Command Autonomy

posted on January 24th, 2010, 3:18 am

Ships with special abilities tend to use them whenever they have enough energy (within your orders and/or AI settings). They'll also attack any ship within range unless otherwise ordered, ideal or not, and on high movement autonomy, they'll follow their enemies straight into a dragon's mouth. How about we implement an AI setting that orders the ship to attack its ideal targets and avoid its worst enemies? It would have to be based on the other AI settings, of course, so you could tweak exactly how you want the ship to perform. It really is unrealistic to give your captains next to no real command over their own ships. It might be more like implementing the Merciless AI for individual ships. If you don't like giving your captains freedom to do whatever they want, you can simply set the Command AI setting to Low Autonomy.

What does everyone else think about this?

posted on January 24th, 2010, 3:43 am

We have Weapon Autonomy, Movement Autonomy, and Special Weapon Autonomy. Any combination of these could only semi-reproduce the kind of command autonomy I'm looking for. It's a little hard for me to keep track of all the strengths and weaknesses of every ship out there, and having command autonomy for my ships would make my job SO much easier.

posted on January 24th, 2010, 10:19 am

I think the command structure for setting AI does need a bit of an overhaul but I'd say I only ever really have an issue with Special Weapon Management. I'd love just a few extra options to fine tune the special weapon autonomy so you can, target specific types of ship with them or change to priorities of specials for ships that have more than one.

In the long run, I'd also like a pop out menu which lists all of your ships and filters to allow you to see or hide autonomy settings per ship and per class of ship (with tabs to show allied ships). However, I think that might be asking a bit much .

posted on January 24th, 2010, 12:22 pm

i always wished that setting the AI to green alert would cause it to avoid ships in its sensor range and hide in nebula.

posted on January 24th, 2010, 1:44 pm

Wow that's an awesome idea actually. I imagine it's non-implementable though

It could be like this:

Green Alert: If ship comes into sensor range, flee, if nebula is within sensor range, attempt to hide within.

Yellow alert, if ship enters sensor range hold position, let ship approach, if ship fires, retaliate.

Red alert: If ship enters sensor range, engage intercept course, fire when in range.

posted on January 24th, 2010, 6:55 pm

the only thing i ever really wanted to see implemented for autonomies is the ability to exlude certain abilities from special weapon autonomy.. is that possible?

posted on January 24th, 2010, 7:08 pm

the only thing i ever really wanted to see implemented for autonomies is the ability to exlude certain abilities from special weapon autonomy.. is that possible?

Well, it's been suggested several times, so I bet it is on to do for a fix up... probably hard to code 

posted on January 25th, 2010, 5:31 am

Wow that's an awesome idea actually. I imagine it's non-implementable though

It could be like this:

Green Alert: If ship comes into sensor range, flee, if nebula is within sensor range, attempt to hide within.

Yellow alert, if ship enters sensor range hold position, let ship approach, if ship fires, retaliate.

Red alert: If ship enters sensor range, engage intercept course, fire when in range.

I can see how it couldnt, mabye not the 'hide in nebula' but the AI will retreat and repair ships underfire, mabye if a ship is set to green alert and detects a hostile in any form it will just attept to evade it.

posted on January 29th, 2010, 10:51 pm

Somehow, I would like my ships to target their ideal enemies whenever possible. If we can implement that in the alert status, I'm fine with that. Actually, I've noticed a more pressing problem: once ships come within range of their enemy, they stop. What they need to do is match their speed to their target. This way, if their enemy is a station, they'll stop at maximum range, while if their enemy is a ship, they'll match speeds with it so they can continue to fire at maximum range. All to often enemies escape because the ships pursuing them keep starting and stopping to stay at maximum range. And the ships need to intercept their target, not just follow it.

The AI really needs to improve on special weapon autonomy, too. They need to use their special weapons only when they are really needed. There's no point in using an ultra-ship-destroyer beam on a helpless scout.

All they really have to implement is better responses from the various AI settings.

posted on January 30th, 2010, 12:32 am

All easy to suggest of course - but all hard to implement I'm afraid. Some work arounds of course are to not actively target your opponent's ships, but to click ahead of them - keep your speed differential and use turning to change your speed and angle of attack, rather than clicking your opponent's ships to kill them.

posted on January 31st, 2010, 8:58 pm

Goodness knows how often I've found myself having to click ahead of enemy ships to make my forces pursue them. It requires a high scroll rate. Yeah, I suppose I could stick with the work-arounds, but it's a bit more micromanagement than I would like. I'm curious - how hard is it to get a ship to compare its strengths to its opponent's weaknesses? For instance, is it really that hard for you to program a ship (presumably on red alert) armed with pulse weapons to choose to fire at a ship that is weak vs. pulse weapons? That's really what I'm aiming at for the moment.

posted on January 31st, 2010, 9:28 pm

That's where you, the player, are supposed to come into play . You have to make the decisions to choose what ships to attack with what, whether a specific passive is better than another - it isn't just about queuing up the correct ship - you have to make the decisions to use it correctly too 

[mimesot]

posted on February 3rd, 2010, 4:28 pm

Last edited by mimesot on February 3rd, 2010, 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The option to fire from maximum range only or to move into battle would be fine too.

Further (copied from e.g.WZ2100) an option, when to retreat from fight:
1) Retreat on sight
2) Retreat on being hit
3) Retreat on significant damage
4) Retreat shortly before destruction
5) Do or die

This is a feature i would really love to be implemented. *plz, plz*

Especially consider that features value in laggy games.

EDIT: Of course Tyler is right. You need a user specified rally point.

[Tyler]

posted on February 3rd, 2010, 4:35 pm

Last edited by Tyler on February 3rd, 2010, 4:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You'd have to give every ship a 'rally point' feature like a Shipyards and set a place to go when retreating or they'll not know where to retreat to. They'll probably end up retreating from an attacking ship to hide in their base or something.

Armada has a rather perverse love of putting your ships in the worst possible place when left to its own devices.

posted on February 3rd, 2010, 5:22 pm

And of course we would need something like "theocracy" in Age of Empires (when 2 priests convert the same unit, the special energy was only taken from one of them. This would make e.g. "critical shot" more handy. Of course it makes no sense implementing it that way.

Probably it is possible to implememt it like this:
If there was a group, you could have the option to fire all weapons (special or normal) at one target or divert fire to several targets.
Another option is to block the use of all others special weapons of a group until (randomly) one is beyond a certain level.