Hmm. Right, I don't think it's "unfair", but I think the point here is somewhat different - it's not that the AI knows it is a problem, but that its behavior of never messing this up is very ... AI-esque, let's say.
This is tricky, though. If you know the AI will make a certain mistake some percentage of the time, or in some specific circumstances, abusing that becomes a strategy - for example, with Hounds, you could slowly whittle them down over time just due to them misjudging the range over and over again. I also suspect that implementing this would lead to threads in the bug reports forum pointing out that the AI doesn't "properly consider weapon ranges"
So, I don't know. This is hard - on the one hand, you want to avoid doing anything obviously automated-looking. On the other hand, players
know it's an AI, so they also have the expectation of it not making the kind of "obvious" mistakes that it'd be simple for an AI not to make.
Especially if these can lead to the loss of friendly ships.
I think the AI gets looked at with a much more critical eye than one's own play, because there's no escaping knowing that it *is* an AI.
That's not to say I'm not open to suggestions - actually, I really hope you guys offer some, and continue to provide feedback on what bugs you about it. Having the AI be good is extremely important to me, and oftentimes it's hard to look at what it's doing objectively, having spent so much time with it.
If there was one thing I could change about the AI, I would give it a short time memory and the ability to change it's tactic in reaction to the player's behavior. It's a bit immersion braking if the same stupid trick works five times in a row. But I don't see any easy way to give it the ability of pattern recognition, so whatever.
Could you point out the specific tricks? Just fixing those up could be the easier way to go (I also don't see an offhand way of doing anything resembling learning - that's extremely problematic, even if it was actually successful.)
By the way - the "turn around to lure frigate in" trick should no longer work.
A) AI fleet composition - The AI never seems to have a good mix of ships. A little fine tuning in the variants and fleet compositions could go a long way in making the late game AI a lot more difficult.
Fair point, though I don't think that's really related to the AI.
B) Admiral AI: Reinforcements - The enemy AI always seems to deploy the small ships first. This isn't a bad strategy, but it is very predictable, and a player can usually crush the weaker ships before the bigger ships get in range. I would like to see the enemy ships stay a little closer together upon entering the battlefield, and maybe deploy a mix of heavy and light ships.
Right... yeah. I'd like to have the campaign take shape before really messing with this very much. The same really goes for the fleet compositions issue, too.