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[Linnis]

In this case you should use your head instead of your anger.

The best Strat that always works is...

I really really had enough with this kind of comments. NO. JUST. NO. It is so infuriating seeing people trying to justify the unreasonable behavior of the AI. And its even more infuriating that they are trying to blame the player for it. That they just dont play "right", they "jUsT neEd tO UsE a BeTtEr sTrAt". NO. It should not be the players job to play according to specific rules, just to make the AI usefull, this is madness.
Stop pretending that the AI is flawless. It is not. This is an in development game. Things needs to be changed, and the most frquent complains is about the AI. It does stupid things We all know that the are reasons for that, but it needs to be changed regardless. There are countless examples of it. Is it timid? Yes, you agreed on it yourself. Does it have to be? NO. The AI should act reasonably regardless of player input! (and if this is impossible then give full contorl to the player, like in an RTS)

Yes, they are more cautious now, but their behaviors are now more controllable.

The second half of this statement is just a blatant lie. I never found it harder to make my ships obey my orders, and there are many many complains about the same thing all over the forum and on discord. Ships nowadays even disregard eliminate orders, and usually simply let enemy take control points.
Does it makes it better for you to pretend that everything is perfect, and give condescending replies to those who point out the problems?

Your expecting the commands to be something like once you give the order the AI will do that order to the extreme. We had that kind of implementation a long time ago and it sucked. No one ever used commands because the ships will go full braindead and die the second to take your eyes off of them. Commands now are more like suggestions, maybe the name should change? Just like every other feature in this game has had so many revisions that I suspect more than half of the development time has been changing systems back and forth. Frankly every update there are always complaints about the AI/supplies/deployment points/difficulty/skills. Frankly all this stuff is in constant flux that I think we should all just chill on it and let the devs develop new systems and do a final pass instead of this change *** up every update. Also in every update, it was never un-playable.

Eliminate orders works 100% for me I honestly don't know what to tell you. If you tell a slower or a smaller ship to "eliminate" a larger ship its not going to do it unless the enemy is turned or has high flux. What eliminate does is it makes your inferior ship maintain attention and distance waiting for a opportunity on a single ship. If you have a reckless officer on eliminate order a kite will basically still try to ram its enemies.

Maybe Alex should add an command like "Attack at all costs" that turns off most of the AI behavior and just have your ships get as close as possible like the pre-camping days to appease you guys. Honestly I never encounter passivity problems from my ships I don't even know what to tell you, my ships rush ahead of me blocking my shots and taking up all the firing angles trying to shoots its stupid small mounts on cruisers that I often have to order my frigates to *** off and get out of the way.

[Deshara]

.

I appreciate the feedback! As you mentioned, this isnt an ideal fleet setup & isnt my permanent setup (the destroyer is only slinging triple burst lasers bc I havent found anything else to put on it yet (everyone is mad at me! :c ). I am on the hunt for a HVD cruiser to pilot as the lynch-pin to my weird fleet & until then every fight is gonna be a chore, so I don't expect the AI to win battles with it without me micromanaging it right now, but this setup is exposing weird flaws with the AI -- ones that I remember from 2017.
One thing specifically I wanted to point out; you said my destroyer with heavy burst lasers is losing a ranged war against the mauler it's going up against, and that's why it's darting in, firing off 1 round then backing out. The thing is... that's... the absolute worst thing it can do when it's losing the ranged war. If u lose the ranged war hopelessly (ur maxed out before u even lay hands on the enemy) u should, back go in on them & lay the smack-down, vent once in their face (unless they have a hangman's noose loaded in their missile slots) and then see if u can make them vent before u have to vent a second time.
Also, yeah my fleet requires focus fire. The thing is, I had been trying to get my fleet to focus fire for most of this playthru & aside from manually eliminate ordering my entire fleet onto 1 enemy I can't figure out how to get them to do it -- the reason my cruiser has the cautious officer is bc if it attacks an enemy then the destroyer (even when it had ion & graviton beams, back before it blew up & I lost them) & the frigate sit in its shadow & don't help it. Also don't put too much stock into what officers I have on which ship, I've been cycling them seeing if there was a setup that made them Perform

