Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: [1] 2

Author Topic: The ai do eveything to make you lose  (Read 2810 times)

Kanjejou

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 204
    • View Profile
The ai do eveything to make you lose
« on: March 21, 2023, 12:18:51 AM »

Been playing a few game after coming back and the Ai do everything to get itself killed freely

Going 1vs1 staying in ennemy gun range but making sure none of its gun can shot back
opening shield to eat torpedoes but keeping it up against pd laser, nbever retrating out of ennemies fun to vent


And ignoring any order except "retreat"

Ask 8 ship to attack a single on that is isolated ... nope stay aty max range to get slowly killed one by one

Ask to attack ship A they all go to ship B and spread get isolated then each go attack their own ship and get demolished 1 by 1

Ennemy AI: a stay in group and make sure their pd and gun have focused arc of fire, and block reaper with shield and block normal shot with armor

even reckless officer do nothing, they just or suicide or stay in range to get slowly ***... and all mys hip have at least +25 more speed than ennemies....

Edit: they dont even shot back they just let themselves get killed one by one until im alove and see the undergunned outnumbered ennemies come on top to finish me having lost no ship to speak of... only super long range build and carrier try to do anything
« Last Edit: March 21, 2023, 01:47:04 AM by Kanjejou »
Logged

Lawrence Master-blaster

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 625
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2023, 03:50:47 AM »

The AI for your and enemy's ships is the same, you know.

You just have to learn how to fit ships so the AI is effective with them.
Logged

Grievous69

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2980
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2023, 04:26:27 AM »

https://adultburnsupportuk.org

Welcome to the forum king.
Logged
Please don't take me too seriously.

Jackundor

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 242
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #3 on: March 21, 2023, 05:37:37 AM »

hm. can you show some ships in your fleet and their builds
Logged

Kanjejou

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 204
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #4 on: March 21, 2023, 06:21:53 AM »

1 triple light autocanon lasher with extended range(ITU) and hardened shield

1 Falcon P with twin small breacher twin IR laser twin triple autocanon twin reaper launcher with hardened shield and ITU

2 mule with triple autocannon hardened shield increased range i stripped every other gun since they waste their missile all the time and small gun slot dont allow long range

1 brawler twin arbalest autocanon twin light assault gun extanded range

1 wolf(p) with tactical laser large IRpulse laser 2lrpd laser extanded range(ITU)

1enforcer quad doublee hammerhead torp 1heavy autocanon 2heavy mortar heavy armor ITU
Logged

Grievous69

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2980
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #5 on: March 21, 2023, 06:29:23 AM »

Ok but what are you actually engaging with such a fleet? This is only a part of the picture, and it would be also nice to know the officer personalities. It could be some of your ships have reckless or timid officers so they behave strangely.

Do you invest in flux vents and capacitors? AI ships love having good flux stats and will otherwise do the cowardly back and forth movement since they don't feel safe enough to fully commit.
Logged
Please don't take me too seriously.

Kanjejou

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 204
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #6 on: March 21, 2023, 06:39:18 AM »

1enforcer
1fury
2gremlin they die from cr exhaustion
all officered

all my ship have maxed vent and capacitor(reason why most are undergunned) except the falcon P but im piloting it

EDIT: just had a battle (lost despite having 120dp eagle falcon falconp 7lasher 4wolf and some opther smuck vs 40 1heron one scarab)with my AI controled short range cruiser pushed my ship (was piloting frigate) into the ennemies to die...again and again and again...and AGAIN

edit2. maybe its mod ship and guns that screw the balance indirectly, will continue to play a bit
« Last Edit: March 21, 2023, 02:53:20 PM by Kanjejou »
Logged

basileus

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 133
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #7 on: March 23, 2023, 05:48:50 PM »

The AI can definitely be screwy, especially for high tech because it senselessly drops shields sometimes.

So there are a number of strategies that you can use.

You can go force projection: Carrier fleet and long range missile spam.  Maybe a few sponges to occupy the front lines.  This can also have the advantage of adding durability to your fleet because, unless things have changed, your ships don't tick down unless enemies are close.

You can use wolf pack tactics with a fleet of frigates, like the Tempest, to swarm enemies.  It hardly matters if one of them is doing something stupid.  You have redundancy.  Admittedly, you probably want a healthy economy before turning to an attrition strategy.

You can out-range and out-flux your enemies.  Something like a single extended range tac laser can work wonders with a steady pilot.  Your keeping steady damage at long range will make the AI loathe to drop their own shields to lose hard flux.  Your ship can move in and out of range with its main weapons, managing its flux as needed.  Now the AI will do exactly what your ship was doing before that upset you.
Logged

Not a Pirate

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 37
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #8 on: March 29, 2023, 02:38:30 AM »

Have a look in the pinned comments and you'll find a handy guide to AI ship loadouts with some basic tactics included.

And make use of the simulation in the ship fitting screen to test your builds against "standard" AI types.


Edit: In case you don't know, if you pause the simulation combat right at the start and go into the tactical overview you can then use a couple of commands at the bottom of the screen to "Focus on selected (your test) ship" and "Allow AI combat" or "Use AI" or something like that.    Then you can watch how the AI handles a build vs. other AI.

