[Fury]

Lack of feedback makes me a sad bunny. My main reason to release this custom AI to public was to gather sufficient amount of feedback to balance it properly for all difficulty levels.

[Spoon]

Lack of feedback makes me a sad bunny. My main reason to release this custom AI to public was to gather sufficient amount of feedback to balance it properly for all difficulty levels.

i've created my own AI based on yours, i'm still testing certain things but in general it feels like the A.I behaves more 'natural', it feels more like humans are flying.
So yeah, I for one really like your AI.

[chief1983]

I'm waiting for some issues in trunk to get sorted out, including AI afterburner use, and then I was going to give it a shot with FotG.  Sorry for the wait but I didn't want to sift through a hundred issues with broken builds right now just to test it out.

[MatthTheGeek]

I played both FSPort and FS2 with a slightly modified version of your AI and I admit they are much more natural, as everyone says. On the other hand their behavior is still close enough to the original behavior to not break missions nor modify their difficulty big time, excepted when ships are armed with heat-seeking or dumbfire weaponry, with which they are much more efficient (think the first mission of FS2, you can actually lose the transports against the AIs).

Still didn't found major issues, excepted the fact that you have to make sure that you don't have the new AI applied to turrets, especially on the bomber's turrets, in order to not break balance.

[Fury]

It's good to hear you like the AI. I would much appreciate any feedback on difficulty levels as I'd like to ensure that the AI scales properly, and is not either too easy or too hard for selected difficulty level.

Here's another table I was planning to put into third version of the AI, but due to so little feedback I'm posting it separately for now. It's completely optional and it's not AI change really. It changes turret behavior on fighter and bomber class ships to pick their targets independently, like in capital ships. Retail behavior on those ship classes is that turrets fire on pilot's target, assuming target is in field of view. This makes especially Shivan bombers like Nephilim and Seraphim much more dangerous.

Edit: Attachment deleted, you can get it from the link in first post in this topic.

[Hero_Swe]

That would be helpful if it affected playerships too.

[Fury]

You're referring to the optional tbm in my earlier post? It does affect ALL ships classified as either fighter or bomber.

[Spoon]

Nice, I was planning on making a fighter that had ****ty primary banks but several turrets so that .tbm file will certainly help.

[Woolie Wool]

I tried a modified version with my Wings mod (modified to fit the general gameplay style and extremely high speeds) and unlike some people who found it made the AI less aggressive, I found it made them much more aggressive. They would fire missile after missile at their targets, making the game much more hectic. I once was pursuing this one fighter and saw other fighters fire 32 missiles at it in the span of 10 seconds.

[QuantumDelta]

Much more aggressive than SCP current AI?
Cuz uhh.... all SCP current AI does is pick a target and go "IT MUST DIE OR I WILL RAM IT TO DEATHZORS (..and keep shooting anyway)."

>.>
You don't get much more 'aggressive' than current SCP AI (because it's limited/stupid - doesn't do anything other than attack -.-), well, on insane anyway.

[Woolie Wool]

On Medium they certainly try to evade. They're not very good at it but they try.

[IronBeer]

Yeah, tried the sample missions provided on Medium- the differences were subtle, but were there. I'd see AI ships randomly adjusting speed when broadside to me, I also saw quite a bit more jinking, particularly when charging in head-to-head. Not much else to report- only have about half an hour with the new profile... on Medium, no less...

[MatthTheGeek]

The change of behavior may be subtle, but it is there. For example a wing of Valkyrie doesn't drop like flies anymore, actually they are quite effective at dogfighting.

They also are much more effective when using heat-seeking and dumbfire missiles.

[Fury]

On Medium they certainly try to evade. They're not very good at it but they try.

Hmh, could you try out how much of a difference you can see in AI at different difficulty settings? Hard and Insane AI should be better in their movements.

[Woolie Wool]

I meant the original AI on Medium. QuantumDelta seemed to think that the retail AI fighters always chase you with psychotic single-mindedness like on Insane regardless of difficulty. They fly much better on Medium with your new AI than originally. Even on Easy there's a noticeable difference, and not just the constant missile lock tones.

[Fury]

Oh, I see.

Woolie Wool & MatthTheGeek, you both said you've customized the AI further. Care to share the details?

[QuantumDelta]

I meant the original AI on Medium. QuantumDelta seemed to think that the retail AI fighters always chase you with psychotic single-mindedness like on Insane regardless of difficulty. They fly much better on Medium with your new AI than originally. Even on Easy there's a noticeable difference, and not just the constant missile lock tones.

You're confusing "Vanilla" with "Retail".

These AI constructs Fury put together is much closer to "Retail" than Vanilla is, and, if you were to have a scale it would roughly work out like this.


Vanilla <--- Retail ---> Fury's AI.

Despite the best efforts of quite a few of the SCP duders and myself, the Vanilla bugs that strip retail ai of some of it's 'personality' remain, and show a marked difference in behaviour the higher up the skill/difficulty (general/insane) ladder you go.

The retail AI could still produce and display the behaviour that the SCP AI do, but they would only rarely do it, SCP AI does it 100% of the time, Fury's AI... I've only seen it happen once.

[chief1983]

As the changes in vanilla SCP behavior are corrected to be more like the retail behavior, that won't affect this will it?

[Sushi]

I meant the original AI on Medium. QuantumDelta seemed to think that the retail AI fighters always chase you with psychotic single-mindedness like on Insane regardless of difficulty. They fly much better on Medium with your new AI than originally. Even on Easy there's a noticeable difference, and not just the constant missile lock tones.

You're confusing "Vanilla" with "Retail".

These AI constructs Fury put together is much closer to "Retail" than Vanilla is, and, if you were to have a scale it would roughly work out like this.


Vanilla <--- Retail ---> Fury's AI.

Despite the best efforts of quite a few of the SCP duders and myself, the Vanilla bugs that strip retail ai of some of it's 'personality' remain, and show a marked difference in behaviour the higher up the skill/difficulty (general/insane) ladder you go.

The retail AI could still produce and display the behaviour that the SCP AI do, but they would only rarely do it, SCP AI does it 100% of the time, Fury's AI... I've only seen it happen once.

If you could figure out exactly which table entries are causing the more "retail-like" AI behavior, it could make it a lot easier to track down and debug them.

[Woolie Wool]

Oh, I see.

Woolie Wool & MatthTheGeek, you both said you've customized the AI further. Care to share the details?

The main thing I did was to change the stalemate logic. Wings dogfighting is very different from FS dogfighting, the extreme speeds means that there is more emphasis on slashing attacks and maintaining an extended turning battle is very difficult. Therefore I made the stalemate time shorter (18 on Very Easy decreasing by skill level to 10 on Insane), and the distance longer (1200 meters on Very Easy, 2000 on Insane). Since hostile craft now fire faster, I changed the damage multiplier by skill level (0.1 on Very Easy, 0.25 on Easy, 0.5 on Medium, 0.75 on Hard, 1.0 on Insane). Since there is no linked fire penalty in Wings and mostly ammo weapons, there's no reason not to link them, so now the AI always link their primaries.