I actually was just about to make a feedback post for Alex about this, I was testing what happens if u go into missions, give an Aurora maxed flux cap & all defensive hullmods, mining lasers in all its small slots, ran a simulation and faced it off against the assault wolf and discovered that the Aurora, despite being theoreticaly undamagable by that wolf, will actually lose that fight over time (not accounting for timing out), bc the Aurora will sit back at its own max range(less than the wolf's) & strafe, back out some of the time despite being given theoretically 0 threat by that wolf letting the wolf get in a bunch of free shots, and also sometimes drops its shields in the wolf's face & eats several shots from its medium energy slot despite being at less than 1% flux. Something is definitely up with the AI. When I pilot (yes I know AI wont perform as well as a player, shush im testing here) having stripped all mining lasers & giving the ship just 1 , if I press R, T, 2, M2, hold shift & w and just test what happens when the ship is piloted by the simplest AI possible (same level as a TF2 pyro bot, or worse, a TF2 pyro player), "move towards enemy at all times with shields up letting the gun's AI do all the thinking, vent then pop ship's mobility system when the enemy is too far to shoot me", I max out the wolf's flux stats before it can do any damage to me or even get my flux off of the flux.

In fact, Alex might be playtesting this game with people who know how the game likes to be played, let me restart with no mods (god i hope i remember which mods break my game if i activate them...) & test this like I hate this game. Um, well first thing I've confirmed is that in the vanilla simulator there is no non-pirate wolf? huh??? Anyway, against pirate wolf variant 1 (?) my maxed out defenses & flux cap Aurora with 1 ir pulser in its front radial mount on autopilot knuckled up to the wolf, and after the second blaster hit from the wolf vented in its face & ate missiles blowing thru its armor immediately so it immediately fails this test. So I take the ir pulse laser off, equip it with all mining lasers, start the simulation, then realize how long this is gonna be without the speedup time mod, restart the game in windowed mode so I can leave this running on my side monitor while I harass people I like on twitter until they fear for their lives. I re-did the 1 ir pulse laser test to confirm that it wasnt a fluke that the Aurora dropped shields & ate blaster to the face for no reason, confirm that it wasn't a fluke. Testing the mining lasers, I leave it running & type "POGGO" and "PLAY A DIFFERENT GAME" and "LOL IMAGINE ONLY HAVING 100K VIEWERS KEKW WASHUP" into the chat of the highest viewcount twitch streamer until the wolf starts to break down from CR loss & I can confirm that it didnt take any damage aside from dropping shields in the Aurora's face, which my Aurora also did. Now to idiot test this setup; I reset, same wolf, R T M2 2 SHIFT+W & press F every time it gets out of range, and the wolf vents while being focused by 9 mining lasers and is melted after, like, 4 seconds.
I got bored of the Aurora so I booted up the Medusa, threw beams onto it & it seems fine in the simulator against both bigger & smaller targets, same with beam TTBrawler. So I guess issues I was having with the brawler in-game was down to too much threat for it to function? One thing I did note (having reactivated mods so I can test this with the mod mission with all ships in it) is the Brawler having trouble providing close support against a carrier, but its proving too hard to test this bc anything large enough to be an overwhelming threat by itself has so many fighters that I get insta-died before I can get into range of it -- nothing has as poor of a fighter contingent as the Astral with a couple wasps I faced IRL bc in try mode everything gets exactly what their specs call for, & I cant customize enemies in sim. Plus recreating the conditions I was in of a 30 ship battle with plenty of stuff to distract the fighters while me & my wingman burned up to the flagship is proving too much work & now Im too tired to keep doing this atm

[Fanful]

In my experience a lot of annoyance with friendly AI is that it has a very specific playstyle and if you don't follow/use it, you are going to get frustrated.

The AI in general is very cautious, which is kind of a must, otherwise you would be losing a lot of friendly ships while you are engaged in other part of battlefield. But it makes it really hard to force your fleet to really push against the enemy.

For example, when I recently got back to the game after a couple years of break, I would often lose my flagship as I was finding myself suddenly all alone around enemy ships (as I was trying to finish the overfluxed one, while my allies would stay back).
Instinctevely I tried fixing this by setting a couple bigger ships as an escort to my flagship. This doesn't work, because the game understand escorting capital ship to mean staying at the back of it... I guess they were trying to secure my back, but that only works if we are on defense.

There is no simple way to make the AI ships form a battle line and move it together with the player ship, concentrating the fire. Eliminate order helps, but sometimes AI ridiculously ignores it and favours focusing on some other, closer target.

In the end I simply changed my playstyle. Instead of being the tip of a spear for my fleet, I'm trying to stay in line with my other ships and we all fight rather defensevily. This works nicer, as I'm able to retreat behind friendlies to vent flux. Alternatively I get something faster and then move on flanks, but still let my main force and enemy clash before I move all in.


