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[orost]

I have a Gryphon in my fleet. It's armed with Annihilators, Harpoon pods, and a Hurricane launcher.

While I'm generally happy with its performance, it could afford to be a lot more aggressive with its missiles. I often see it choosing to not even try shooting Annihilators and especially Harpoons at ships with fairly high flux (it's more liberal, if still not liberal enough, with the Hurricane). For most ships it makes sense to save missiles for overloaded targets, but a Gryphon with a Missile Spec officer (which it is) has 18 salvos of Harpoons available per pod. Recently I've been transferring command to it at the end of battles to check ammo, and I typically see it has used less than half of its Hurricanes, less than 1/4th of its Annihilators, and even fewer Harpoons (taking into account Missile Autoforge). It hardly ever uses enough missiles to pop Missile Autoforge, even in very long battles where it runs out of CR.

I'm assuming ammo quantity is a factor to some degree, but now that we have another +100% ammo bonus we can stack, it needs to be more of one to let missile boats be effective under AI control.

(One thing I haven't tried is putting a more aggressive officer in it. I'm assuming it wouldn't affect this, but if I'm wrong, please correct me!)

[Goumindong]

Nah. I have noticed this as well. I lost a gryphon today and it didn't even shoot its 3 front sabots in panic. Just sat there with missiles on the rack.

I can understand the Harpoons, they're listed as strike. But the Gryphon should be dumping missiles like there is no tomorrow. The thing can have up to 9 times the number of missiles for each launcher. It should not be worried about running out.

[pairedeciseaux]

I suspect the line between "oh look, that ship is too shy about using its missiles" and "wft, that ship just wasted half its missiles against the strong shield of a fast ship at low flux" is not that well defined.

I kind of remember the "shoots all Sabots" panic reaction from all ships in previous version of the game, it looks like it doesn't happen anymore. In fact, same with other missiles, ships tended to shoot everything shortly before being disabled, to the point a player had to keep shield raised when finishing an opponent - not doing so meant receiving a painful volley of quick Atropos (or else) in the face. It does not happen anymore.

Back to the initial point, one example of related behaviour I often see: I fly an Hyperion and jump to the rear of a target ship (from any size) having many missiles, Hyperion (being what it is) can stay shooting at engines for a while, in the mean time the targeted ship slowly shoots its Sabots - maybe one every 5 seconds (*). In some cases Hyperion Ion Pulser's EMP disables missile launchers, sure, but otherwise it looks like there is some kind of deliberate pacing by the targeted ship shooting missiles. Pretty sure I saw this with targeted Gryphon, Onslaught, Dominator and Conquest.

That said, I have also seen full Harpoon volleys being shot in other situations, so it does still exist.

(*) this is only vague memory on my part, I haven't done any lab testing

[WeiTuLo]

I find that ships with Hurricanes like to use them freely until they go down to 5 shots/launcher, then they conserve them more.

[Inwaves]

Ships shouldn't launch Squall at frigates from max range :/

[Amazigh]

Just had a peek at the weapon_data.csv to check the "hints" column (which is where you apply tags that tell the AI how to use a weapon)
(also iirc, the "tags" column doesn't change how the AI uses a weapon, but only how autofit rates the weapon.)

I find that ships with Hurricanes like to use them freely until they go down to 5 shots/launcher, then they conserve them more.

Hurricanes are set to "CONSERVE_5" so they'll fire freely until they have 5 ammo, then be more careful, explaining this behavior.

Ships shouldn't launch Squall at frigates from max range :/

For some reason Squalls have "CONSERVE_3, STRIKE, USE_VS_FRIGATES" so they're tagged to be careful with the last 3 salvos, and to treat the weapon as a "strike" weapon (this is normally allocated to torpedoes, so i'm not sure if it's really the best idea for this weapon?) but the "USE_VS_FRIGATES" means that the AI will consider frigates a perfectly viable target for this weapon, even though frigates can evade squall fire like 90% of the time.


Further on the CONSERVE behavior:
- Small Annhiliators have CONSERVE_1, so they should fire freely (if they are in range and pointed at an enemy) until the last burst of 5.
- Pilums are also told to CONSERVE_1, so again, just their last burst (i think this is so they only fire when they have a *full* burst regenerated, rather than just 1 missile at a time.)
- Swarmer/Locust are tagged "DO_NOT_CONSERVE" so will fire if there is anything in range, but are also set to prioritize fighters, given how much ammo these two have, it's fine (imo) to have them just fire about as often as possible.
- Breach SRMs are told to "CONSERVE_FOR_ANTI_ARMOR" which as is already known by alex, might not be working properly and is under review. (iirc)

No other missile has any form of CONSERVE tag, there could have been an update to how the AI looks at missiles and ammo, and the lack of a conserve tag could could explain why they don't fire at rates that we'd like?
I do know that there is also meant to be a "panic" subroutine for the AI, that makes it fire missiles as fast as possible, and some ships are meant to have this constantly active, possibly this subroutine is not triggering correctly?

[Wywern]

This is absolutely a huge problem for gryphons. They will literally die before firing their missiles (EDIT: Sabots and harpoons in particular). The only way I got around the damn harpoons being never fired is putting them in the same weapon group with all the PD, and setting it on linked so they can only be fired together.

[Kobura]

Well now I know not to use Squalls. I always wondered why they were such a joke. My Wolfs danced around them until the AI expended them all, meanwhile they could have been forcing shields onto my capitals and hurting my position speed/forcing suppression during tactical disengagements...

such a good weapon and so badly used