I've been thinking about this a lot recently and obviously this isn't the first or likely last time its come up, but-
However, your third request I would argue does require sentience (or at least a lot of algorithmic considerations) to implement properly, or at least doesn't result in just as annoying behavior as we have now, since it's context dependent. Enemy fleet has mixed slow and fast ships. Player fleet is made up of SO Hyperions only. Does half the enemy fleet simply not bother going anywhere and sit at the top of the map (or just grab objectives).
Yes. It's better that the ships stay together in almost every scenario I can think of. If they can't catch anything anyway, spreading out is exactly what the enemy fleet wants so that they can be easily picked off by the concentrating faster ships on isolated ones and leveraging numbers. The slow ships can move towards the center or something after objectives but the onus should be on the player to engage them not for them to engage the player. And that is only because the player has the faster ships. If the situation was reversed, that is where orders like Search and Destroy and the various override orders come into play. But it shouldn't be the default behavior imo.
Perhaps you meant to say slow ships should prioritize other slower ships, and if there is nothing left, only then go after the faster ships. Although even then, having an Apogee decide to go after the 120 speed Lasher across the map instead of the 150 speed Omen adjacent to it might look funny (and equally likely to fail to catch).
Yeah this is something that would have to be weighed and prioritized or it would indeed look funny. This is the most complicated part I think. I could definitely be missing more edge cases too in my thought process. Unfortunately, actual implementation would probably be required to flush them all out.
Take it to an extreme, and have the player deploy a Paragon from reserve into that all SO Hyperion fleet. Do all the slow ships stop engaging the frigates right next to them, and make a beeline for the Paragon across the map that just entered (even if they had cornered a frigate on the edge of the map?).
Yes. The reasoning is simple. There is no point to engaging the frigates. If they can't be bursted down (and they already likely would have been) then nothing is actually being accomplished by engaging them in the first place. Flux damage isn't actually damage when the ship is a lot faster. If they
can be bursted down then not engaging isn't an issue because when the frigates naturally decide to harass they get bursted down. Er, does that make sense?
Does the slow ship press through a line of frigates, ignoring their flux levels, towards that capital, or do they have to engage with the frigates in between, despite them being twice as fast? Do they attempt to go around and fail because the frigates are faster? I could imagine some interesting degenerate fleet strategies for the Paragon + fast frigates setup assuming such an AI.
The first thing. Barrel through the frigate line. Same reasons as above. If the capital ship can't ignore frigates it can't catch then is it really a capital? If it loses a battle with another capital because that frigate line put too much flux pressure on it while breaking through then all the better! Now there is a better reason for escorts and the important thing is that its very intuitive! Chasing a frigate while the enemy capital mows through everything isn't intuitive at all to me.
What if the slow ship has carrier support or long range missile support from an ally. What if the ships is equipped with a pile of ECCM Harpoons? Is it enough to drive the flux up on said frigate, which will be driven higher by pursuing since 120-60 = 60 relative retreat speed instead of 12). Now that ship needs to be aware of ally weapon and range considerations to properly make an intelligent decision on whether to continue pursuing.
I would just ignore that kind of complexity entirely to be honest. The choice of whether to pursue is basically a binary decision based upon relative speeds with the wrinkle already mentioned above. I don't think it actually needs much more nuance than that in the majority of cases. I'll further explain my reasoning below but I've already touched on it a bit.
In general should an isolated capital just let a frigate constantly shoot it's engines if there's a distant, slow target?
Either that is a feature of the ship and it really needs allied escorts, or it has rear guns exactly for that reason. As stated above, taking the frigates into account is a tactical error because that isn't what the capital ship is really supposed to do. If there was a concrete benefit to turning and engaging the frigates then ok but I honestly don't think that there is in over 90% of cases. It just slows things down a lot. Probably more so than the engines getting taken out a bunch because the frigates can always vent and close the gap and the capital can't actually get anywhere it really needs to be because its always concerned with the presence of ships it cant catch but could beat if it could. Hopefully this makes sense as I'm not sure I'm explaining it all that great.
