Police Vipers, Thargoids, and pirates...not very aggressive?

[Switeck]

In using the last trunk version on Win XP SP3, I noticed a Viper charged after a fugitive pirate...turned away, and resumed patrol according to Pause, 0 key, and read log file. At no time was the distance between the pirate and Viper (interceptor to be exact) greater than ~20 km. If anything, the Viper broke off even before >15 km range.

I'm noticing other cases of NPC ships firing VERY slowly and doing little twitches in direction (<5 degrees at a time) like they cannot get a dead-on shot most of the time and refuse to fire.

I'm calling this a bug, because it's worse than earlier versions.

[Commander McLane]

Part of the reason may be that NPCs have become more evasive in 1.75. It's also noticeable if you are chasing an NPC. The NPC doesn't flee more or less in a straight line, but makes a ton of small pitch-and-roll manoeuvers, making it harder to aim at him and finish it off. Perhaps aiming has become harder for NPCs as well?

The police ship completely breaking off is the other part of the problem. I'd say that this shouldn't usually happen. I'm not sure off the top of my head whether this is some new AI feature. As far as I know it's possible (but not very likely) that an AI switches target mid-battle. However, target-switching should not happen if there is no other target to switch to.

[Switeck]

I'm well-aware of NPC ships doing jinks and turns in combat, especially because of my "Switeck mod". I usually attempt to fly formation like a wing man for an off-to-the-side moving camera view of ship vs ship combat. I can do that well enough to notice small angle changes, because that usually quickly causes closing or diverging paths at speed. But in head-on passes with both NPC ships supposedly firing away...dodging is often only accidental, though they may rotate -- at least till they nearly collide and pass each other.

And as for the Police Viper Interceptor -- there were other pirates in range. It wasn't changing targets to another pirate, it changed to going back on patrol! If it were fleeing, it would have been in a different AI state. Plus, it wasn't using injectors. I'm dumbfounded.

I'm seeing NPC ships take an inordinate amount of time to kill other NPC ships, even at times with seemingly overwhelming firepower. 5-10 NPC ships chasing and supposedly firing on a single ship. I see maybe 1-2 shots per second total even if most or all of the NPC ships are mounting beam or military lasers. Considering the concentration of firepower, even with some overheated lasers, I'd expect far greater fire. Over 10 shots/second are possible...maybe 20! I don't expect quite that high, only that the fire rate is extremely low even to act as a "crutch" for the player so they can take on massive numbers to boost their ego. On top of the fire rate, the hit rate even at relatively short ranges of <4 km can only be described as bad. My previous bad AI example concerning NPC ship "jousting" showed just how bad -- sometimes 10-20 shots fired by a single ship at these ranges before it scores 1 hit. This is against ships usually moving almost directly towards or away from each other.

I'm often cloaked at the time, as an observer who doesn't want to ruin the test...and the very extremely hacked ship I'm using has radar jammer and descrambler so it's never a missile target. Sometimes I'm targeting ships, but often I am not as I know the AI reacts weirdly to being targeted by cloaked ships. Sometimes I'm not cloaked at all possibly because I'm distant enough from the fight and/or can tell all the participants already have targets.

[Eric Walch]

npc ships can change target in mid flight. Normally they are induced by "group_attack" commands. With pirates it sometimes happens. A problem arrises when the groupmembers are out of each others scanner range. They get a new target, notice that the new target is out of range and loose the new target. However, such ships (pirates) acquire a new target easily.

Police and escorts use an interceptAI.plist. Those ships should never switch target and keep fighting the original one until its dead or our of range. Did the police have the normal interceptAI or did they attack under a custom AI?

Ships not killing each other fast enough is not what I witness. When I add 10 pirates and 10 hunters/police in a close area, a large part is killed within minutes. Only some ships are not able to kill each other. The attacking ship is not flying faster than the ship its following. At great distance ships are flying at max speed (or injectors) but when within 105% of weapon range the speed is always reduced to that of the target. In some occasions you see that one ship is in attack_from_target and the other is in attack_to_target, but always keeping just out of weapon range. But that is already happening since 1.65.

