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[DaviBones]

First of all, apologies if this is a duplicate, I did try to search but I may have missed it, I didn't exactly know what to search for.

So this is an issue I've suspected for a long time but have had a lot of trouble reliably reproducing. However I think I finally have a concrete list of steps to reproduce it:

• Get a cautious officer and stick him/her in a standard Wolf-class frigate
• Strip the Wolf down completely, then add a Graviton beam and tactical laser, and max out vents/capacitors
• Go into the combat sim against a single "Lasher (D) class Close Support Frigate," and switch on autopilot.
• If all goes as it did in my tests, the Wolf will correctly kite the Lasher, staying in range over 90% of the time, and never once dipping into the Lasher's weapon range. In my tests, the Wolf won with about 50-60% CR to spare.
• Now, go back to the loadout screen and add an Unstable Injector. (An average player might naively assume that this will make it kite better, because it now has greater speed and still outranges the Lasher comfortably.)
• Repeat step 3. If all goes as it did in my tests, the Wolf fails to stay within it's weapon range more than 10-20% of the time. It does a great job, however, of maintaining a range about 50-100 units farther than the range of its own lasers. Both ships stare at each other menacingly, until the heat death of the universe presumably.

As I mentioned, this is a behavior I have noticed frequently with Cautious AI, and though it seems highly correlated to whether the ship in question has Unstable Injector installed, I have both seen the behavior without said hull mod, and see the ship perform just fine with it, which has made it hard to nail down. I think fixing this issue will make cautious pilots far more useful, since one of their only niches right now is kiting with long range weaponry, and unstable injector is a natural choice for many kiting setups.

[Alex]

Thank you for the report! (This is absolutely perfect, btw, as far as reporting an AI behavior goes. Easy reliable steps, took me about a minute to see exactly what you're talking about. Much appreciated.)

So, right - the way "cautious" works (or at least one of the things it does) is it stays out of enemy non-missile range most of the time, by a fixed margin, and occasionally darts in - essentially behaving as "steady" in that regard for a few seconds.

In this particular case, installing UI makes the margin plus the Lasher's range exceed the range of the Wolf's weapons, while without  UI, the weapon range is still enough even with the margin.

What I've done is change the margin to be *up to* the current margin, but less (down to a certain threshold) if the ship's weapons outrange the enemy, but not by that much. That means this may still happen, but the range difference between the ships would have to be around 50 or less, so that should hopefully cut down on it a lot.

[DaviBones]

Great! Looking forward to seeing the difference when the next patch drops!

Also, glad I could be of help. I have a lot of fun messing around with loadouts and AI; trying to get them to do what I want and trying to find new niches for AI types besides steady (have yet to get reckless pilots to do anything but get themselves killed without extensive baby-sitting, but that won't stop me from trying, damn it!) In any case, I'll keep my eye out for more weird or just straight up foolish behavior. I already have in mind an issue where occasionally AI pilots seem to "forget" that they can either strafe or stop their forward engines in order to face their enemy; instead they try to do so while at full throttle, causing them to zoom right past their target, firing off a couple broadside volleys on the way by. If I can isolate this issue (or any others) I'll try to be as thorough in my bug report as I was here.

[Alex]

Thank you! (Might be worth holding off on those specific issues until the next patch as there've been some changes that sound like they affect that particular area, btw.)