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[Kohlenstoff]

And i still want sometimes to get ships out of surrounding situations. Especially since i tend to use only one other ship besides of my flagship. I actually don't even do nor like micromanagement and i like even, that the AI thinks for itself so good. I rarely use more than 2 of my command points during large battles. But sometimes i see, that my Radiant is in a possibly dangerous situation and i want to have it out of there.

Here at 13:35 i have to use this trick because the small remnant ships in masses tend to ablate too much hull.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32NeliLSGYU&t=810s

[torbes]

Just to point out the OP gave an assault order on the point. That is essentially all free ships attack said point. You can even see in his SS that 2 of the bars from the ships are yellow, the rest are green. As in the 2 he commanded and the rest followed. OP just needs to either.... use capture instead of assault OR give other orders to ships he doesn't want attacking that spot. Assault is the more extreme order...ala exterminate and engage.

Also to note, assault turns to defend after the point is captured, so that the ships will stay in that general vicinity short of suiciding on it. Capture turns to a more loose hold order where if there aren't any enemies or less enemies some or all player ships will move farther out to help in battle and only return when enemy threat to capture point is increased.

[DatonKallandor]

And i still want sometimes to get ships out of surrounding situations. Especially since i tend to use only one other ship besides of my flagship. I actually don't even do nor like micromanagement and i like even, that the AI thinks for itself so good. I rarely use more than 2 of my command points during large battles. But sometimes i see, that my Radiant is in a possibly dangerous situation and i want to have it out of there.

Here at 13:35 i have to use this trick because the small remnant ships in masses tend to ablate too much hull.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32NeliLSGYU&t=810s

All this shows is that direct retreat probably shouldn't be cancellable because you can abuse it to micro ships in ways you are not supposed to. The reason your ship is getting swarmed is because it has no escorts - the solution is adding escorts, not letting the player micro more.

[Megas]

Just to point out the OP gave an assault order on the point. That is essentially all free ships attack said point. You can even see in his SS that 2 of the bars from the ships are yellow, the rest are green. As in the 2 he commanded and the rest followed. OP just needs to either.... use capture instead of assault OR give other orders to ships he doesn't want attacking that spot. Assault is the more extreme order...ala exterminate and engage.

Also to note, assault turns to defend after the point is captured, so that the ships will stay in that general vicinity short of suiciding on it. Capture turns to a more loose hold order where if there aren't any enemies or less enemies some or all player ships will move farther out to help in battle and only return when enemy threat to capture point is increased.

This is not what I expect from those orders.  I expect those ships to dogpile at that point or hold it with their life, but they do not do that.  Instead, they let the enemy steal it!  Classic case of "frustrated with AI ignoring my orders in battle."

All this shows is that direct retreat probably shouldn't be cancellable because you can abuse it to micro ships in ways you are not supposed to.

I have cancelled retreat occasionally before because an unfavorable situation suddenly turned (critical enemy ship just died) or the ship I want to retreat was slow and suddenly the enemy decided to retreat and it is time to full assault.

[Vanshilar]

Yes, I agree the single most lacking aspect of Starsector right now is the lack of a competent AI. The game revolves around fleet combat. That's where the game should really shine, but it doesn't, and the single biggest reason is how the AI works. Let's start with the gameplay design.

By design, the AI does *not* carry out your commands directly, as it would in a traditional RTS. You tell it to "go here" or "attack this" and it may or may not do that. The stated reason is that the ships are themselves acting like people would, i.e. they're not going to just march in to their death or whatever the same way you can command zerglings to run in to their death. You also have a limited number of command points, the purpose of which is to limit your control over the other ships in your fleet. So the whole point is to give it more of a "you're leading a fleet as a ship captain" rather than "as a fleet admiral" feel. In other words the other ships, by design, have a lot of autonomy, and the player is more "just one ship within the fleet".

That autonomy would be great if the ships were good at "reading" the battle and understanding the role of their ship within the context of a battle, the same way a human player can. Unfortunately the AI is pretty poor at doing this. Also, what the AI is doing is pretty opaque; it's difficult for the player to figure out *why* a ship is backing off, or why it's continuing to advance into multiple Brilliants when it's at 90% hard flux, etc. There are many other factors that the AI is trying to account for that the player may not readily notice. So overall what the player sees is an AI that doesn't listen to the player, and that alternately seems to either stay away from battle, or rush headlong in and suicide, without apparent rhyme or reason. You get ships which you tell to defend a location, only for them to run off chasing some frigate and then get surrounded and die to enemy ships halfway across the map. Or you see ships at low flux staying away from battle, while the ships with high flux committed to staying on the front lines, I think because the AI has some sense of "once another ship gets close enough then it's time to commit your weapons and fight" as part of its "fight or flight" response. Thus, paradoxically, the ships that are the most vulnerable (high flux) stay in and fight, while the ships that are the strongest (low flux) tend to stay away. This is obviously the opposite of how the player wants the ships to behave.