[Switeck]

Police and escorts use an interceptAI.plist. Those ships should never switch target and keep fighting the original one until its dead or our of range. Did the police have the normal interceptAI or did they attack under a custom AI?

The Viper Interceptor was using interceptAI.plist ...if it had any wingmen, they were almost certainly dead by this point. They certainly weren't within ~25-30 km, though I have seen such groups become separated. The nature of the very one-sided fighting I was throwing them up against makes their survival chances really low. Pirates were often added as groups of 9 ships at a time...which could easily be 11-19 ships due to escorts for the pirate freighter types. I was adding traders 1 at a time. Police Vipers were not being added, so as they were lost they could only be replaced by the normal system replacement logic. They tended to become very rare to nonexistent due to attrition.

"When I add 10 pirates and 10 hunters/police in a close area, a large part is killed within minutes. Only some ships are not able to kill each other."

10 on 10 should have the first couple losses happen relatively quickly (like in <15 seconds of initial fire) and then each additional loss takes longer so long as 1 side doesn't end up with a large advantage over the other. Ships using injectors to make long passes tend to only be able to get off 1-4 shots and unlikely to hit before overshooting their target -- by the time they make their next pass the target has already recovered.

You've seen my jousting pictures I hope. Even discounting the turn-when-hit bug, the sheer number of misses and how slowly the ships were firing was proof enough that some logic should probably be tightened. Accuracy could get a big jump -- to at least 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 4 short-range shots being hits against a non zig-zaging target in a head-on pass or tail chase. Rate of fire could likewise put the NPC ships' beam laser fire rate maybe 1-4 shots per second when they have solid aim.

[Commander McLane]

It's difficult to look at NPC-to-NPC combat separately from player-to-NPC combat. If NPCs get more accurate and score more hits per second, this won't only affect other NPCs, but the player as well. His survival becomes harder as well, and he has no ship group as a backup. Facing a bunch of pirates who all hit reliably can become an unsurmountable obstacle.

It may become really impossible with the beefed-up ships that were created to compensate for the relative lameness of NPC-combat-style. The other day I was taking on a group of four pirates when I learned the hard way that there was not one, but two renegade pirates among them. Usually I dodge them with my cloaking device, but this time they both had a good firing angle on me and used it to fire quite some shots in quick succession. Before I could press '0' my shields and two energy bars were already gone, and at that point the cloaking device didn't work at all anymore. I couldn't even kill one of them before they finished me off.

None the wiser I jumped into the same system again, and this time was hailed down the space lane by two military ships. Same drill, but this time only one opened fire first, and I could cloak. Then I took him on, and only when I frequently de-cloaked I noticed four yellow laser beams coming from sideways and understood there was a second military ship. This time I won, because I managed to separate them and finish them one by one. With NPCs aiming better and firing more frequently any encounter with two multiple-military-laser NPCs would become an instant death-sentence for the player.

The presence of OXPs which adjust the in-built balance of Oolite makes it very difficult to re-calibrate said in-built balance, because basically all these OXPs would have to be re-calibrated as well.

[Switeck]

It seems there is an accuracy variable that can be set per-ship, though I haven't actually tested it. So at least that part could easily be helped.

As for rate-of-fire, I'm seeing fire rates of as little as 2 times every 10 seconds even under near-optimal conditions. This apparently isn't due to some OBVIOUS limitation of how fast they're allowed to fire, as I too have previously seen NPC ships fire maybe 2x a second for short bursts.

[Eric Walch]

It seems there is an accuracy variable that can be set per-ship, though I haven't actually tested it. So at least that part could easily be helped.

It is called accuracy, but that name is wrong. When used for missiles, it really influences the accuracy but for ships it is used differently. It only influences the distance from which shots are fired. The only use in game is for miners to force them shooting from greater distance. When using on other ships, they also start shooting from greater distance, and at greater distance, accuracy is even less. Using one key for two different things is a bit confusing, but it was never intended to be used for non-miners. Miners shoot at a stationary target and hitting those from great distance is not that difficult.