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[BCS]

I've been playing with Afflictors for a while now and I observed several... peculiarities when it comes to their behaviour. I don't know if this is something specific to Afflictors or all phase ships.

When two Afflictors are ordered to take a point, they use phase space to get there, but they both go to the middle of the point, so they cannot exit phase space(because they overlap one another) When this happens AI tries to move a bit in not-so-random direction to get out of collision range, but because both ships do it simultaneously it often doesn't work too well and it can take several seconds or so for them to actually "untangle" which just looks bad and wastes CR.

Sometimes Afflictors exit phase space too close to large friendly ships(in my case, Conquests - maybe it's a Conquest thing) even though they still have plenty of flux to spare - this usually means within operational shield range, but in some extreme cases within the actual bounds of the ship. In both cases they needlessly take damage.

Sometimes they hang out too close to enemy ships when they blow up. This is especially bad in case of enemy capital ships which can instapop them(and that's with Reinforced Bulkheads and Elite Damage Control but I'm not sure if the latter affects ship explosions) I noticed that the AI will try to keep the distance from an enemy ship that is low on hull, it's just sometimes not good enough at doing it especially if both ships are moving.

The Afflictor AI has no respect for Light Assault Guns - it will not treat the base 40 explosive damage as worth entering phase space for(it will avoid Light Mortar shots, so I assume it's calulated based on per-shot damage, not damage per second) This causes the phase ship to needlessly tank 160 explosive DPS.

Shade's EMP Emitter functions the same - Afflictor will just hang around in real space in range getting constantly zapped. (On a side note the EMP Emitter seems to be quite... strong? - it's basically a Pulse Laser with a massive EMP effect)

Oh, and Afflictors sometimes just die to Doom mines because they don't avoid the mine blast radius, only the trigger radius, so if something else triggers the mine the Afflictor takes the hit too. Dunno how intended this is.

[TaLaR]

Avoiding large ship's death explosion is a skill that takes quite a bit of practice even for player.

Simply put, many capitals have larger death explosions than AM Afflictor's attack range. So you have to shoot at part of the target furthest from center, while on break-away trajectory yourself, so that by the time shots connect, you are even further away.

Avoiding Doom mines isn't trivial either. If a mine pops exactly in front (there is some random, as to where exactly it pops) of Afflictor going full speed, the only possible reaction is to instantly cloak - you don't have enough acceleration to course-correct. The counter is to slow down before exiting phase near a Doom. And just being in vicinity of allied fighters when enemy Doom is around is a death threat you need to avoid, because mines can pop these instantly.

Obviously AI doesn't even remotely consider any of these advanced points. Imo, Alex basically treats advanced phase ship maneuvers as exclusive toy for player. Which I'm not super happy about, but is better than brute-force removal of any mechanic interaction too complex for AI to figure out.

[Alex]

Thank you for the info! Made some improvements for the "several Afflictors going to the same place" case. IIRC there should also be improvements re: mine/explosion avoidance, but, yeah, not the easiest thing for the AI to do, depending on the circumstances. (For what its worth, I believe it does try to actually be moving away from the target or at least not be moving towards it, if it's low enough for the explosion to be a danger.)

The Afflictor AI has no respect for Light Assault Guns - it will not treat the base 40 explosive damage as worth entering phase space for(it will avoid Light Mortar shots, so I assume it's calulated based on per-shot damage, not damage per second) This causes the phase ship to needlessly tank 160 explosive DPS.

Shade's EMP Emitter functions the same - Afflictor will just hang around in real space in range getting constantly zapped.

There has to be some threshold where the AI won't phase or e.g. you'd have a full-health Ziggurat phasing to avoid a single light machine gun, right? So the way it works is it's looking at the current armor and hull values and it's a sliding scale of how much it cares; instead of making a judgment call (and thus probably being *badly* wrong at times) it feels its way around at the expense of being slightly wrong, more often. So, yeah, it'll take some extra damage. And at times that might even let it dish some out in return, too. How and when to spend armor is another difficult problem!