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[BigBrainEnergy]

I know I'm probably in the minority here, letting the AI pilot a doom in my fleet, but it's surprisingly good. I dislike piloting phase ships because the battle can take longer than it would otherwise (and I'm not very good at it) so I was pleasantly surprised by how well the AI performed.

Except for one thing.

In about half of my battles it will strip it's own armor off with mines. This can be quite funny when it happens to the enemy, but is extremely frustrating when it's YOUR doom. After it's armor got buffed with the changes to phase ships I figured it would be a good idea to put heavy armor on it and it's been working wonders for the ship's longevity in combat, except for that 50% of the times when it strips off it's own armor with just 1 mine.

I just don't know how this hasn't been addressed. Not to be rude, but it seems like something that would come up in testing or on the forums at SOME point, like "hey, maybe it shouldn't drive into it's own mines unless it's phased." I mean, it's sitting at 0% flux and it's not like the phase cloak is on cooldown because I've been watching it. I know it wasn't using it recently. So why doesn't it just activate the cloak before the mine goes off? Every other ship on the battlefield gives appropriate respect to the mines, even my other ships. But not the doom itself. I've seen battles where the doom was limping home afterwards, but 90% of the damage was self-inflicted while other battles it never even comes close to it's own mines.

Has anyone had similar experiences? Is this something that's come up before and I'm just repeating an old complaint that can't be fixed easily? I'd be less frustrated if I had a better understanding of what's going on here.

[Salter]

Ive found that doom doesnt handle well in AI hands because it doesnt register its own mines as hostile, at least from my own experience. The AI will handle all the other phase ships fine, but the doom is best left in the hand of a player imo.

I also found that the player can make much better use of the mines too, since the AI first idea is to lay them all out, whereas the player can use them to break up fighter wings, coral escaping ships or punish an overly aggressive Onslaught.

[Alex]

Hmm - do you have a vanilla save or a simulator scenario where I could observe this happening at least semi-reliably? I'm not seeing it and I thought this issue was (at least mostly!) fixed in the latest release.

The Doom is absolutely aware of its own mines, btw - an easy way to test that is to run the simulator, drop a mine, fly over it, and turn on autopilot.

[DaShiv]

Anecdotally, I've observed the AI Doom hitting themselves with mines when trying to defend themselves from fighters in the current patch. They don't seem to observe consequences when leading the target using dumbfire ordnance, similar to how Flashes will happily bomb the rear of friendly ships when starting their bombing runs.

[Alex]

That is the most difficult case, yeah. But - doesn't seem to be doing it for me; I've tried Strike Doom vs the 3 sim Condors, and vs 2x Condors (without the Piranha one) and a Strike Heron. After a few runs - it's very careful about not unphasing if there's a mine nearby, and hasn't had a single friendly-fire hit from its own mine. And it *did* wait out a mine it was in range of several times, unphasing immediately after it detonated.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying there isn't some problem case! Apparently, there *is*. I'd just love to know exactly what it is, since so far I'm not seeing this issue crop up.

[GoldPile]

I can also attest that I've experienced OP's AI behavior occasionally on Dooms. Usually the Doom will phase if it's on top of a mine but occasionally I'll see it just ignore one slightly to the left or right of the bow. I'm currently doing an AI Doom run an observing their overall behavior.

The AI Doom generally strips off a hole in their own frontal armor, I cannot confirm if this is due to a close enemy presence as it will drop a mine on an enemy then proceed to fly close to said enemy and not phase before the mine explodes. There are a few cases where the mines were targeted at fighters and I saw a similar behavior. AI Dooms can also drop mines in close proximity to itself and not fly outside the blast radius. Usually the explosion strips a small hole in the armor from the side but won't ever be directly on top. I've stopped building armor into Dooms as there's a chance it will strip itself.

AI Dooms are captained with Systems Expertise, Phase Modulation, and max capacitors. Captains range from aggressive to cautious with most being steady. I've observed this behavior on zero flux as well.

[BigBrainEnergy]

I do run nexerelin in my game, so I'll see if I can replicate the issue entirely without mods (might need a day to get to that point though). For reference, I was testing against an ordo with an aggressive officer in the doom.

Something of note is I've never seen it sit directly under the mine when it detonates, when it hits itself it's always near the edge of the explosive radius. My speculation is that maybe the AI was told to respect the mine within a certain radius and later on the damage radius got increased.

[Alex]

Ahh, I think I've got it sorted! For some reason I started seeing it more when using Systems Expertise - I don't think it contributes anything directly, but it's just a lot more mines and it's liable to spawn a bunch more of them when the fighters swarm it.

So: what I think is happening is that occasionally a fighter (or an asteroid etc) will trigger a mine by running into it, and the AI wasn't aware of that possibility. I've made it aware, and also increased the radius at which it treats mines as a danger, adding a little bit of padding to it. It seems to be just about completely resolved in testing - at least, I've seen zero self-mine-hits over a period where I'd normally see two to three. Not the most extensive testing, but I can also see it actively avoiding the danger in the situations that would end up in self-hits before.