Personally I would welcome some changes to the orders mechanic. I liked the whole system in theory, but I think it clashes a bit with the main game mechanics, which are playing individual ship.  I think the orders should be more focused on formations and support of the player. Give me wingmen, give me orders "cover me", "get back", "shoot at my target" or "defend my flanks" etc. etc. Teach the AI to better position itself in relation to other friendly units (for example frigates should never go directly front of the friendly capital ship). Maybe even teach it reply to an order with "I can't do it now" instead of just not doing it (though I imagine this would be tricky to implement well).

[Yunru]

I wouldn't mind some variant of escort order where they escorters focus on whichever ship the escorted is targeting.

I do also experience the frustration of telling ships to take strategic locations, only for them to give them up completely chasing some irrelevant ship that happened to be attacking them and retreating.
Then to rub it in, they trying a kill all nearby ships before reclaiming the point that is currently clear of enemies.

Spoiler

[close]

The strategic location I tell them to hold should be priority one, not combat! If a ship they're fighting moves beyond their ability to engage without leaving the location, they should disengage, not merrily keep fighting! If the point isn't under their control, they should attempt to actually seize it, rather than fight every ship in the surrounding area first!

Sorry, that got a bit ranty the longer this battle went on.

[sector_terror]

I agree with Linnis in that several commands, the more extreme ones like hard elliminate, makes the AI follow orders fine. I'd rather slower more cautious battles where I'm the hero instead of an RTS where I'm playing tactician. When I put my units onto eliminate, I better be certain it can be killed fast or is worth the risk, because my ships WILL put themselves into harms way and push their flux and armor to their limits to kill that target. I barely use that command -because- it  draws the AI to be so reckless. Imagine taking that concern to no end. Would you want frigates to follow around and play shield/fire support for s ship currently surrounded and do nothing to fall back when it finds itself getting flanked? Would you want ships to stop their charges and return to defend a point the second even a single enemy shows up to it? Even midway through a joint 2 on 2 between you & it versus another two enemy ships? Would you want ships to ditch you and any hope of a line engagement just to chase the one remaining target with a harass order?

It's this level of babysitting that made me outright quit Mount&Blade. In that game your tactical play was such a deciding factor that your melee skills meant nothing. You barely ever had to fight, or even could, since battles were over in a flash. My archer lines cripples enemies, my melee lines were torn to shreds in seconds. On the other side, a good unit could decimate enemies like nothing. I couldn't just make simple orders and leave them either, because the AI was so good at following those orders, they'd follow it right to their deaths even when it was against their own self-preservation. All of this because combat had each unit more eager to attack then to care for their own survival. It means if I wasn't babysitting, I'd lose units I didn't need to. The same is true here. Losses are massively expensive, and even a few frigates can make bounties lose all profit. If I had to live in constant fear like that, I'd turn my flagship to auto-pilot and never leave the command screen.

[Deshara]

I wouldn't mind some variant of escort order where they escorters focus on whichever ship the escorted is targeting.

this would help so much. A lot of the problem I'm having is that even if I set my beam cruiser & my beam frigate to escort eachother, when my cruiser gets into range & starts laying the melt down on the enemy, the frigate goes "! oh no ): that enemy is too big for me to fight by myself" and then hides behind the cruiser. If there were a "wingman" order where the frigate escorts the cruiser and shares in its orders, I think I'd have less issues. I get why escort is the way that it is, big ships need small ships to attack the things it isnt attacking, but wolfpack tactics style fleets need the ability to not only order a couple of ships to attack the same target but also for them to stick together & engage at the same time

In my experience a lot of annoyance with friendly AI is that it has a very specific playstyle and if you don't follow/use it, you are going to get frustrated.

Absolutely. I've just been playing this game a long time & want to do something else other than lashers with MGs & LAGs & Vulcans who are capable of a nice, honest 1v1 for when every ship in my fleet pairs off with one of the ships in the enemy fleet, and eagles with the exact same setup but bigger, ect.

[Vaulter]

And btw you can set the default ship personality under doctrine settings, so your whole fleet can be aggressive or reckless if you want (apart from ships which have officers of course). Lots of people miss this so it's worth mentioning.

Oh..

[Deshara]

so since the problem I was having was clearly bc I was trying to run a beam fleet, I got a regular Brawler so I could run a regular, balanced combat ship capable of dishing out each type of damage. Gave it a heavy MG, a frag MG & 60 breachers. Jumped into try mode, ran it against a mule, murdered it without taking hull damage, handed it over to my reckless officer and, well... it wont even engage a freighter running an autocannon and nothing else. So I reinstalled OBS, reset the game, stripped out all my mods (again) except for the mod that adds showcase missions (since theres no mission with a brawler, apparently) & the speedup mod (you'll see soon why thats needed). The one thing is that the only equivalent to the heavy vulcan is double flak, but it made no real difference. Also this is how I discovered that the Breacher wasnt a mod weapon

observe


there is no non-civilian ship in the game that shouldn't be able to 1v1 a mule that just has an autocannon

[DownTheDrain]

observe

Well, that was a waste of 8 minutes...