The fundamental issue is there's no guarantee of any given type of fleet configuration, on either side. The absolute statement "not chasing frigates twice their speed" only makes sense in a classic spread of ship types versus a similar spread, and assuming the slowest ships die last. The AI has to be general enough to handle a very wide range of situations, including situations where the "obvious" behavior that should be hard coded no longer works. Not to mention as the fleets take losses, the AI still needs to do something vaguely sensible. Capitals chase frigates because sometimes frigates are the only ship around it, and the ship AI has a very local view. Making a decision of whether it's better for a really slow ship to ignore the really close fast frigate and instead pick from 5 different potentially slower target ships across the map that is going to take 2 minutes to reach any of them is a sentient level strategic decision weighing many considerations, assuming you want it done right.
I think you are sort of right here, but I also think we have a tendency to over think things as well or otherwise expect more complexity than is really needed. Why do I feel this way? Thinking about it, the painful thing about a capital chasing a frigate is that it will never, ever, catch it in a reasonable time frame that
brings value to the battle even if it eventually does catch it and kill it. The big thing here is the "value" part and of course that's high subjective. A capital breaking the loose "formation" to go on a wild goose chase will always be a negative thing imo and so it doesn't bring value to me. Honestly there isn't a situation in mind where its beneficial to do this off the top of my head, but I'm sure others could come up with them.
Anyway, to me I think the best course of action for the AI would be to not ever pursue it and let the ship come to it instead. That is, unless an order to pursue/engage/eliminate, etc was given. Capital ships are not obligated to engage anything but stations, really, or anything they can catch. They are the anvil around which the hammers of the battle operate.
Taking my earlier comment into account, why should capitals brute force their way through enemy frigate lines? Because they can a lot of the time, and that's a lot better than stagnating the battle by getting out of position. If the capital gets destroyed because it over extends itself, that is a
player problem in my mind because its really easy to avoid with a defend order or a target redirection or even taking manual control. But what it certainly isn't in this case is an AI problem. The AI is doing what it should be doing and have the ships engage targets it can realistically destroy. Anything in between is part of the tactical layer of an engagement.
To put it simply, I think battles should be far more decisive than they are right now and it would make for better combat both visually and in a tactical sense if ships operated this way. What we have right now is a lot of stagnation by ships being overly cautious and spreading out too much. The really painful thing here is that
despite all that work put into these edge cases to try and make sure the player doesn't lose ships in silly ways, it
still happens from time to time. So what is really being accomplished here when you think about cautious AI? It isn't fulfilling its primary directive, and the cost of that directive brings a host of other problems along with it that are equally if not even more painful.
Alex has stated that part of the reason the AI is cautious is so that the player gets to do the heavy lifting in a battle. That does indeed make a lot of sense don't get me wrong - especially considering the narrow view of the player outside of the tactical map. However, when you consider scale it gets a bit messier. I don't think the player wants to personally destroy every enemy ship if that makes sense - and I think that's what we are close to at the moment.
I think cautious AI was a mistake that was a well-meaning reaction to player frustration over ship losses. I was talking with my brother in detail about this and I think the better approach to that problem was to tackle it at the campaign level. For instance, tweaking the recovery system to always allow player ships to be recovered without an OP tax (because why does it really need that?) and something like templates that make restoring a built ship with as little button presses as possible.
Our conclusion was that the real reason that losing ships is annoying has little to do with the money lost or the supplies, etc. That is manageable as long as there are ways to make money without combat - and there are plenty. The real reason is the
tedium of rebuilding your lost ship and by the fact that in the current system RNG is such a large factor. If it takes you half of a campaign to find the ship you want and then it gets lost in a battle because of AI derp - that's where you are going to see angry posts on the forums. If its just a matter of pressing a few buttons and maybe waiting a bit (we discussed a mothball sort of situation that takes docking with a station to repair or something along those lines) as well as what essentially boils down to lost money, its a lot less painful to lose ships.
So to really simplify this, iirc the line went something like: "You should really only have to build a ship once. After that, its just some sort of minor penalty for losing it that makes it unavailable for a bit but you don't have to find it or its weapons again."
To summarize:
The AI should be more decisive for the sake of both tactics and battle stagnation with the implied expectation that ship losses are more common. Because ship losses are currently really unfun, that needs to be addressed at the campaign layer with a variety of QOL improvements which I've detailed a bit.Now I could definitely be wrong here and I don't want to make it seem like I 100% know the answer to these issues, but after a lot of thought and some discourse on game design this is what I came up with. Hopefully it can fuel some friendly discussion at the very least.