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[Tartiflette]

So after probably too much Battlefleet Gothic and remembering this:

• Improved broadside AI:
  • Will now turn more into a broadside if its frontal firepower is significantly lacking
  • Will pursue (by turning towards enemy) less

I decided to mod in a low tech broadside equivalent to the Dominator.

(Still quite WIP)

And I ended up with this HSS Siegfried, Attrition-class Cruiser.    I though I did everything right. The hardpoint is a missile slot, the large turret has a 360 degrees coverage, all small turrets can reach the sides and all mediums have 90 degrees arcs. It also have an Omni shield and better maneuverability than the Dominator.    Oh boy was I disappointed when I tested it.    That ship wouldn't turn on it's side until the front armor had been obliterated and it had to start spreading the damage like any frontal based ship. I tried with a short range weapon in the turret compared to the side without better result. And without any weapon in the turret you say? Let's check that out.

Webm of how it went. (full 15MB gif in spoiler)

Spoiler

[close]

   So without any frontal weapon at all, the ship would still face the enemy. After a while it veeeryyy sloooowlyyy turned one side to it for some reason, but after a couple of shot remembers it preferred not shooting at all by squarely facing it's target. It's only when half its starboard weapons got disabled that suddenly the AI became alive, quickly maneuvered and started to slug the enemy with its other side. I sadly cut the recording, but as soon as the weapons got repaired the AI went brain-dead again, returning to its "I want to watch you in the eye even if it kills me" behavior.

   From that I get that the AI can only choose to broadside if one side if significantly more powerful than the other. But that completely defeat the purpose of a broadsiding ship: The point is to be able to say "Oh you wrecked my port side? Big deal! My starboard side is good as new and ready to finish you off". I would also love seeing broadside ships circling their target instead of just standing in front of them, but that is a whole new can of worms for the AI.

   That ship is still quite fun to fly, but if the AI can't deal with it there's no point really.

[Alex]

Hmm. Any chance I could get my hands on this ship in a standalone minimod? Sounds like there's a bug somewhere.

[Tartiflette]

Here you go! Now thinking about it, I wonder if just turning one of the sideway weapons 0.1degree to the front could temporary solve the issue by making one flank more "attractive" to the AI. But even if that work, it would mean that the AI would always prioritize that flank even if it means going in the wrong way compared to the fleet, expose itself, and any number of such issues.

[Alex]

Thank you! Will check it out later today; knee-deep in some graphics code right now.

I don't think the issue is because the sides are balanced. It's more likely either a range issue (i.e. it doesn't feel it can hit with the broadside at the range it's at), or an issue with "just enough" things being pointing within 15 degrees of the front to outweigh the broadsides.

[xenoargh]

I think that it's high time to have a Hull Mod AI that specifically requires broadside behaviors.  This is one of those things where I honestly believe that it's not feasible to put it into a general-purpose AI, because the edge cases are multiple.

[Alex]

A hull mod AI?

[xenoargh]

Yeah, like I did for Vacuum.  You could pick an AI behavior by putting a Hull Mod on; the code picked the AI based on what was installed; it's how I implemented something like Timid, etc. and other specific behaviors, before Captain personalities were a thing. 

It'd be classier to do it through the Captain UI for Vanilla, but it was a quick stopgap that worked.

[Tartiflette]

I don't think the issue is because the sides are balanced. It's more likely either a range issue (i.e. it doesn't feel it can hit with the broadside at the range it's at), or an issue with "just enough" things being pointing within 15 degrees of the front to outweigh the broadsides.

Well, in the case I show in the Gif, all non PD weapons have 1000 range and point 90 degrees to the sides. Only two vulcans are vaguely pointing forward. Plus the enemy ship is clearly in range since once one side get disabled the AI immediately become proactive and start maneuvering/shooting.

I agree that some way to specify a ship should favor a "side" behavior would be welcome. Either with a tag like "Civilian" in the ship data, or some way to specify that in the refit screen. Maybe something along the lines of a 4 direction toggles next to the weapon grouping, one for each side of the ship the AI should present to the enemy. That way you could specify "fire from the front", or "Fire from your Starboard and Front" like my mockup, "Only fire from both your sides", etc.

[Silver Silence]

Perhaps a dropdown menu in the fitting screen to select and try to enforce certain combat styles? "Fight broadside whenever possible." "Fight frontal whenever possible." "Keep range at all times." "AUXILIARY POWER TO THE DEFLECTORS." "Raise shields only when faced with obnoxiously high alpha, ie torpedoes"

[SafariJohn]

I think it would be best if the broadside ship AI was separated from the regular ship AI and activated only by a "broadside" hint in the ship_data.csv.

Keep a bit of angling in the regular ship AI for stuff like the Centurion that work fine currently.

[xenoargh]

I do not want to see it be an ai hint.  Let players customize the AI behaviors; they know what they want the ship to do.

[Alex]

Here you go!

Ahh, can't open up the file. 7-zip is borked on my machine, and filzip shows an empty archive. Mind putting it in a regular zipfile?

[Alex]

To respond to some of the other suggestions here: I don't like the idea of customizing AI via the refit screen. Officers are about as far as I think it can comfortably go. Beyond that, it's going to result in so many permutations that some will inevitably broken due to it being impractical to test them all.

Beyond that, I'm not a fan of the idea of "tune the AI behavior" being something that's an important part of gameplay. Not to say that this is universally bad or whatnot, just definitely not a direction I want to go in. In Starsector in particular, I don't think the timing of the feedback cycle (i.e. you make a change, then you see whether it's good or not) is right at all for this kind of gameplay.

[Dark.Revenant]

Something that might be more useful is static AI assignment, like defining broadside preference on a per-hull level.

[Tartiflette]

Here you go!

Ahh, can't open up the file. 7-zip is borked on my machine, and filzip shows an empty archive. Mind putting it in a regular zipfile?

That's weird...  Here's a zip then.