Just about every time I watch the AI fight, I see multiple mistakes that the AI makes. I'm not talking about optimizing tactical positioning necessarily which is very difficult to do (i.e. the player is much better at determining if it's worth diving into the enemy fleet to finish off a near-dead target, but that's very hard for the AI to figure out), I'm talking about very simple problems with the AI, in particular with its positioning:
1. Overall, orders need to be much more responsive. The game needs some sort of "and I really mean it this time" button or something. If the AI is ordered to grab an objective, it needs to go grab that objective, even if there are other ships near the objective. You can order a whole fleet of Furies over to grab an objective and they'll all back off if they see a single Lumen in the vicinity (particularly if that Lumen is also trying to grab the objective), before re-advancing some time later. Grabbing objectives is very time-sensitive, especially at the beginning of the battle when you're trying to deploy your whole fleet. For some reason the [REDACTED] ships have no trouble making a beeline for the objectives, maybe because they're fearless, but the player's ships will always back off first when they encounter an enemy ship nearby, even when the enemy ship is one that they can kill no problem.
2. If a ship is ordered to eliminate a target, it needs to go try to eliminate that target. This isn't directly reproducible or predicable but happens frequently, where when I order a ship to eliminate a target, it'll sometimes actually back off away from that target. I think it's to vent or something, I'm not sure. I've seen it retreat over 2000 su away, well beyond the weapon range of the target (which had short-range energy weapons), vent, and then try to re-engage, by which point the target is long gone. This is even when my ship was at low (i.e. ~1/3 or less) flux. There's no reason why it couldn't have just dropped its shields for flux and continued pursuing when it was out of the range of the target's weapons anyway. I've also even seen this happen causing the ship to run into the enemy fleet, when it was previously just sitting there duking it out, then when commanded to chase down an enemy ship that had gotten away, it'll actually move in toward the main enemy fleet rather than toward the target it was ordered to eliminate.
3. Broadside AI needs work. I get that it looks cool to see the ship moving forward while firing its broadsides into the enemy fleet. However, this is bad in terms of positioning. If a broadside ship is ordered to defend a point, if its weapons are on its right, it'll gradually move to the left of the enemy fleet. If its weapons are on its left, then it'll gradually move to the right. Taking the latter case, as time goes on, it'll gradually move so far to the right and so far up the map that it'll be letting all the enemy ships through the point it was ordered to defend. Worse still, it'll have gotten itself flanked by the incoming reinforcements and the ships at the defend point that it just let through. It also doesn't help to order the broadside ship to eliminate whatever ship is breaking through the defend point that it was ordered to defend, because what it'll do is try to broadside that point and thus run headfirst into the incoming enemy fleet.
Broadside captains need to learn that even though their weapons are on their sides, this is space, not water, and they don't need to be moving forward all the time. Their ship can move in any direction independent of where their nose is facing.
4. As a corollary to this, if a broadside ship is ordered to eliminate a target, it should head directly toward that target, not try to head in a direction that broadsides it. Heading in a direction that broadsides the target just means that the target will always be able to outrun the broadside ship since the broadside ship keeps moving to the side of the target. Again, as it approaches the target, it can just turn to expose its broadsides toward the target while still heading directly toward the target at full speed.
5. When encountering the enemy fleet, the ships tend to clump up. This means that the ships in the front block the ships in the back from firing, and the ships in the back block the ships in the front from backing off when they're at high flux. Sometimes this also means that the ships in the front will incorrectly move forward into the enemy fleet even more when they're already at high flux, in order to prevent collisions with the ships in the back. The ship positioning should have some sort of way to move around each other, i.e. naturally form a line instead of a clump. Intuitively my sense is that slower/bigger/less maneuverable ships should have priority, followed by ships at higher flux given priority over ships at lower flux, in terms of figuring out who moves around who. (I would actually say ships at higher flux have higher priority regardless of slower/bigger/less maneuverable, because I'll see big ships box in small ships that are in front of them even though the small ships are at high flux.)
6. Ships at low flux should head toward enemy fleet, ships at high flux should back off away from enemy fleet. This sounds like a simple principle, but I see this get violated in almost every fight, where one of the ships is at high flux and still running into the enemy fleet, while a nearby ship is at low flux yet hanging back and not engaging. This is even with identical ship configurations (so it's not a case of one ship deciding it's more "powerful" than another). So something in the AI subroutines will prevent this from happening. At first I thought it might have been inertia (i.e. the ship that ran in first is just too unmaneuverable to slow down in time) until I saw a Conquest actually jet in at high flux toward the middle of 3 Brilliants while a nearby Conquest at zero flux was busy backing away -- with the zero flux Conquest at the side so it was only facing one of the Brilliants. Not sure why the AI engages in this type of behavior, it might be confirmation bias but it always seems like it's the ships that are surrounded that are more likely to YOLO and dive into the enemy fleet.
