#24 AI flight style

[Anonymous]

Ships don't pilot like in the original game, making the experience
different, and slightly frustrating. Here goes my explanation of
how the AI works:

Ships attack most of the time in straight line. When the ship gets
near it usually turns around, but depending on your orientation it
may "stick" to attacking the rear of your ship. This is the problem:
while attacking the rear the ship tracks milimetrically the speed
of your ship, which I guess is a "relic" of the "match speed"
keys F9 F10 which are usual in X-Wing like games.

This is just not good. In the original game when the attacking
ship made a run, it would always back off at least 2000 meters
before returning at you. In fact, if you followed it the range
would extend, since it had this kind of state machine behaviour
and it would always get away x meters before attacking again.

However, right now the game follows the speed and tracks the
rear. This can get really really stupid when you fly the tarsus and
turn around at the maximum yaw. Why? Since the enemy has a faster
yaw rate you can never ever get out of a loop where you and the
attacking ship are circling around.

But there's more stupidness to this! Once fighting off a stiletto I
entered one of these endless loops and simply stopped my speed to
0. The ship, instead of getting away and doing another run tried
to keep flying around me trying to find the rear. I verified this
using the V key to switch the camera and saw how the stiletto was
circling and shooting at the same time yet never reaching my rear
so I was never hurt. Could spend my whole life like that.

Another problem with rear tracking is that using the tarsus the
most easy way to fight against three or more talon ships is to just
escape using afterburner circling around a little bit to avoid bein
hit. The talon ships will all try to match your rear, and from time
to time you can hear a "boom" because the enemy ships have crossed
their own flight paths shooting at you.

I don't remember any game in the original game trying to match your
speed when attacking, which I used escaping faster ships: stopping
would make them turn away and while they went away some thousand
meters you could continue escaping in a straight line. Of course
this was dangrous, since you could become a sitting duck if more
than one ship attacked and their position was at different lengths.

But IMO you should remove the track speed feature from the AI,
from all the glitches/changes I've seen it is by far the one that
most changes the game experience with respect to the original. Of
course, maybe you wanted this change explicitly. In such situations
I would suggest redicing artificially the enemie's yaw rate by 20%
when under less than 1000m, or maybe make the AI timeout the rear
tracking after 10 seconds if they haven't placed any hit on you. I
think the "track rear" AI should be used only against capital ships,
I don't remember normal ships in the original game search for your
rear specifically.

IIRC a ship being hit by fire would try to change its path regardless
of enemy or friendly fire. This also avoids ambushing friendly
ships. When you reach a status of 100 friendly against pirates,
you can sneak up behind one and kill it to death without trouble
because it won't move away when you blow up the shileds, and by the
time it reacts it's got no shields and you probably damaged it badly.

I think all ships except capital ships should have this "avoid fire"
movement regardless of faction that made the shot.