I've been waiting!
It honestly wasn't my intent to upset anyone and I'm glad we cleared it up, I've had lots of theories about what 'might' be wrong and such, but ultimately I think it's going to come down to isolating the subtle AI behaviour changes one at a time.
The most impacting Multiplayer change (which is also actually seen in single player too on higher difficulties), is that the AI have a penchant for pointing themselves at the players target reticle, and never ever stopping, to the point that if the human doesn't move out the way or kill the AI the AI will just ram the human and keep firing (this is without MVPs and on the same missions the behaviour is absent on retail builds), the AI is so accurate and so 'glued' to the lead reticle of your ship it's not actually worth it (even in a light fighter) to try to dodge the AI's aim, even at my skill level I can't reliably enough dodge their shots using tricks that would send any pilot in the world out of their chair, because of this behaviour well balanced missions in multi are currently very-difficult-to-impossible (though subsequent to these posts we have started being able to beat these missions, either by taking the AI on head to head one at a time or running away and avoiding them as much as possible whilst completing objectives, but anyway) due to the number of enemies that inhabit multi missions (*only the busiest single player missions match up to a typical multi mission).
- This change, we had assumed came from the AI tables, but this turned out to be untrue.
A great many people on IRC helped out looking, but it wasn't until Wanderer started throwing old builds at me (which I tested in quick succession) that we managed to lock down the problem a bit, we still don't know what caused it, but the behavioural change is between 3.6.7 and build some time later, unfortunately we ran out of builds - there was still +-400-500 revisions to check through.
The change is very distinctive, AI - even on insane have a tendency to 'flinch' whilst you fire at them (this lowers the incoming DPS on the player AND upsets AI aim which becomes more accurate the longer it's pointed at a target), this twitch or flinch in the SCP builds this behaviour is at the very best 'extremely, extremely rare', and at worst - non-existent (not actually true, since I've seen it, once, couldn't repeat it with the same ship on the same mission after trying dozens of times, though).
I'd previously assumed it was stuff like super_attack triggering and 'staying on', because other aspects of AI behaviour had remained less changed.
For a concise list of observed changes (not extensive but all I can think of atm);
AI; shield management has dramatically increased.
AI; "not flinching" leading to super-AI accuracy, even to the point where they push the turning limits on their ship.
AI; missile evasion / CM launching is greatly improved (leading to dumbfire missiles on occasion (CM fired almost simultaneously to Missile launch, doesn't bother me much since I don't use aspect seekers if given the choice but I imagine it could annoy some people
)
AI; Now bombs like a player (well, an ok one), leading to fleets of incoming bombs from wings of bombers (they fire -> change bank, -> fire, etc)
AI; Shivans use "slide" far, far more effectively on some missions haven't worked out what causes it solidly (*looks like collisions and/or target swapping mostly) but they can circle strafe a player.
Subsystem damage - seems a bit high (possibly due to more CPU time free to calculate it), this is most obvious with beams (AAA) but that may also be related to the lack of beamwhack, it is however visible with primaries that have smaller projectiles (subach/kayser/SDG) as well.
Collision damage - especially subsystem damage from collisions seems to be much more punishing, especially on multilplayer (collision physics was always a bit screwed up on multi, the client had a tendency to take a little more damage than the host, but at the moment this has been exacerbated massively - skimming a capital ship at very low speed can leave your fighter on very little hull, or even destroy your ship), it's very difficulty to furball properly because of it (*ramming used to be a tactical decision, now it's near suicide).
Bombs - seem to be significantly harder to shoot down on Multi (their tracking isn't correct - even lag adjusted), they also seem to be very slightly harder to shoot down from behind on Single/As host, but on multi it's virtually impossible, they also don't always report if they have been shot down to the clients - which leaves the clients chasing bombs which aren't there.
Beam accuracy - now this one might raise a few eyebrows, but beams were somewhat inaccurate at the best of times when they were introduced, beams could never be dodged or evaded (*'cept by ducking around a corner whilst they powered up), they either hit, or they miss, currently they seem to use the normal AI code for aiming, and thus have increased weapon accuracy, leading to them virtually never (*never in some cases)missing, when they would have previously missed ~30% of the time.
SCP builds seem to randomly completely
lose sync between host and clients (very rare) - it used to happen with laggier clients on Retail, but currently it happens even with sub 100 pings.
The client sometimes crash when the host jumps whilst the client is in respawn (about to get the respawn screen, after their ship has exploded) - Believing this to be a retail bug, but I don't really remember, also other than this condition I'm not sure exactly what causes this.
Another old bug that's gotten slightly worse;
Secondaries on ships that are warping in (trebs at a Ravana front beams for example) seem to 'miss' for no discernible reason other than the capships speed is over ~100 or whatever the actual speed is (hard to judge sometimes, but it seems to be just over 100 that this behaviour begins).
Debris - another old bug, not really one that has been made worse by SCP but one that would be greatly appreciated to be fixed. On the host side, Debris is rendered correctly, however on the client side, it's rendered completely differently, different sized debris, different directions of travel, and the real ones obviously are totally invisible, so clients end up 'dying for no reason' on occasion because debris has clouted them in the face.
..I know there's a couple I've missed, but there's a descriptive list of the ones I remember right now. :<
- sorry I didn't reply to your PM on IRC btw Goober, I was sleepin' peacefully
*Edited to try to make the subject of each slightly easier to read.
