AI Decisions

[Aven Valkyr]

Actually the AI in this game is really good. Unlike my UI Decisions post there's not a lot to list here. My one and only gripe with the AI is NPC pathing. I have stood on a ship and the NPC pilot has flown that ship straight into a station, ramming it until it is chipping into its hull, and then I'm like OMG and have to jump into the command seat while the ship takes more damage. The AI pathfinding in this game is atrocious. But I think I can shed some light here.

By tweaking a couple of things I'm certain you could clean the AI pathing right up.

- Vector based pathing. It seems that ships in this game want to fly in a straight line as opposed to a curve. So the pathing becomes a bunch of segmented lines. "Fly here. Stop. Turn ship. Fly here. Stop. Turn ship". This is the mind of your NPC pilot. What the AI needs is a calculation that makes the pilot avoid obstacles, or is able to plot a curved line around things like stations, gates, large ships, asteroids etc. Out of sector the AI is perfectly adept for what it needs to do. But it doesn't work while in sector. And the reason is because obstacles count when you have them loaded up. So it's the in-sector pathing that needs to be fixed. And once again the line they pick while pathing needs to be a vectored curve in order to get around objects. The pilot could use the linear pathing as you have now for travel. But if say within 20KM of a large object, it switches to vector pathing, obviously eating up some CPU to crunch those numbers. The fact that the pilot only uses vector pathing when it needs to, as opposed to all the time, would reduce strain on the computer. If you try to tell me you are using vector pathing now, then I would laugh and say, you are using it wrong then. Because pilots in this game want to fly in a straight line, AT ALL TIMES. This just doesn't work. When do you as a player ever travel in a straight line unless it's to go any long distances? You wouldn't. But while in-sector, with all those obstacles loaded, the AI just doesn't understand that they will get blocked by said obstacles. The AI doesn't understand it's not out of sector anymore. This is something that if changed, would solve some pretty serious problems within X4.

- Follow/Guard commands. The AI in this game just doesn't understand how to follow the player ship, and really needs to be fixed. Once again, this is all in-sector stuff, so this only really applies to the player and any fleet they have associated with them. When the player engages travel mode, the fleet ships just sit there, even if their command is to protect. They are unsure of what to do until the player has reached even a couple of systems over. Then the fleet wakes up and goes OH! The ship we are supposed to protect is gone!!! And then, they slowly poke their way to the gate and jump through it. The way this needs to be fixed is to write a code that when the fleet sees the player take *any* action, they override any command they have going at the time and mimick the players movements. So if I were to activate travel mode, all of the ships in my fleet would check my heading, engage their travel drive as well, and align themselves to my heading. Unfortunately this can't happen in "game ticks". This has to be a realtime service. Because the fleet would be constantly checking my heading and making sure they are working to match my speed. I know this can be done because space sims dating back to 1997 have been able to do this. It's not a new concept. And the caveat here is this would only apply while in-sector. For all OOS activity the AI works perfectly fine.

- Fleet AI options. There is a massive lack of control over fleets. The fact that your "fleet" is bunched up with the rest of your asset window, makes me not want to work with it at all. The way fleets are visualized and interacted with in this game is nearly non-existant. Once again there is a missed opportunity here to give the player a great amount of control and customization over fleets. Here are some AI things that will make them better:
>>> Carrier control - Setting how and when a carrier releases its fighters. Setting how those fighters react once released. Setting how those fighters come back into dock once combat has ended. Setting up patrol runs of fighters (carrier always has a few of them roaming around while not travelling), allowing the player to set small, medium and large patrol radius from the carrier.
>>> Fleet rules of engagement - Being able to set a patrol radius would be nice. Or make it so that fleets will engage anything in sight of an asset (satnets light up targets). As of now fleet vessels just blindly wander around a sector and won't engage anything unless it's right in their face. Fleets should also have a jump radius that they will follow targets for (depending on target size/quantity), as defined by the user
>>> Fleet supply ships - Kinda like the CAG from X3. We should be able to have fleet run transport operations, maybe even automatically diverting some fighter cover to the transport ships associated with the fleet. The carrier(s) would divert a certain amount of their fighter assets to protecting soft targets in the fleet.

Well that's all I've got for now. I'm still just a small little corporation in my game. I have yet to get to the really big stuff, although I did have a frigate at one point with a single fighter docked, and a couple other small ships floating around. And while in-system the AI is just about completely broken when it comes to fleet ops. Out of system it seems to work decently, aside from my ships ignoring hostile contacts in the system. Thanks for reading!