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[Durog25]

When I give a "defense" order, my fleet scatters. When I give an "engage" order my ships dither around without shooting. I seem to only be able to give one of two orders, either: *** about and die alone, or suicidally focus on one target.

The enemy fleets form up into a tight ball, they dive expertly to snatch kills on fluxed ships, they swarm objectives and keep formation.

This is utterly unacceptable. What are my carriers driving headfirst into the enemy fleet alone without backup whilst there's sit at the back... whilst at the same time my destroyers are *** about chasing a lone frigate or sat at the back picking their noses whilst the enemy have four destroyers on my and they never let up, expertly switching in and out to balance their own flux. What the smeg is going on?

[Mordodrukow]

Try to use ships with good shield (preferably: 360 degree) and good weapon range. Dont keep timid officers. Steady or agressive are ok.

For orders you can use: capture point, escort, full assault or full retreat. Also: they can act stupid if there are too small space for them. It might be better to create 2-3 points and distribute ships between them to make a firing line.

Direct orders like "eliminate this target" are bad most of the time, because AI *** indeed. It will take him few seconds to realise the order, he will engage build some flux for enemy and himself, then start inner fight between self-preservation and your order. While he will do that, the enemy will retreat behind his allies, and the order will become useless. Exception for this: fast ships who can engage fast and do good damage in short time.

[Modo44]

Your ships are not suicidal unless you give the hard Eliminate/Full Assault orders. When they see a bigger fleet, they will try to stay away while engaging. This leads them to scatter away from the Defend point. They mainly check for hull sizes of opposing ships, so even a crappy pirate Atlas will make your frigates flee. Get some numbers. Get some big bricks (cruisers and capitals) to make your line look tough. Set up to delete weaker enemies quickly to thin their numbers before they overwhelm you. Be prepared to still be on the defensive when facing multiple or larger fleets.

Alternatively, learn to pilot one of the OP ships, so the entire rest of your fleet becomes irrelevant cannon fodder.

[Euripides]

Whole bunch of things influence AI behaviour

Equip at least 1 PD weapon - without it the AI gives higher priority to disengaging and avoiding/destroying missiles than it does attacking a target. Basically every ship needs a PD classified weapon now so that a single missile doesn't spook it away.

Make sure your flux dissipation is 60-80% of your total generated flux. When its too low the AI spends more time flying away to recover flux/vent even when it's barely gained any flux.

Aggressive/Reckless officers try to stay at the range of the shortest ranged weapons

If you're sick of your frigates flitting away to vent flux after 0.2 seconds of shooting, use the new s-mods to add safety override and hardened subsystems without the OP costs. They won't fly off to vent if they literally can't vent.

Play around with the weapon links and groups, it can have a dramatic impact on how the ship fights. The AI often will not fire an entire weapon group even if it has flux for some of them, but it WILL if they're in separate groups or sometimes if you set the firing to alternate.

Your frigates will spend a lot of time shooting at and running from enemy fighters, so bring some fighters of your own to keep the bad ones off your frigates

[Durog25]

Thanks for the advice but I'm already doing all of that.

My ships don't seem to know how to use their weapons or don't want to. Orders don't seem to mean anything. Yeah, the kill order sucks because a ship will instantly get itself killed for no reason (it's like the enemy knows which orders I give my ships) but support orders do nothing. I tried to build a to ship kill team, on ship spec'ed for kinetics and the other a whole bunch of torps for finishing Overloaded targets, but no matter which ship I fly, the other is a dumbass, if I fly the kinetics ship the finisher sits back and never fires a single torp it's too busy hiding behind me; if I fly the finisher the kinetics never engages either, I never get the chance to engage. Engage orders chose seemingly random ships, so I get a carrier (the ship not its squadrons) on an engage order but the cruiser next to it just dithered in the back ranks.

EDIT: Euripides, I haven't tried some of that. I'll give it a go.

[Mordodrukow]

They won't fly off to vent if they literally can't vent.

Really good advices, TY! 

[Histidine]

If one side has a large range penalty due to ECM it messes with their AI, so try to avoid being on the losing side if you can.

[Daynen]

Location based orders like control or defend also seem to have some leeway as far as tethering the ship to that area.  No idea how wide it actually is.

I try to avoid giving my fleet ships that can get them into trouble but can't get them out.  Burn drives are infamous for causing fleet AI to charge into deathtraps; avoid ships with those if you can possibly stand it.

I have a tendency to make my allied ships durable, simple to pilot, and hopefully viable against both armor and shields so they're not wasting time firing on a basically invincible target.  I also hesitate to give them weapons with limited ammo for obvious reasons.  Exceptions exist and I'm still experimenting with the new skills on officers (especially missile specialization) but as a rule, the more idiot-proof you make your fleet, the less catastrophes you'll have to deal with.

The point about alternating fire is also a subtle but good one; the AI doesn't really push its flux to fire when maxed and prefers to keep its shield available if it has one.  Whereas you or I could just hold down the fire button and get that reduced fire rate at max flux, the AI doesn't really do that much with a linked group.  I favor alternating fire anyway because it tends to create a more consistent stream of fire that's harder to dodge and is just slightly easier on your flux dissipation.  Faster weapons like chainguns and beams need to be linked though; otherwise you lose way too much time cycling weapons instead of firing and the AI will basically be reduced to no DPS at all.

[RemnantAI]

Strap shield shunts on ships and you will see a 300% increase in aggression.

[Thaago]

Just as a quick note because its not always obvious from in game play: The AI between the player side and AI side is completely symmetric, including limited orders on the command layer. So if you see the enemy AI doing things, yours can too with the right orders.

