EDIT: It may of course, which is a major reason for this post and which I deleted while attempting to proofread
, throw off the balance of OXP set piece fights involving lots of Thargoids or turrets which were prepared in 1.76 or earlier. EDIT 2: Better video playback
Point Defense: The main changes are for ships with turret weapons (either plasma turrets or the thargoid laser). These ships will now track multiple targets to make better use of their weapons, and fire at a secondary target if the primary target is out of range or fire arc (or, with a thargoid laser, sometimes just because they feel like it).
Here are a couple of GalNavy Frigates demonstrating this capability: Video 1 - I couldn't get a clear static screenshot, unfortunately.
Secondary target selection is mostly automatic (I didn't need to touch any AI files inside the GalNavy OXP to get that behaviour) though there are some new AI commands for greater control where needed, which I'll document soon.
Thargoid combat manoeuvres: Thargoid ships have an omnidirectional laser. To use this laser, they flew straight at you as if it were mounted in a fixed mount on the front of their ship. Well, not any more. They'll still try to get close to make you a bigger target, but they'll fly near to rather than right at you while doing so. This makes the old trick of "full blast from the mil laser" a little harder to pull off (it still works, but you might have to turn your ship slightly while doing so).
Here's a video of their new flight patterns in action: Video 2 (also note the third ship shooting down a hardhead at 1:05 with a lucky defensive shot - "All Thargoid combateers are ruthless in combat, and some may be comparable with elite-status human combat pilots.", so some of them will get your missiles occasionally)
As a side-note on this: Thargoid laser rate of fire doesn't depend on the frame rate any longer (the higher your frame rate, the higher their shot frequency in 1.76) [EDIT: remove incorrect bit about aft thargoid lasers]
Finally, Q-mines. Now, if a Q-mine is about to go off, rather than sitting around like lemons looking at the new red/yellow blip on their scanner, other ships will react somewhat sensibly, either by running away (most ships) or by trying to shoot the Q-mine down and then avoiding the blast if unsuccessful (Thargoids). In practice, this doesn't make a lot of difference except to ships with injectors which can generally get away in time, or when dropping a Q-mine into the middle of an absolutely huge thargoid swarm where the chances of them all missing it are pretty low. It makes them more useful defensively too (because most things will stop shooting at you earlier) and gives OXP writers who really don't want their big boss to fall to a Q-mine a few more options to avoid it.
Ships with custom AIs will still act like lemons until adjusted, unfortunately.
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New Cargoes
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