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[Genir]

The issue:

AI controlled ship often doesn't fire High Intensity Laser despite:

- targeted ship is in range and has shields down
- attacking ship is low on flux
- there are no obstacles between attacking ship and targeted ships

The issue is not permanent, attacking ship will eventually fire the HIL, but will continue to toggle it on and off.

What I expected to see:

AI controlled ship fires HIL non-stop as long as the above criteria are met.

Example screenshot
Ship loadout
Save file with a battle where the behavior can be observed

[Alex]

Thank you for the detailed report, I *really* appreciate the effort you've put into it!

Hmm. One thing to keep in mind is the AI is conservative about autofiring weapons that built up its flux too high; the threshold for just leaving things on is quite low because even a modest flux buildup can be an easy way to lose the flux war.

I played the battle through a couple of times; in this specific case, it'll toggle off autofire for the HIL quite often, but it will also manually fire it at armor at higher flux levels; for these Executors it looks like it'll alternate manual control of the Heavy Autocannons and the HIL, depending on whether the target has shields facing it or not, but it won't keep both on all the time.

The gaps in HIL fire are pretty small and are just due to the built-in delay to its reactions/decision-making; this looks like everything is working as it's supposed to.

(Really nice Executor builds, by the way! The way they make smaller ships pop, especially, is really something to see. That was fun )

[YoungArchivist]

Thank you for the detailed report, I *really* appreciate the effort you've put into it!

Hmm. One thing to keep in mind is the AI is conservative about autofiring weapons that built up its flux too high; the threshold for just leaving things on is quite low because even a modest flux buildup can be an easy way to lose the flux war.

I played the battle through a couple of times; in this specific case, it'll toggle off autofire for the HIL quite often, but it will also manually fire it at armor at higher flux levels; for these Executors it looks like it'll alternate manual control of the Heavy Autocannons and the HIL, depending on whether the target has shields facing it or not, but it won't keep both on all the time.

The gaps in HIL fire are pretty small and are just due to the built-in delay to its reactions/decision-making; this looks like everything is working as it's supposed to.

(Really nice Executor builds, by the way! The way they make smaller ships pop, especially, is really something to see. That was fun )

It would be nice to have vanila in-game fire control settings that can be tweaked by players. If I want my ships to trade high flux over enemy armor, this should be mine decision as a player, not made by AI that follows arbitrary set of rules that I have no control over.
This is a fleet sim, but we dont have any way of setting up simple behavioral protocols for our officers.
There are officer types, but they offer behavioral protocols in batches and I have no fine control over them.

No, I dont want to micromanage them in combat, I understand - Starsector is not an RTS. I want to set up my doctrine before combat, maybe in the defunct "Orders" tab.
Maybe have checkboxes in there, for example:

[Y] - Disregard catious approach to firing weapons that generate large amount of flux
[Y] - Push enemy ship until its dead if it's overloaded
[N] - Conserve misslies to use only when neccesary
etc

[Alex]

Hi - I appreciate the suggestion, but please, no off-topic posts in the bug reports forum. It needs to stay clean and on-point to make sure things don't get missed.

[Genir]

For future reference, there is a vanilla method for changing the described behavior. Adding a non-ammo based point defense weapon (Mining Laser, Flak Cannon etc.) to a weapon group prevents the ship AI from manually controlling that group. This leaves all weapons in the group under weapon-specific AI control, which adheres strictly to AI tags defined in weapon_data.scv but does not attempt to control flux usage.

In case of vanilla High Intensity Lasers this results in the weapon missing no opportunities for damaging armor and hull, but drives the flux usage really high.