I've built ships I thought were great but just didn't suit the AI, and others I thought were pretty bad but ended up being a really serviceable fleet/front line/support build in the AI's greasy little hands.
« Last Edit: March 29, 2023, 04:49:57 AM by Not a Pirate »
Logged

robepriority

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 409
  • robepriority#2626
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #9 on: March 29, 2023, 08:23:00 PM »

Every ship in your current fleet is civ/pirate grade, and the weapons/hullmods they have aren't optimized into their niches. Outfluxed and outgunned ships won't preform well.

MrTwister

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 62
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #10 on: March 30, 2023, 04:25:16 PM »

Actually with hightech and midline in my hands AI works pretty well, with some micromanagement of course and good ships.

I prefer a mix of Aggressive and Normal officer personalities, Normal for carriers and support and Aggressive for frontline.

Your really need to learn how to use guard position commands and distribute your ships tactically around the field and also how to spend your command points well, this is key.

It is tempting to just fly your flagship manually and let everyone do their jobs but truth is, this game is much more rewarding for the proper tactical management approach. Give your own ship to the AI and observe the battlefield instead, use your command points, that's my best advice.
Logged

Daynen

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 413
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #11 on: April 03, 2023, 10:52:25 AM »

Starsector will very quickly teach you to idiot-proof your own fleet.  Some ships simply cannot be entrusted to the AI and some weapon combinations will turn your fleet into complete morons, orders be damned.  They can't fly worth a damn; the number of times my allies have literally flown into my shields and taken hull damage while I'm purposely steering away from them is beyond counting.  They lose focus and their priorities go to crap the moment they have more than one ship in engagement range.  I refuse to use dumbfire torpedoes of any kind in 99.9% of all fleet scenarios; my allies have more than once steered DIRECTLY into the path of my reapers or hammers AFTER I've fired them at a completely clear target.  Never again.

The fleet AI simply cannot seem to comprehend that the remaining sections of a damaged station are ON THE OTHER SIDE and insist on getting as close as possible no matter how much weapon range they have, perhaps thinking if they get JUST A LITTLE CLOSER they might be able to fire through the debris or something.  Collateral damage from stations is thus frustratingly common, as the friendlies take full point blank damage from any remaining guns on said station AND block line of fire for any allied ships behind them, possibly causing them to die, creating even MORE debris to block line of fire, causing MORE ships to bully their way up front and cram themselves into the station's face, all culminating in sizeable collateral damage when (if?) the station finally explodes in their faces.

So yeah, learning to get the fleet AI to behave smarter than a tae kwon dodo is a pretty sizeable part of mastering Starsector.
Logged

basileus

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 133
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #12 on: April 03, 2023, 04:12:29 PM »

I hope that Alex reads the part about station combat.  Not only does the AI continue to shoot at sides of the station that have already been destroyed; but also, I recently had an Odyssey move clockwise with the station to make sure that it continued shooting at the destroyed part of the station and couldn't possibly do anything useful.  (Yes, I eventually gave it an order to move counterclockwise after confirming that, no, it really was going to make literally the worst move possible indefinitely.)
Logged

Vanshilar

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 585
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #13 on: April 05, 2023, 07:21:15 PM »

Oh definitely, I feel like the AI is currently the weakest part of Starsector, hands down. It's basically something that you have to learn how to work around. I would happily take an update that is nothing but improving the AI and making it more responsive and intuitive, over new content per se. But working on refining the AI isn't "sexy" so the current AI basically soldiers on. Basically all new players have to get used to the AI doing completely unintuitive and stupid things and learn how to work around that, to make their fleet so strong that even if the AI makes a bunch of mistakes, it'll still win.

Fortunately, as Alex has directly said, the enemy AI is identical to the player's fleet, even down to having an admiral who's sitting there looking at the entire battle map and issuing commands to the ships, limited by the same command points that the player is limited to. So if you're playing a strong player flagship like an Onslaught or a Ziggurat, and you're feeling like the enemy ships just walk into you and die, well, that's because your fleet does the same thing to them. It goes both ways. So you might want to be careful about asking for better AI; better AI may very well make the game harder as the enemy fleet uses better tactics against you.

The only commands I've found to work consistently are "Avoid" and "Retreat". You should see everything else as general guidelines or objectives for your ships to follow, with no particular urgency nor commitment on their part:

"Capture Objective": You might intuitively think that this means the ship(s) will make a beeline to the objective, and then stay within proximity of it to take control of it, unless forced off by enemy ships. What you will actually get is that even if you send an entire fleet of Furies to capture an objective, they will stay a respectful 2000 su away from a lone enemy frigate capturing the objective while they ponder whether or not 8 Furies is enough to handle one enemy frigate, then they'll slowly mosey in after the enemy frigate captures the objective and starts heading away. Or they'll be there until they see another enemy ship at which point they'll decide that chasing after the enemy ship is more important than waiting until the objective is done being captured.

