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General Discussion / Re: How do you make the game's AI work?
« on: February 08, 2023, 07:36:37 AM »What's bugging me is that DEFEND order is really useless. Assigned to defend ships will stay afk behind and watch "defended" ship die no matter what... or maybe I just need "SUICIDE DEFEND" button and more reckless officers.
I think it suffers mainly from lack of explanation, along with escort, because both are very useful, but only if you know what they do.
Defend would be better named "Rally" in my mind, because that is what it does: it makes a good number of ships use the spot/ship as the center of their movement area. Like normal, if your ships in that area are winning, they will push forward and attack. If they are losing, they will be pushed back. This means that the "defended" ship can be left alone if it is slow and the other ships are outmatched.
If you want the "defending" ships to surge forward and protect the main ship, you can order that by telling them to eliminate the threat! Select them and right click the enemy. Once they are engaged and the main ship has had a chance to vent/repair knocked out weapons, cancelling the eliminate order is a good idea because otherwise the smaller ships are both going to block the line of fire and are also going to get killed.
Escort is a much shorter leash, and it assigns ships to fall behind and to the sides of the escorted ship - it might be better called "Protect Flanks" though that is a bit of a mouthful. If the escort is short ranged, or not aggressive, they won't even be able to fire at what is in front of a capital! So they aren't that great at protecting the "escorted" ship from the front. However they will stick to their posts quite well so are good for stopping a ship from getting flanked on the side, because they won't chase other ships very far at all. I strongly prefer having aggressive or reckless escorts with decent range, because in that case they are more willing to push forward and can fire forward. The same trick of ordering an escort to 'eliminate' a target in front that you need them to kill applies to get them to really go forward and cover, with the same caveat of cancelling the order when appropriate.
HVD/Mauler/flak Enforcers (officered or not) with aggressive/reckless settings make fantastic escorts as they are tough enough to survive capital level firepower (for a short time at least), shoot down fighters and missiles, bring missiles of their own for finishing support, and can even bring an escort fighter too, though that starts to eat into the OP budget a lot. Plus by being escorts the primary weaknesses of the enforcer (slow, vulnerable to getting swarmed) are mitigated.
An excellent and accurate summation of the differences in behaviour between the two commands.