Thank you for bringing this up, and for all the details!

[BigBrainEnergy]

Now that you mention it, you're right. I have seen the doom get hurt when fighters/asteroids trigger the mines but I forgot about it. Thanks for the quick response!

Edit: I'm still working on getting a fully vanilla doom, but I have some footage of my existing playthrough that shows the doom hurting itself which may be useful. I'll post it soon once I cut it down to the relevant moments.

[Alex]

Edit: I'm still working on getting a fully vanilla doom, but I have some footage of my existing playthrough that shows the doom hurting itself which may be useful. I'll post it soon once I cut it down to the relevant moments.

Thank you! I *think* this is sorted, but it wouldn't hurt to have a look at a case where it's happening just to be on the safe side, so I appreciate it!

[BigBrainEnergy]

I'm in the process of uploading the footage to youtube, but as I was combing over the examples I noticed something. It looks like the mine's timer ticks down faster when an enemy ship is in close proximity, but I don't think the AI takes that into account.

*Edit* here it is, I may have gotten carried away with the editing (I also wanted to include samples of the AI performing well and then I wanted to add some background music and well... it is what it is). I added timestamps in a comment for each instance of friendly fire.

In particular, the first example in the video stands out as being quite strange but it fits what I think is going on. If you look closely, a spark passes right by the mine (but doesn't detonate it) and the timer seems to speed up so when the doom get closer it detonates sooner than the AI expected.



Oh, and I believe when the AI uses termination sequence it judges the range based on the ship's position rather than the drone's position. This will occasionally cause it to shoot at targets that are out of range.

[Darloth]

Well I'm still not sure this makes the effort it must have taken to edit that worthwhile, but -I- laughed.

[Brainwright]

It's a good vid.

I've recently started using a Doom to support my fleet of super-elite frigates, but I use standoff weapons and don't see this problem.

I will say though... I usually take on vastly superior numbers, and pushing suppression weapons until they're oppression weapons has been my go-to tactic.  Two cryoflamers wouldn't work because they're too flux intensive.  A cryoflamer plus a graviton beam and breacher missile might work better.  It will do almost as much damage to shields, cost substantially less flux, and the graviton beam will drag the ship, making it more vulnerable to mines.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Well I'm still not sure this makes the effort it must have taken to edit that worthwhile, but -I- laughed.

If you guys like it, then it was worth it.

Two cryoflamers wouldn't work because they're too flux intensive.

I spend a lot of time thinking about strategy in this game, so I get why you might think that but you have to change your approach for phase ships. Where a shielded ship would be screwed over by all that soft flux, a Doom will watch it all disappear as soon as it cloaks (especially with phase anchor). The only thing is it won't cloak unless it gets shot at so it *can* get bottlenecked but in that case you're probably winning anyways. With max caps it can empty out all the charges even with extended mags assuming it started with no hard flux buildup, and besides, it just looks AWESOME.

A cryoflamer plus a graviton beam and breacher missile might work better.  It will do almost as much damage to shields, cost substantially less flux, and the graviton beam will drag the ship, making it more vulnerable to mines.

I'll admit I hadn't thought about the potential synergy with graviton beams, although I'm a bit skeptical because the slowing effect is pretty minimal in my experience.

I usually take on vastly superior numbers, and pushing suppression weapons until they're oppression weapons has been my go-to tactic.

The best example of this is squall spam. I'm kinda glad they're getting nerfed, but Alex was careful not to hurt their anit-shield properties. They're still going to be very strong in large numbers, you just need a way to close out the kill before you run out of ammo. I'm not saying you have to spam them, they're still good as a support weapon, but having long-range flux-free anti shield weapons is always going become oppressive once you have enough of them.

[Alex]

I'm in the process of uploading the footage to youtube, but as I was combing over the examples I noticed something. It looks like the mine's timer ticks down faster when an enemy ship is in close proximity, but I don't think the AI takes that into account.

*Edit* here it is, I may have gotten carried away with the editing (I also wanted to include samples of the AI performing well and then I wanted to add some background music and well... it is what it is). I added timestamps in a comment for each instance of friendly fire.

In particular, the first example in the video stands out as being quite strange but it fits what I think is going on. If you look closely, a spark passes right by the mine (but doesn't detonate it) and the timer seems to speed up so when the doom get closer it detonates sooner than the AI expected.

Thank you, that was *super* helpful! I really appreciate it. Possibly the highest production values on any bug report

Thanks to this, I was able to reproduce and fix a couple of other issues where it was outright ignoring its own mines. It should be in much better shape now, though it'll also - as a side effect - won't be quite so cavalierly aggressive when its own mines are nearby and close to exploding.

You were right about the triggering, btw - due to... some backend things, it was only respecting friendly mines if they triggered by the duration expiring, and not by an enemy passing close by the mine and triggering its pre-explosion sequence.

Oh, and I believe when the AI uses termination sequence it judges the range based on the ship's position rather than the drone's position. This will occasionally cause it to shoot at targets that are out of range.

(Yep, aware of that one, thank you! Already made some changes in the dev build.)