[Nuclear1]

With Fury's new AI, it's less of a problem.

And I'm all for not sending in 5-6 bomber wings at the same time.  That just looks stupid.  The player only ever gets one or two wings supporting him at any time, so why on Earth am I chasing down 30 enemy strikecraft at once?  Make the individual units tougher, don't compensate by flooding the battlefield.  You can do a whole lot with less.

[headdie]

planned warp in points and balanced reinforcements for the enemy do a lot more for mission tension than raw numbers.

forcing the player to dash between small numbers enemy reinforcements knowing there will only be seconds between you getting there and the bombers launching are some of the best moments in freespace

[ChronoReverse]

I find that at different difficulty levels, the competence of your wingmen also changes.  On Easy (sort of ironically), I find my wingmen completely incompetent whereas on Medium, they're actually useful for guarding targets.  I'm not too sure how useful they are on Insane because any AI advantage available was wiped out by their tendency to die.

[Commander Zane]

Ohhhh no, on Medium they're just as incompeitent as they are on Very Easy on my part.
That (Almost) seven minute furball between four Valkyries and one Seth, was on Medium, they can't do a damned thing except keep missiles from tracking me instead.

[General Battuta]

Nope, ChronoReverse is correct, wingmen competence will increase with difficulty level since they use the same AI classes as hostiles.

[Commander Zane]

It never seems that way to me.

[General Battuta]

Perhaps because the hostiles are getting better too.

[Commander Zane]

Even so it shouldn't take seven minutes of four ships chasing one without even hitting it.
Every time I simply see the friendly AI utterly incapable of doing anything properly. I might get lucky once in a while but that's a rare occasion.

[General Battuta]

Unless I'm forgetting something major, friendly and hostile AI are the same on a per-class basis. There is no distinction.

The hostile AI may be set to a higher class, mind.

[Sushi]

Unless I'm forgetting something major, friendly and hostile AI are the same on a per-class basis. There is no distinction.

The hostile AI may be set to a higher class, mind.

In most cases, this is true, but there are some team-specific AI Profiles attributes (friendly AI fire delay vs hostile AI fire delay).

[Commander Zane]

I must be missing out on edited global AIs or something, as it doesn't matter what campaign I've played (I'm sure War in Heaven will actually be different though) the hostile : friendly AI skill ratio always seems to be 3 : 1 regardless of whatever difficulty I put it on.

[General Battuta]

Nope, the friendly AI is pretty much the same as hostile on a per-class basis (barring the team rules Sushi cited) even in retail.  

Whatever effect you're seeing may be because the hostile AI tends to be set to a higher class in retail missions, or because there are more enemy ships than friendly.

You can check out the freely available Fury AI to see kickass AI at work.

[Commander Zane]

Yeah I've already looked at that AI mod and actually got splashed on Apocalypse on Medium for the first time ever.

[Nuclear1]

Amen to that Battuta.  That new AI mod is incredible.  Granted, it should be used somewhat sparingly, but when it's used, there's a noticeable improvement in wingmen survivability.

[General Battuta]

We had this problem with WiH development where we couldn't get the GTVA to seem scary and challenging without using overwhelming numbers, but that just didn't make sense, because zerg tactics are silly.

And then Fury was like 'oh hai, I'll build a custom AI for Blue Planet' and we were all like YAY.

I would not say we are using it 'sparingly', though.

[IronBeer]

I would not say we are using it 'sparingly', though.

Do you think it might be a bad idea to simply use the AI improvement as a blanket swap? AKA build campaigns from the ground-up with that sort of AI balance in mind?

[Spoon]

I would not say we are using it 'sparingly', though.

Do you think it might be a bad idea to simply use the AI improvement as a blanket swap? AKA build campaigns from the ground-up with that sort of AI balance in mind?

Give a good reason why that might be a bad idea?

[General Battuta]

I would not say we are using it 'sparingly', though.

Do you think it might be a bad idea to simply use the AI improvement as a blanket swap? AKA build campaigns from the ground-up with that sort of AI balance in mind?

Um, that's exactly what we're doing. We do test our missions.

Swapping it in to the retail campaign certainly makes it a new kind of fun, though.

[Dilmah G]

Indeed, and it wouldn't make sense for the GTVA to suddenly kick ass in one mission and then get pushed aside in the mission afterwards. The difference between Retail and Fury's AI is very obvious, it doesn't make sense NOT to blanket swap them.

[IronBeer]

I should certainly hope that you're testing your missions.  

Really, I'm just being facetious. The only potential downside to implementing the improved AI (near as I can tell) would be the possibility of unbalancing existing missions. "Possibility" being the operative keyword.

Ok. What I meant by "blanket swap" was for ALL campaigns to use it. Not put it in a few missions in a campaign but not into others.