So, I've got most of the ships and weapons finished that I want to use, and I've started testing them. The AI sometimes isn't very smart, but the AI-stupidity was best demonstrated in a bomber-vs-capship test I did:
On the initial attack run, the bombers flew at the enemy capital ship and made a swarm of bombs, which worked great. However, they only fired one wave of bombs; they didn't switch banks to lock and fire more waves of bombs. Or if they did switch banks, they never established lock and fired.
Once the bombers got in close to the capital ship, they sort of loitered around it at short range. Because of the $FOF property I set up in point defense weapons, getting really close to a capital ship is supposed to be kind of dangerous. These are really big, ursa-dwarfing bombers, designed to not care terribly about enemy PD, but they were so close that they sometimes blew themselves up with their own shockwaves. I could do some screwing around with damage types and armor.tbl, and make bombers immune or near-immune to bomb shockwaves, but if smaller bombers repeat this behavior too, they'll get torn to shreds by PD guns.
The turret behavior for shooting down bombs is really really weird. The turrets seem to always prefer the closest bomb - which in theory, makes sense. Unless you have dozens of PD guns, and they end up concentrating fire on just one or two bombs. I need a way to make them target bombs a little more randomly, and spread fire across multiple targets. A swarm-barrage of ten non-radius-doubling corkscrew-enabled bombs isn't supposed to be easy to shoot down, but even on simple capship-to-capship torpedoes that fly in a straight line, PD guns have problems.
