ships only, however, and so holds less weight than those experiencing issues with vanilla ships. Just figured I would report it because it can be frustrating when it happens. There is also an easy workaround. Give any assault ships aggressive AI captains. Then you never have to worry about them not engaging 

[Goumindong]

Okay so I decided to collect more data to assess the extend of the issue rather than trying to quantify some "impressions". Turned out that the recorded battle was better than average for that loadout, BUT the AI behaved much better when I tried another one.

...

Interesting - really does make me think the AI is different in the dev build.

Something else to consider as a potential issue. Broadsiding ships cannot as effectively make use of strafing behavior. From a technical point if the ship is, at any point, trying to "strafe away", its going to show its front(or back) to the enemy and then it will decide it needs to bring its guns to bear and so will "ping pong" as soon as it decides maybe it needs to strafe away from the dominators main guns.

Ideally a broadside ship won't be strafing to avoid fire at all, but will be burning normally. It might be worth it in a general sense to see if there is a preference towards strafing to avoid fire/enemy ships or burning to avoid fire/enemy ships. I have noticed that many AI ships, regardless of their configuration or what they're doing (unless in full retreat) attempt to avoid fire by strafing. Simply tweaking the AI in general so that the ai is more likely to avoid fire by normal controls might fix broadsiding issues. Alternately giving broadside ships orders to not strafe might have the proper effect to get them to actually fly in circles

One way to test this might be to see if you can add a dummy ship for the dominator to fire at so that the dominator isn't forcing evasion behavior on the part of the broadside ship.