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[stormbringer951]

This is a problem I notice in vanilla and modded games fairly often, to a greater and lesser degree. Today while watching the tournament I found a very good example of where I think it goes wrong:

Watch from 1:50:00 ish, you can see the Haze (with supporting escorts) in the bottom left, a cruiser which comprises a very significant element of one fleet's firepower (bonus points for having three wings escorting it), chasing a frigate around while the rest of its fleet faces the larger enemy fleet alone.

I am sure this behaviour isn't caused by the scenario but is just a more prominent version of what I see in vanilla a lot. Ships, sometimes a significant percentage of your force, will chase lone enemies that are faster and hard for them to kill far away from the rest of the battle. When I am using a fast frigate fleet or a fleet with a very powerful capital/cruiser flown by the AI, I feel like I have to often check to make sure that significant elements of my fleet isn't chasing a single irrelevant enemy ship far away from the battle.

On the player's side, this makes ships like a Wolf with graviton beam/tac lasers and speed/range mods very good, since it will usually draw off several time it's own worth in slower enemy frigates which struggle to break its shields. You can see this with any fast ship that can be fit with a lot of beams - the Hecate from the Ship Weapon Pack mod is also a very excellent example if you want to see this behaviour replicated when you fight as an early game player fleet vs a slightly larger pirate frigate fleet. Changing this might make the game harder but it will reduce the micro load on the player by not having to tab out to make sure that important and powerful/lots of ships aren't trying to focus targets that are just fast enough to back away from them indefinitely.

I feel like ship decisionmaking should be more aware of and incentivize ships to stay in proximity to other elements of your fleet/the main concentration of the enemy fleet. Slower more powerful ships should ward off faster enemy ships that are trying to flank, but shouldn't go chasing it very very far away from the rest of its fleet, making it a proxy win for the faster weak ship and a loss for the fleet that has more powerful vessels chasing small ones off into the middle of nowhere.

EDIT: Someone pointed out to me that this is a good behaviour in certain cases like when you need to win by causing a CR rundown to zero on fast kitey ships, but in many cases for player fleets they will be fighting outnumbered and may need the chasing ships to win the main battle like in the example video so this behaviour still seems suboptimal.

[Sy]

agreed.

at least with size/power differences that large, ships should be less willing to chase something smaller. a single destroyer chasing a single frigate might be okay (although still not idea if it's not fast enough to actually kill it) but a cruiser probably shouldn't. and a capital ship probably shouldn't try to chase a destroyer.

[Thaago]

I will also add that in a lot of cases, the chasing ship will be drawn away from the rest of the battle, but will be unwill to press the advantage and actually engage the ship its chasing. There are times when I will switch command over to the offending ship, turn weapons onto autofire, and simply pilot straight at the enemy ship until its dead.

Perhaps the chasing can be officer personality dependent: an aggressive officer would chase and try to kill, while a cautious officer would prefer to stay with other allied ships.

[Alex]

Hmm - maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this exactly the sort of thing assignments are for?

[Tartiflette]

I think the core of the issue is that the commander AI pretty much never rescind orders. Maybe it would be better if all assignments were to be reconsidered at regular intervals: a ship targeted by an attack order didn't took any hull damage for a minute? Better cancel that for now.

[Inventor Raccoon]

Yeah, does the AI consider how successful it's commands are? Maybe it should reconsider what it's doing if what it's asking isn't being completed. If a ship is trying to fight something but isn't able to damage it, reconsider and assign a faster ship to replace it. If a ship is trying to reach a point but can't because of enemy contacts, reconsider, and send another ship to assist. If a control point isn't being captured because the units assigned are occupied with hostiles, send a ship that has less enemies in the way.

[stormbringer951]

Hmm - maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this exactly the sort of thing assignments are for?

Assignments do help. However, I don't think it really solves the problem for me:

1. The Ship AI is conservative by design in the risks it takes in combat, but when several ships chase a faster enemy ships that they judge weak and killable, the ship AI is taking a significant risk on behalf of the fleet. It is effectively establishing local superiority against a straggler to kill it, but the ship AI is conservative enough in actual combat that it often will not be able to do so if the other ship is survivable due to being slightly faster or has much better flux-pushing efficiency due to good shield eff, kinetic burst, etc. If a key ship or too many of my frigate/fighter screen run off to chase opponents they think they can kill safely and then spend three minutes not killing it, the risk doesn't pay off and it leave my fleet in the lurch.

2. Sensible use of assignments does mostly fix this. However, that means I need to interrupt combat to check my overview to make sure my ships are doing sensible things and aren't splitting away form the rest of my fleet. I mostly don't bother to micromanage to this extent often because I don't care too much if I lose ships and I quite enjoy replacing them, but on the times I've had very rare and valuable ships, assigning my fleet to escort each other in pairs all the time and having to keep an eye on the frigates in my fleet seems too much like no-brainer rote micromanagement that I do for every battle to make sure my ships don't run off and do silly things when not under adult supervision, as opposed to carefully implementing an overall strategy or seizing a sudden tactical opportunity that I feel is the design goal of the command point system.

