Problems with the player faction ship AI

[silent_elyxyr]

Yes, in principle, the player's AI would ideally be as bad as the NPC AI. It isn't. More devastantingly, player has no limit on number of ships. Your ship mines at 80% speed of NPC ship? No problem. Assign ten ships to the task. That yields 800% of the NPC output.

Ironically this is precisely why we'll never get a fix anytime soon unless Egosoft makes a breakthrough somewhere.
Imo Egosoft should bite the bullet and start optimizing for small player sizes instead of large ones.
If players want thousands of ships, they better have the hardware for it instead of Egosoft balancing quality and performance towards performance.

Perhaps there needs to be more of an "LOD" for the simulation side of things?

[silent_elyxyr]

The player ships are supposed to perform tasks for the player such as mining, trading, escorting the former two, etc.

They seem to do EVERYTHING both worse and stupider than the NPC faction ships, even if the player faction captains have max level on everything.

They also will rarely make attempts to reposistion and seem to be unwilling to use boost, or other methods to gain space between them and enemies so they can get a better shot at them. (all things that the NPC AI seems to do on some way or other)

The player ships do perform those tasks. Particularly on trading player has the power to govern details that the NPC cannot, and thus make guaranteed profit.

Yes, in principle, the player's AI would ideally be as bad as the NPC AI. It isn't. More devastantingly, player has no limit on number of ships. Your ship mines at 80% speed of NPC ship? No problem. Assign ten ships to the task. That yields 800% of the NPC output.

There was heated discussion about boost, because player's ships died in combat due to using it. The 7.5 update is supposed to change the boost.

They just seem to do a lot of extremely stupid things. (for example, when told to flee, fleeing into enemy fleets and making no attempts to reroute when they detect them, or when in combat, sitting still, failing to make any attempt to reposistion, and doing a horrible job at turning to face the enemy ships because they are stuck in the middle of the enemies attack runs and so they keep trying to change the direction they are turning in constantly for some reason instead of commiting to a direction and getting turned around or reposistioning to get a better spot to turn around at.) A 5 star pilot in a PE should not be losing to a Xenon controlled PE unless the player fleet pilot is doing extremely stupid things like sitting in place and just constantly turning in a way that makes them unable to fight properly while not moving at all and letting themselves get shot at constantly.

Also, the player faction ships do not seem to do any of the things the NPC faction ships do. (such as attempting to avoid enemy fire, especially from capital ships) which gets them killed in nearly every situation unless they are all attacking one small poorly armed fighter together while being micromanaged by the player. (which makes the game less fun)

[silent_elyxyr]

Invest some time to research how successful feauture/improvement suggestions and bug reports are done on this forum. Otherwise you are just wasting your time.

In the current format there is zero chance a dev will read through this thread.

I haven't seen any posts from you indicating your suggestions being implemented. From what I understand, most of his suggestions are common complaints that Egosoft is already aware of. They’ll only address these issues if enough complaints appear across all platforms.

Please direct me to the correct place, and also a lot of these are observations I noticed after constantly losing ships in the same way and having to micromanage my multiple fleets of ships by pausing and unpausing and hoping that when I tell ships with depleted shield to flee that they will 1. flee properly (and drop laser tower if they have any) and 2. NOT FLEE INTO ENEMIES.

[Raptor34]

Yes, in principle, the player's AI would ideally be as bad as the NPC AI. It isn't. More devastantingly, player has no limit on number of ships. Your ship mines at 80% speed of NPC ship? No problem. Assign ten ships to the task. That yields 800% of the NPC output.

Ironically this is precisely why we'll never get a fix anytime soon unless Egosoft makes a breakthrough somewhere.
Imo Egosoft should bite the bullet and start optimizing for small player sizes instead of large ones.
If players want thousands of ships, they better have the hardware for it instead of Egosoft balancing quality and performance towards performance.

Perhaps there needs to be more of an "LOD" for the simulation side of things?

They just need to stop accommodating players who wants to print hundreds of destroyers.
Even the factions combined don't have that many.

[silent_elyxyr]

Ironically this is precisely why we'll never get a fix anytime soon unless Egosoft makes a breakthrough somewhere.
Imo Egosoft should bite the bullet and start optimizing for small player sizes instead of large ones.
If players want thousands of ships, they better have the hardware for it instead of Egosoft balancing quality and performance towards performance.

Perhaps there needs to be more of an "LOD" for the simulation side of things?

They just need to stop accommodating players who wants to print hundreds of destroyers.
Even the factions combined don't have that many.

Ouch. Also the game proabably couldn't handle it even with a lot of optimization of the simulation side of things.

[silent_elyxyr]

The purpose of player's ships is to die. Their death supports the artificial urge to build more of them.


How about this: Remove all weapons from game. Nobody can get hurt. Nobody will die. No AI issues?

The purpose of maximum level ship captains is to be good at flying their ships so they don't die and actually get things done for the player.

[Raptor34]

Perhaps there needs to be more of an "LOD" for the simulation side of things?

They just need to stop accommodating players who wants to print hundreds of destroyers.
Even the factions combined don't have that many.

Ouch. Also the game proabably couldn't handle it even with a lot of optimization of the simulation side of things.

From what I see the game could handle it. And this optimization is what leads to dumb AI. Because they optimize for quantity instead of quality.
Although note I'm not talking hundreds of destroyers bad, that's why I use the word print. Because behind those hundreds of destroyers are thousands of miners, transports and probably the defenses and stations for them too. If it's just hundreds of destroyers slowly accumulated over time that isn't an issue, it's the support infrastructure.
Though tbf you can probably cut those down too by buffing logistics across the board. If one miner can do the work of 10, then you can replace them that way. And if players look towards 10X production instead of cutting down instead, then maybe it's time to say **** them, but politely.

Although such a change would also be a PITA to reorg your empire for tbf.
For me now that ship replacement is available, I've basically scrapped all my sector anti-Khaak patrols and just eat the losses.

[GCU Grey Area]

They just need to stop accommodating players who wants to print hundreds of destroyers.
Even the factions combined don't have that many.

You might be surprised, I was. Out of curiosity just loaded up my previous game in which I had a very comprehensive sat network. I set map filter to ships & typed 'destroyer' into the search box. This was the result. Then I counted all visible destroyers for each faction. Total was 261. Most factions tended to have a couple of dozen or so, minor factions around a dozen, while the two biggest destroyer fleets were TER (52) & TEL (45). Even if the player hasn't gone mad building a ridiculous number of destroyers the game still has quite a lot of NPC destroyers to cope with.

[Raptor34]

They just need to stop accommodating players who wants to print hundreds of destroyers.
Even the factions combined don't have that many.

You might be surprised, I was. Out of curiosity just loaded up my previous game in which I had a very comprehensive sat network. I set map filter to ships & typed 'destroyer' into the search box. This was the result. Then I counted all visible destroyers for each faction. Total was 261. Most factions tended to have a couple of dozen or so, minor factions around a dozen, while the two biggest destroyer fleets were TER (52) & TEL (45). Even if the player hasn't gone mad building a ridiculous number of destroyers the game still has quite a lot of NPC destroyers to cope with.

I am honestly.
Though at least I'm not surprised as to who has them. Does TEL include both MIN and TEL? Or is it only one of them.

[GCU Grey Area]

I am honestly.
Though at least I'm not surprised as to who has them. Does TEL include both MIN and TEL? Or is it only one of them.

Tel have 45, MIN have 13.