Is my AI secretly working for the enemy?

[CMDR Duck]

Has anyone watched a garrison try to defend a world without interfering?

I'm still learning this amazing game, I just started my first level 7 campaign. One thing about this game is that a whole bunch of things happen at once. I use garrison troops to hold off raids targeted at my worlds (v-RClick). I was curious to see an AI vs AI battle.

I just watched the saddest battle I have ever seen in a RTS game. It was about 120 of my mixed garrison(I&II) against 40(I) AI ships. The AI managed to destroy my shipyard and reactor before being repulsed. My ships did the worst thing they could do every single time. They chased fighters while bombers attacked my factories right next to them. When the fighter they were chasing fled the battle they started to run in all directions almost randomly. A lone fighter attacked a Capital Ship Bomber. Finally the AI concentrated it's ships around my home base, and my ships had something to shoot at. I almost lost the planet, if I had run the battle myself I would not have lost any infrastructure.


As I expand I will need to rely on this AI more and more over time, I can't be everywhere at once. Right now the friendly AI is worse then useless because it allows to many friendly ships to be destroyed.

I really think that the friendly AI needs a overhaul with simpler rules: 1. Attack anything in range. 2. Attack anything the guy next to me is attacking. 3. Hit the nearest thing 4. Attack retreating ships only if you run out of attackers.

[eRe4s3r]

Well, you have a point with the free roam target allocation being very.. odd , but usually you are not supposed to use that in a defense like that - put tractors under a shield close to the wormholes and put your weaponry around it enough to pummel ships to smithereens. Also, when the ships are tractor caught you will notice FRD working very nicely ;p

Usually i go for 5 or 10 tractors per wormhole and a mk1 shield and lots of turrets ;p (Missile turrets are very nice to have ,p) and place all my ships to defend the shipyard - i never have them FRD mode for defense.

Since turrets are outside shields (better for your tractors ,p) they also tend to get shot at primarily so the ships that are caught will be caught for quite a while, long enough for FRD to get a clue and aim at something ;p

[Oewyn]

FRD is more for mopping up some ships that broke through your front line defenses and now are just running around your planet.  It wasn't designed for primary base defense.

How FRD works:
1) FRD ships will attempt to target any preferred target that particular ship has.  Your fighters have cruisers selected as their primary target, the FRD fighters will attempt to attack cruisers first.
2) FRD ships attempt to spread out to attack all threats equally.  This means that your force will split into many smaller forces and attack individual ships
3) FRD ships don't care about what the enemy ships are doing.  They will target ships with dead engines in the middle of no where with the same priority as ships attacking your orbital.

Hopefully this will help you understand how FRD works better.

[keith.lamothe]

Not sure about this, but with the "if player explicitly targetted me on a specific ship, prefer that ship family when auto-targetting" behavior it's conceivably even worse than fighters go after cruisers no matter what, if there was an accidental click they might go after the bombers or something.  This means it's probably best to give a ship group the stop order (end key, I think) before putting them in frd-patrol so that they'll at least use the default targetting (unless you want them to always kill the cutlasses first or something).

But yea, if the enemy can get past your wormhole defense with any significant numbers you're going to have to take a personal hand if you want to keep damage down.  Tractors are your friend

[boogerhead911]

Ouch, 120 ships vs 40 ships and still lost, that just sad even for A.I. But take a look at it this way. If they made friendly A.I as smart as enemy A.I you would never need to control your fights again, you could just sit back and relax while your army of 20 mark lV missle ships (forget what there called) annhilate the enemies force of 300 troops, in no time just by kiting (with the aid of a couple tractor beams). Usally The A.I was made to be set very close to the wormholes when enemies do appear, so they don't go all crappy on you.

I also notice that the friendly A.I will use the forces on lone instead of in group, thus the faster but weaker units get to the enemies fleets and get destroyed and when the rest of your fleet arrives they are destroyed because of all the fighters distracting. The friendly a.i won't recongize certain ships were made to work together, because sometimes i have a fleet on stand-by(FRD) and when the enemies come the engineers are left comepletely alone.

PS: what about your turrets, that usally protects world pretty well, although i just put sniper turrets at the corner of the map and let them snipe everything that appears and sometimes they even get aggro

[RCIX]

Um, did i miss something? friendly AI?

[Revenantus]

Um, did i miss something? friendly AI?

He's referring to the game AI that controls player ships when in FRD mode, rather than an actual friendly game entity.

[Fiskbit]

Yeah, just the target acquisition AI while in FRD mode, telling your FRD ships which enemy ships to go after.