"Eliminate": You might intuitively think that this means the ship(s) will do its utmost to put all its weapons on the target that you selected. Nope, it'll continue with what it's doing, not even bothering to start moving toward the target until it's ready, and possibly firing on other ships even when the target is in weapons range. What this *will* do however is make your ship ignore that it's under attack from other ships, so you need to be careful about using this if there are other enemy ships around. Sometimes the "Eliminate" order will also make your ships back off, which actually makes the situation worse (for example, if you ordered some backline ships to "Eliminate" an enemy ship because a forward ship is getting pummeled, and then you get to watch the backline ships actually back off; or you order your ship to "Eliminate" an enemy frigate before it gets away, then you watch it head directly away from said enemy frigate). That is supposed to be one of the bugs to be fixed in the next update, so hope it'll be addressed.

"Defend": You might intuitively think that this means you're telling the fleet to go to a particular high-value location and prevent enemy ships from getting to it. What you'll actually get is your ships may decide 1) there's some enemy frigate it would rather chase halfway across the map, even if you gave directly gave it a defend order to a location, or 2) your ships will decide to back off when enemy ships approach that defend point, courteously moving to the side so that the enemy ships can slip through. Unfortunately you have no control over which choice your ships may make.

Having said that, "Defend" is useful for getting your fleet to spread out in roughly a line at the beginning of combat. If you take your fleet and give them a "Defend" order behind the enemy fleet, they'll naturally spread out into a line as they try to pass by the enemy fleet without disturbing it too much. Then you can cancel the "Defend" order and they'll start attacking. So there's that.

The AI doesn't really know how to be at the proper weapon range, nor how to adjust its aggression based on its current flux levels. You might intuitively think that low flux means close in and high flux means back off, but you'll find plenty of examples of high-flux ships next to the enemy continuing to head in (maybe because they're trying to kill off a target or because they decided to commit to the fight), while low-flux ships behind them are staying back, unsure if they should move in (maybe because they see missiles on the way or because they're afraid of whatever enemy ship the forward ship is next to). You might think that overloaded ships should back off, but nope, a lot of times overloaded ships will decide to just keep going forward toward the enemy while still under full maneuvering control.

The AI also doesn't know how to move around each other. Say you have a high-flux ship to the upper left and a low-flux ship to the lower right. For us, it's intuitive that the high-flux ship just needs to move to the left a bit and then it can back off, while the low-flux ship just needs to move to the right a bit and then it can head in. What you'll actually get though is both of them will be stuck against each other; the high-flux ship doesn't want to risk colliding with the low-flux ship so it won't back off, while the low-flux ship doesn't know how to go around the high-flux ship so it'll stay there and block the high-flux ship from backing off. So the result is that the high-flux ship will eventually get overloaded and die, while the low-flux ship hangs back at low flux and doesn't fire a thing.

The AI doesn't have any sense of a formation. Not just in the traditional RTS sense, but also, in that if you have a friendly ship in front of you, then it's safer to move in, while if you're the only ship in the front, then maybe you should wait for the others to catch up, or have a lower flux threshold for backing off. There also isn't a generalized "attack move" command, meaning to move in this general direction and attack anything you come across, so it's hard to force the AI to move forward when it's hanging back. You can try to use an "Eliminate" command to do that, but then it'll just ignore anything else, including if that target moves behind other ships, so you have to watch it carefully.

The AI also over-prioritizes missiles that aren't a threat. This means it'll face its shields toward Proximity Charges that are far away and ignore the incoming fire from the ship next to it. This also means that backline ships will refuse to head in if there are any missiles in front of them, even if they're at zero flux and the missiles are just some gimpy Pilums or something.

I think it's not a coincidence that the most effective ships I've found -- measured by how quickly they can kill enemy fleets -- have basically been long-range ships that can equip Squalls. In the same way that your ships don't know how to handle enemy missiles, the enemy fleet also doesn't know how to handle a bunch of missiles being thrown at them from 2500 su away either. The Squalls basically put the enemy fleet in disarray and prevent them from mounting any sort of offense, while the long-range weapons kill them off before they can close in to do any significant damage. This means I don't have to deal with AI issues as much. Gryphons, Conquests, Atlas2's, Legion XIV's, etc. all perform much better than a similar DP's worth of other ships, at least thus far in my testing, because of this. With the Manticore (LP) in the next update getting a Large Missile, I'm looking forward to spamming it in my fleets (depending on its DP cost, of course), since this strategy works even when the ship has SO.

Eventually though you get an intuitive feel for when the AI will act badly, and learn how to avoid getting your fleet into those situations. Or you just learn how to make sure strong ship builds and fleet setups that your fleet will win despite all the AI issues. In the meantime though it's a lot of frustration and yelling at your screen until you figure out how the AI works, or doesn't work.
Logged

Lawrence Master-blaster

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 625
    • View Profile
Re: The ai do eveything to make you lose
« Reply #14 on: April 05, 2023, 09:47:11 PM »

The only commands I've found to work consistently are "Avoid" and "Retreat".

Fun fact: if you have a Monitor that is currently engaged in combat and you issue a Retreat order to it, it will quickly die.
Logged
Pages: [1] 2