What would help are the following:
1. "Command points" should be renamed. Maybe "objective" or "goal" whatever. If the AI does not directly follow the player's directions, but instead tries to do its own interpretation of the directions, then it really shouldn't be called a "command". The word choice itself implies AI properties to the player that the AI doesn't actually possess.
2. The AI should apply the player's directions more "unquestioningly". If the player is giving an order to the AI, this inherently means that the player is overriding the AI's autonomy. From a gameplay design perspective, what the player is really saying is "whatever you've autonomously decided is incorrect, I want to supersede what you're trying to do". For example, if the AI is commanded to go somewhere, that really means it should try to go there, not continue chasing whatever frigate it happened to be fighting at the time. In this case the player may be trying to tell the AI "you're getting too far away from the fleet, go back to the fleet". Currently the only way I've found to "force" a ship to disengage is by using the "avoid" command. However, that's very unwieldy, since it's a blanket order and *all* ships start moving away. Many times, it's that I want a *certain* ship to move away (for example, I see that a ship is at high flux and/or it's about to get flanked, but it is continuing to charge in), not the entire fleet.
3. More transparency as to what the AI is doing. I think a lot of the player frustration is simply that the player has no clue *why* the AI is behaving the way it is. For example, in this current release it seems like the AI is overly shy when there are enemy missiles, so many times even when the player orders the AI to charge in, it'll continue to stay back. (I suspect many of the complaints about the AI not being aggressive enough are due to enemy missiles.) There is very little documentation about how the AI functions, nor about how to use the tactical map effectively. This game does not have a "replay" feature and battles are randomized, so AI issues are difficult to reproduce. So if the game at least displays more info about how the AI is thinking, then it would go a long way toward figuring out issues with the AI.
4. Ideally the AI should somewhat prioritize not getting too far away from the main fleet unless commanded to. The fleet tends to spread out, which usually means one of them gets surrounded and then dies. Certain commands (like "defend") do help somewhat with leashing ("defend" is nice because after an "eliminate" command, once the target is dead, the ships will go back to the defend command); however, ships still get pulled out of position pretty easily.

I know fixing the AI is a "hard" problem. It's very easy to point out flaws in the AI. It's very easy to load up any battle and point out how the AI is misreading the battle and how the ships are doing the wrong things. But whether or not the game is fun ultimately boils down to how well fleet combat works, and having a good AI is a very big part of that.

[Yunru]

What I'd give for a tool tip that said both what a ship is doing and why the AI is doing that (e.g. "Backing off: Flux too high)...

[Lucky33]

I think game already has nice placeholder to fix most of its AI problems.

Doctrine screen should be expanded to include things like target prioritization and formation cohesiveness.

[SCC]

I think the best suggestion to come out of this thread is that AI ships should be more transparent as to what and why they do things.

[Lucky33]

It was possible to show the AI flags in the 0.91. Didn't help much really. AI is unable to tell as to why it doesn't execute the order in the manner what is expected by the player.

[Cik]

Personally I think the game would likely choke and die if you tried to extend the AI's decision making much beyond the purely personal. As it is it does a relatively~ OK job of considering it's own circumstances and it can at least mostly hold a steady state and threat-estimate to keep itself alive. The problem is the "mount and blade problem" in that it gets hung up in a purely personal consideration of firepower levels. It will refuse to engage a target it could easily take as long as it engages with friendlies that are nearby and ready to hand.

I always thought a good way to fix this would be a way to organize your ships into squadrons, which would automatically escort each other at the start of the battle (or something similar) and would calculate their firepower and tankiness as a sort of group if they were inside a certain radius and unengaged with other targets. That way at least if a couple ships operating together encountered a foe they could work out if they could take that foe or not keeping in mind the fact that there is more ships than just themselves and it on the field.

I hoped a long while back that a more detailed deployment / engagement metagame might eventually arrive where the game would become strategically more detailed than just burning on to the table in a big deathball and shooing it out with the enemy deathball. I mean, the game is fun don't get me wrong but there's not really any strrategy to it; if you have a superior fleet you'll win, and if you have an evenly matched fleet you'll win with maybe a couple losses caused by the AI on your team miscalculating and getting overwhelmed or surrounded in a way you can't really prevent.

I actually liked "old" fighters more than the current "personal" way they work. At least you could form them up into a big package and push them at enemies in a way that was kind of interesting and involved some skill. The game, imo, retrograded when they were changed and has stayed in pretty much the same place (strategically / tactically obviously, the actual game has gotten much better in most other ways)

anyway this post sounds grumpy. I wish serious attention would be paid to what I addressed above but I think I'm in the vanishingly small minority that doesn't just want to fly a 2d spaceship and blast people with some friendly/enemy ships around to fill up the table with fireballs during the battle.

[Generalstabdick]

I don't undestand why the AI is shy when in comes to missiles, considering that my ships are always gimped with enough flak to sred even the largest missile barrages / fighter swarms.

There was a time in the game's life where only small ( and only small weapons Flagged as PD ) would shoot at missiles and fighters, It might be off-topic but I don't understand what changed throughout the patches that now justifies the AI's Gunning crews insistent need to put a Hellbore round between the eyes of an enemy talon pilot.

It's little things like this that make the game frustrating to deal with and it gets worse with mods because of the extra added weapons ( Ofc this is not the fault of Alex that modded weapons can break the game ).