The AI's inability to fly with you.

[Poacher886]

Personally after 150hr's at this sim, i find this the single most frustrating thing. I can't believe its still an issue especially when in X3 it worked just fine.!

If i set my wings to follow or defend etc they simply fly 5-10k behind me then stop after a few seconds until i exit the system! how can they possible defend me if their 10km away! or indeed the other side of the sector..!!?

In x3 they would fly INSIDE 1km and typically closer, would to some extent hold formation, and weve about in a convincing manor, why after 3yrs of this sim is this still not possible.

By the time my wing has caught up, the battle's over !!

[jlehtone]

I can't believe its still an issue especially when in X3 it worked just fine.!

Just fine? Had to pick slug shots from my tailpipe after trying formation, once, in 2006. Never again.

[Alan Phipps]

They just seem to be better flying in formation with an NPC lead ship pilot than with the player at the controls. Maybe they find the player's piloting actions rather unpredictable?

[mr.WHO]

They just seem to be better flying in formation with an NPC lead ship pilot than with the player at the controls. Maybe they find the player's piloting actions rather unpredictable?

Even this is questionable.

My patrol fleets are spread over entire sector when using cruise drive or changing patrol direction.

[builder680]

They just seem to be better flying in formation with an NPC lead ship pilot than with the player at the controls. Maybe they find the player's piloting actions rather unpredictable?

The followers will still disengage their travel drive way too soon and fly at cruising speed to catch up while the lead ship is getting shredded. I don't remember since it was 10 years ago or more now, but I don't feel like I had this problem in x 3. Well of course we didn't have travel drive but still, follow still means follow. So I do not understand the regression in behavior other than it being part of everyone's favorite skill star system. Which I believe I have read dictates the distance at which they disengage their travel drive. The fact that the game has so many of these elements that are designed to deliberately screw with you is maddening. There are a million things that I want to be paying attention to, but babysitting every single ship that has an escort command, or a fly to command, or deploy object, or whatever, is not one of them. Just yesterday, I literally watched one of my station managers delete my resource probe deployment command twice in a row. The commander sets the default Behavior, but you still are allowed to manually add orders to these ships and they follow them 99% of the time, but then they just decide not to sometimes. No matter what you do the game is trying to fight you.

[NightmareNight91]

If the AI could properly use the travel drive, this wouldnt be as much a problem.

[af_2017]

By the time my wing has caught up, the battle's over !!

Does it mean that you do not need wing actually?..

[builder680]

By the time my wing has caught up, the battle's over !!

Does it mean that you do not need wing actually?..

Not if every "wing" is a battleship.

[flywlyx]

If the AI could properly use the travel drive, this wouldnt be as much a problem.

Nah, no matter how slow you fly, they won't follow you.
It is just a lazy design.

[jlehtone]

It is just a lazy design.

Are you sure that it is lazy design and not lazy by design?

[rubahax4]

To make your wing fly behind you, I use the autopilot to a specified point on the map.

[af_2017]

i find this the single most frustrating thing.

I gave up with the idea (erhm... more than 1k hours in the game and several new game starts).
If I want to fight with my npc fleet I do not pick fleet command, instead I tell the fleet attack area or multiple targets and taking some subordinate of the fleet under my own control.

[Artean]

Fleet movement in general is still an obvious weak spot of X4. Too often does a simple "fly to" order break up my fleets and scatters the ships around, seemingly confused and disoriented.

When it comes to develop existing features, I would very much like to see Egosoft spend more time here. Moving a fleet from point A to B should be fail-safe, coherent and swift.

Reading through Steam reviews, AI criticism is likely the most mentioned weak point of all (complex UI is up there too), thus motivating further attention.

[Axeface]

I was doing some tests with AI followers. I noticed that they sometimes, immediately stop if you press backspace while in travel drive, regardless of how far away they are. Obviously they should not do this, if I am 50km's away and press backspace pulling myself out of travel drive, they should not do the same, they should stay in travel drive untill they reach me. I think this is one of the biggest issues with followers, they seem incapable of understanding how far away they are.

[Poacher886]

By the time my wing has caught up, the battle's over !!

Does it mean that you do not need wing actually?..

No... I lose the battle!

[taztaz502]

It's funny because the Ai you get at the start of the Terran campaign follows you perfectly and behaves how a wingman should.... so it's not that they can't fix it.

Also even for Ai fleets it's terrible 9/10 your ships will enter combat one by one and be torn to pieces, I've suggested a system similar to freelancer multiple times where ships "Lock" in formation basically mimicking each others movements until they enter combat.

Nothing would make me happier than seeing huge fleets flying together., this should be serious priority before everything else incl the next DLC. as it makes most ships useless early game and just plain frustrating late game.

[max17]

Personally after 150hr's at this sim, i find this the single most frustrating thing. I can't believe its still an issue especially when in X3 it worked just fine.!

If i set my wings to follow or defend etc they simply fly 5-10k behind me then stop after a few seconds until i exit the system! how can they possible defend me if their 10km away! or indeed the other side of the sector..!!?

In x3 they would fly INSIDE 1km and typically closer, would to some extent hold formation, and weve about in a convincing manor, why after 3yrs of this sim is this still not possible.

By the time my wing has caught up, the battle's over !!

And here I thought I was doing something wrong with the game Glad to finally know that it wasn't my fault to not understand how this worked!

[BigBANGtheory]

bringing X3 into the topic isn't helpful imho

the fact is if you issue an order be it a formation from the UI on fighter class ships or battlecruisers it should just work... from my experience it kinda works and is annoying but not game breaking.

[alt3rn1ty]

I'm kind of hoping ES do for X4 what they did for X3TC, early game development for X3TC in the first couple of years Wings were introduced but suffered from some bad formation flying on the AIs part (there was a mod by X Freak Cartman, namely FCS MkIII, turned wingmen into a ballet, the games AI driven pilots were a bit Auto-Pilock in comparison regularly bumping off the side of the player ship / gates etc).
Later though ES development of X3TC fine tuned the AI pilots as wingmen into something quite decent.
Fingers crossed they do the same for X4, and maybe finally sort out the awful AI approach to enclosed wharf docks, and the odd moments of slamming into asteroids / gate structures which still happen occasionally (not as much as they used to because ES have already tried to address some of these issues already).
Honestly though, compaired with what we used to have in X2 The threat and X3 Reunion, AI pilots are a lot better these days considering how much our CPUs are doing in X4, its quite an amazing game.