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[mehgamer]

As per a conversation that was had just right now in the discord server, it's again come to my attention that the autofire AI struggles to engage long distance targets.  The trouble is that the AI would appear to constantly switch targets in the middle of preparing to fire, which is a real problem for beams and weapons with firing delays.  Want to test it out?  Cover a conquest with tac beams, give it all the range increases you can, and install integrated point defense AI - the guns will struggle to stay on track for a single target long enough to even reliably destroy missiles from far away!

There may be a more concrete solution for this I'm not thinking of, but a possible "band-aid" fix could be to apply a "minimum targetting time" hint to weapons with charge-up times, beams, and other possible weapons susceptible to this issue.  Ideally this could scale based on the distance to target, as especially with the case of beams, the further away the target is the less damage the AI will commit to before switching off.

I know this is probably the worst time to suggest such a thing, RCs being worked on and all, but hey - it's out here now!

[Dark.Revenant]

A related issue is point defense behavior at close ranges.  Often, something like a PD Laser will fruitlessly attempt to defeat a missile that’s close to impact, fail, and then switch to another missile that it has no chance of defeating in time.  It’s quite frustrating to watch, since if it chose a missile further out, it might have actually destroyed that one.

[Megas]

Was a ship targeted?  I noticed that beams tend to interrupt more if I have a target lock on a ship.  I sometimes remove target lock so that beam PD works better.

No idea if AI maintains target locks on their enemies.

[mehgamer]

Was a ship targeted?  I noticed that beams tend to interrupt more if I have a target lock on a ship.  I sometimes remove target lock so that beam PD works better.

No idea if AI maintains target locks on their enemies.

To be honest, I've never tested this, though i don't know if it makes it better - especially considering that the problem persists in AI controlled ships however the case may be.  Worthwhile thought, though, with regards to trying to find a central "cause" for these patterns.

[Megas]

It is not like you can force AI-controlled ships to not use target lock if target lock interferes with slower beam PD.  All the player can do is use faster PD to mitigate that meddlesome quirk.

[Morrokain]

Burst beams like the Phase Lance are especially noticeable with this behavior when the ship is AI controlled.

My mod makes heavy use of the burst beam mechanic, and the majority of the time in a fleet scenario only about half to 3/4 of the full duration of the beam strike actually land on the intended target. What can be worse from the player point of view is that the AI also doesn't seem to consider friendly fire after the initial shot, because it will sometimes actually maneuver and rotate the active beam into an ally if it has high maneuverability or related skills.

[Thaago]

I've noticed that retargetting causes a lot of problems for tac lasers (can make them useless even), but I haven't seen anything bad with phase beams. The only real issue I have with them is that the AI sometimes fires them juuust at the edge of max range, and the beam doesn't quite reach.