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Author Topic: AI Tweak Against MG  (Read 3252 times)

Gaizokubanou

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AI Tweak Against MG
« on: March 10, 2012, 11:53:09 AM »

ATM the AI can't handle fighting against machine guns.  It uses shield to take machine gun shots, which in turn overloads the ship's flux pretty much instantly, then they can't fire, so they just eat more machine gun while they can't shoot back.

My proposition is a very small one.  If the AI is getting hit by nothing but machine gun fire and it is not taking hull damage (armor is still up), it shouldn't use its shield so that it can at least keep firing its weapons.
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Alex

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #1 on: March 10, 2012, 02:58:21 PM »

Good observation :)

This is actually pretty tough to fix, particularly without breaking other behaviors. (Oh, I can ignore kinetic damage? Pshaw, bring on the Gauss Cannon! <gets gibbed>, etc).

Still, added to the AI improvements todo list - will see if I can figure something out. This is probably the biggest weakness the AI has - not turning off shields to take kinetic hits on armor - but it's also a pretty tough call to make correctly.
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Steven Shi

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #2 on: March 10, 2012, 05:25:34 PM »

Or maybe tweak the MG damage so it does less damage but in explosive instead? =P 
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Arrath

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #3 on: March 10, 2012, 05:40:22 PM »

Maybe a new (set of) weapon hint(s) that would help shape the AI's reaction?
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xchazz

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #4 on: March 10, 2012, 08:02:22 PM »

Evasive action the moment it starts to take excessive kinetic damage when near flux overload sounds good
Code
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Gaizokubanou

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #5 on: March 10, 2012, 08:54:32 PM »

Evasive action the moment it starts to take excessive kinetic damage when near flux overload sounds good
Code

Kinetic weapons are often the fastest and most accurate weapons.  Dodging them in their current form is not really an option.  And you have to see just how fast MGs and needlers take flux off from shield.  With a ship focused on kinetics or swarm of broadswords, it takes like 3 seconds or less to go from zero to overload.

Given that flux overload is the most devastating status to be in outside of death, this makes kinetics weapons easily the most versatile weapon, and they are rightly highly priced.  Yet these automatic kinetics still easily make up for their ordinance cost by 'flux-overload-locking' AI ships' down.

What SQW said is probably the easiest fix... as Alex said, the decision making of whether to take hits on armor or use shield to absorb as much as possible may seem intuitive for a person, but coding it into functional AI is another matter.  Another method is to simply stop AI from ever using shield when in danger of flux overload, which would help it against kinetic spam, but not sure how that would work against other weapon types.
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Thaago

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #6 on: March 11, 2012, 12:45:11 PM »

Maybe a new (set of) weapon hint(s) that would help shape the AI's reaction?

This would probably be the only way to do it. Maybe a tag that tells the ai: If flux < .5 block with shield. If flux >.5 then avoid with shield. Its hard to tell what would work because we cannot see inside the excellent AI, but we allready know the AI looks at incoming fire for shield behavior.
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arwan

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Re: AI Tweak Against MG
« Reply #7 on: March 11, 2012, 02:38:03 PM »

or an AI rule. if kinetic damage being taken is <XXX then dont use shields. if kinetic spike damage is >XXX raise shields.
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Alex
You won't be able to refit fighters and bombers at all. They're designed/balanced around having a particular set of weapons and would be very broken if you could change it. Which ones you pick for your fleet -out of quite a few that are available- is the choice here, not how they're outfitted.