[Alex]

I feel like what you're doing here is taking a questionable loadout that the AI is never in a million years going to use well, (for bonus points putting it in a situation that's also very tough for the AI to manage) then observing it not do well, and... I'm not sure what you're expecting to see, honestly.

Having watched this video, there's nothing here that I can (or would want to) really "fix". If you put an iffy short-range Brawler loadout in a situation where to win it has to armor-tank while dodging Salamanders and maintaining constant pressure on an enemy ship, it's going to do poorly, period. It's too many things to juggle and too many calls to make that require higher level decisions that are pretty much the exclusive domain of the player. This is also not very representative of actual fleet combat scenarios.

The AI will *always* have trouble with some oddball scenarios. The game is *always* going to involve a healthy dose of figuring out what works well with the AI and what doesn't. Finding some combination of things that doesn't... I mean, that *can* be valuable, if it's something that can be reasonably improved to extend the range of play! But with stuff like this, it's asking the AI to make decisions of the sort where if it gets them wrong, the ship gets destroyed or chipped away at for no benefit, and I'd much rather have it behave this way in a contrived 1vs1 than to risk even a slight negative impact on how it works under more reasonable circumstances. I hope that makes sense!

[DownTheDrain]

If you put an iffy short-range Brawler loadout in a situation where to win it has to armor-tank while dodging Salamanders and maintaining constant pressure on an enemy ship, it's going to do poorly, period.

The loadout is all sorts of terrible, but I'm somewhat surprised the AI doesn't decide to get in close and just take it on the chin.
If it was a fight with several ships on both sides, where armor-tanking at the wrong moment could have serious consequences, I would totally understand. In a 1v1 with an enemy that can't really hurt it I was expecting the AI to be less timid.

[Alex]

The AI is basically coded for multi-ship combat, though, since that's largely what you get in the game. Even in a 1-1 somewhere off from the main battle, it's probably better for it to be conservative and survive until the player gets there to help than for it to take risks and get blown up or just take damage that limits its further usefulness/costs to repair/etc. The "upside" of it occasionally winning fights like this isn't worth the downsides.

I mean, I get what you're saying! It's just... if the AI makes these sorts of decisions, it'll *definitely* get them wrong sometimes, and that's very bad. What it does now is arguably even good because stalemate-type fights give the player more of a chance to exercise agency over the battle.

"A 1v1 with an enemy that can't really hurt it" - that's practically impossible for it to determine, right? You and I know this is a simulator battle limited to a 1-1. But it what about a real battle, where reinforcements might come in, and where the player's current supply situation might matter, and so on? In this specific case, though, the maneuvering to avoid Salamander hits is far too tricky regardless. But if the Salamanders weren't there and the Brawler had better flux stats, it'd probably run the Mule down, though.

Basically... a 1-1 like this, either it's happening somewhere offscreen and it'll keep. Or it's happening somewhere nearby, and the player is involved, so either they're controlling one of the ships, or it's not a 1-1. The case where the player is watching a 1-1 on autopilot go wrong and not doing anything about it - I mean, that's what we have here, but it's explicitly not a case I'm worried about; it's not one that matters very much, if that makes sense. It can be handy for figuring out what the AI does well, what needs improving, and so on. But I think it's also important to realize which aspects of it don't actually count for much, and be judicious about what to address, and what might create more problems than it would solve.

[DownTheDrain]

Alright, that makes a lot of sense. If I have to choose between an overly conservative AI that doesn't run down enemies when it could and an overly aggressive one that loses ships when it shouldn't then I'd obviously prefer the safe choice.
I have no idea what's happening under the hood, how all-seeing the AI is compared to the player or what it can and cannot determine, so I'll just take your word for it.
Combat still feels extremely kitey but that's probably a separate discussion.

[Alex]

Yep, gotcha - what's easy or not for an AI isn't exactly the most obvious thing! And, yeah, that is indeed the choice. (Though, arguably, there's a bit of room for the "reckless" personality to take some otherwise inadvisable chances.)

Combat still feels extremely kitey but that's probably a separate discussion.

(Hmm, yeah. Can't say much about this since I'd need to know what specifically you mean.)

[Lucky33]

handed it over to my reckless officer and, well...

There is no officer on the ship.