However: a lot of 'bad' AI behavior comes from being out ranged, out speeded, or losing a flux war. If the enemy ship can hit your ship's shields hard enough for them to be in high flux 'retreat' mode, AND they are fast enough that your ships can't retreat... well then your ships are stuck running and thats it. Really nothing they can even do then and they are going to get scattered attempting to get away long enough to vent. I highly recommend "Unstable Injector" as a priority #1 hullmod on all your frigates early game, because that speed means that even if they lose a flux war they can still back off, vent, and reengage, instead of just continually running. Getting 20 nav bonus should also be a priority if the player is using tech (Wolfpack is a trap until mid game IMO).

Another tip: the full assault button in the upper right hand corner is a big deal. If you want your ships to be pressing, use it. It can be toggled on and off, so if you find your ships being too aggressive, take it off.

[Immahnoob]

So how is it best to order your AI?

Since this thread got better responses than mine, how do you guys make a "Shieldwall" for example to attack a Nexus? How would you make your fleet so they actually try to cover each other to vent since it seems some behavior is based on ships/range/etc?
How do you make ships focus more on ships you clearly want dead?
Also, does targeting with R actually make your automatic fire focus on the target?

[Rauschkind]

i tried to fight a hostile base today but it was so painful to watch.
i gave eliminate order, but most of my fleet was to scared to fight. so these ships that actually made an efford went in alone and of course got focussed down.
i have also seen ships chasing fighters around instead of attacking the station.

that "cant order suicide" argument is bs. NOT attacking a strong target with the fleet is the real suicide, because this is a great way to whipe. also there is the fact that ignoring orders generally is inadvisable in military operations.


but its not just that. certain builds just do not seem to work. i made a SO falcon with two reaper torpedos. when i simulate it against a target, it will just circle the target outside gun range, waiting for the shields to go down to use the "main" weapon torpedos i think.

then there is the fact that my champion heavy cruiser loves to fire its hurricane mirv against fighters and frigates. sometimes it picks a target it can hit with that weapon, but generally its pretty useless most of the time.

i think what this game urgently needs is settings for main weapon, prefered engagement range, and prefered target size.

[Thaago]

Stations can be tricky, both because of their extreme range but moreso because the AI doesn't target them correctly (for some reason they prefer to target structural spurs instead of modules, and they will fire missiles into the wrong side of a partially dead one).

But that aside, my guess as to the way to make a shield wall would be to have roughly every other ship attacking the station with an "engage" order while the other half are set to escort the first half. I have NOT tested this, but I have seen good behavior from escorts. Really what is wanted here is for your own ships to bunch up together on one side of the station, which will lowed player firepower but let them go in front of each other. Perhaps a 'defend' order right in front of the station would work. I'll be honest, this is something I've never tried to actively encourage, because I want maximimum firepower on a station rather than mutual defense.

To make ships focus fire but NOT eliminate, give an "Engage" order on an enemy then assign your ships to that engage by selecting them and then right clicking the engage'd enemy.

Targeting with R makes all automatically firing guns that can shoot at the target shoot at it, and all missiles fired target it, and all fighters in 'engage' mode target it. Autofire guns that cannot fire at the target will fire at other things in range (and this can cause problems if the turrets are slow, because they'll try and switch to other targets if the R target keeps going in and out of arc).

Not asked about, but very handy:
To make ships stop chasing an enemy and go in a direction, select the ship and right click in the direction you want it to go but much farther to make a rally point. This maxes out the "leash" on the ship and makes it actually move in that direction To make this even stronger, put an avoid order on the enemy. The avoid order may effect other ships, so be careful and be ready to remove it once its done its job. The rally point is too far, so it will need to be cancelled once the ship is engaged on the proper area. If the ship you want to avoid is faster and keeps engaging... then your ship will probably try and back away from it and get to the rally point, but its not going to do very well at it as its being harassed.

i tried to fight a hostile base today but it was so painful to watch.
i gave eliminate order, but most of my fleet was to scared to fight. so these ships that actually made an efford went in alone and of course got focussed down.
i have also seen ships chasing fighters around instead of attacking the station.

that "cant order suicide" argument is bs. NOT attacking a strong target with the fleet is the real suicide, because this is a great way to whipe. also there is the fact that ignoring orders generally is inadvisable in military operations.


but its not just that. certain builds just do not seem to work. i made a SO falcon with two reaper torpedos. when i simulate it against a target, it will just circle the target outside gun range, waiting for the shields to go down to use the "main" weapon torpedos i think.

Stations are a problem, no two ways about it. Carriers will also suicide into them instead of engaging with fighters. For the falcon - that sounds like a target group bug, thats worth posting in the bug forum. Do include the exact build (all details incluing weapon groups) and the target in the sim you were fighting.

[robepriority]

The best way for ships to cover each other, I've found, is to put an eliminate order on the offender. This switches your frontline to those with the eliminate order, and forces the target to reconsider firing due to flux issues, even if you retract the eliminate order later. Of course, if the offensive ships need to be able to threaten the target fluxwise.

Escorts can form battlegroups, but the escorted ship will be at the *head* of said group, not the backline. So having an agressive or reckless officer escorted will have him as the front while everyone else checks flanks/rear.

What sucks about stations is that you can't tell fleets to focus individual models, so any calculation the AI does considers the station as a whole versus the scattered fire that a fleet would do if given a vague order like "eliminate the station".

[Rauschkind]

 For the falcon - that sounds like a target group bug, thats worth posting in the bug forum. Do include the exact build (all details incluing weapon groups) and the target in the sim you were fighting.

thanks will do


edit: i wanted to veryfy my observations before making a bug report, and i cant reproduce it anymore. no idea whats different now.