3. Good use of assignments is all well and good for the player, but the enemy admiral AI doesn't understand when a ship it calculates as weaker and outnumbered is surprisingly durable, it is not breaking even but actively losing because of the opportunity cost, which makes survivable skirmishers much more powerful than their paper performance suggests. When you are lucky, an allied beam-fit Wolf or Hecate will draw away large numbers of ships and make winning the battle much much easier. I recently had a tac-laser fitted frigate tangle with a destroyer and two enemy frigates alone for several minutes while they only managed to moderately damage it, while I killed off the other half of their fleet (slightly larger than the rest of mine) in a series of unpressured 1v1 duels, making a fight at 2:1 odds a lot smoother than it should have been if the rest of their ships had been around to add to my flux pressure or flank me.

Could I suggest something along the lines of a fleetwide order that would cause ships to stay within moderate distance of allies (enough to flank, not enough to run away and fight in another corner of the map), or a similar stay-reasonably-near-allies behaviour at the individual ship level?

[Cik]

excellently put. it might also be a good idea to have saveable templates for escort/grouping orders, so that you can have pre-set ship squadrons that you can quickly throw onto the table and will be set to protect and escort each other automatically.

it's kind of weird in general actually how "independent" ships are by default. it seems to me that "stick close to X ship, provide local support" should be the default action. the vast majority of ships would probably fare better in this behavior, and only the largest or smallest (and fastest) of ships should operate truly alone.

[Megas]

I guess this explains why ships I order to defend an objective get so easily drawn far enough away that the enemy steals it effortlessly unless I personally go there with my flagship to defend it.

Or anytime my ships drift all the way across the map, far away from the things they are supposed to guard or protect.

[intrinsic_parity]

Hmm - maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this exactly the sort of thing assignments are for?

In my experience, the AI will often prioritize its current engagement over orders that you give it. It seems like any time an enemy ship engages, the AI will turn to fully engage. It doesn't seem very good at backing out of engagements unless it is able to fully disengage (if it is faster than the enemy ship). Like Megas said, it's a big problem for orders like attacking and defending points because the AI usually won't go onto the point until the enemies it is fighting are dead. It's especially annoying with nav buoys because a lot of times, the enemy will cap the point and then kite endlessly while my fleet never actually takes it, even if they have much more powerful ships that can safely just sit on the point. The AI is good at individual battles but it seems pretty unaware of fleet context and the player doesn't have enough command points to micromanage individual ship movement constantly.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

This issue is a big problem for me because I prefer to organize my fleet into discrete combat elements, generally a cruiser or capital escorted by some fast destroyers. I do this so my fleet remains both mobile enough to avoid engagements it can't win, but also dense enough that the large ships can't get flanked by frigates without a fast destroyer nearby to fend off the flankers. If one of those cruisers, escorted by a pair of destroyers, runs off after a lone frigate it can't quite kill, then that's about a quarter or a third of my combat strength running off to do nothing; much like what happened in the video in the original post. Being a human, I can tell the AI to stop doing that and get back to their job, but unless I catch it immediately then they've still wasted a bunch of time and have to travel half the combat space to get back into the fight. Doing so also wastes a Command Point, and those things don't regenerate.

On the short-term, individual ship level, the AI may think it's doing something good; it's in very little danger and it's going to be able to destroy part of the enemy fleet. Low risk, moderate gain. From a long-term, fleet-wide perspective, it's risking the rest of the fleet being overwhelmed while it's not there in order to kill a single frigate that may not even have strike weaponry. High risk, low gain.

Other people have mentioned this, but I wish to reiterate that the individual ship AI is quite good in a 1v1 context between equal-ish ships. It's somewhat unable to tell when it should be cautious and when it should engage hard, but that is a difficult problem to solve. Though you have solved it for when to use missiles, as the tournament demonstrates nicely. However, it doesn't stick together enough in fleet actions, and the escort order seems to be more of a "protect this ship with your life" order rather than a "stay close when possible and support each other" order.

[Morrokain]

I do agree that I see this a lot. One thing that will definitely be a band-aide fix will be the next updates regenerating command points overhaul. Reassignment after an attack order goes south won't be such a burden to tactical options then (I increased base command points in my game to compensate for this very thing actually).

That won't solve the issues with the escort and point defend commands though. And those, I think, are the last stubborn blemishes on an otherwise amazingly polished combat AI.

I give a pass to point capture commands because I don't think its necessarily unreasonable to be required to commit enough forces the clear the area, but AI "sniping" points I have well defended because my defenders get distracted and an enemy frigate sneaks in anyway is pretty frustrating considering the context of the command I ordered. Its like an officer in a besieged fort, when ordered to hold for reinforcements, sends half the garrison chasing the scouts into the woods and leaves the gates wide open for the besieging army.