Why is every attack wave led by 3 fighters?

[Ramsar]

Every wave that attacks me is led by 3 fighters. Why is this so?

[keith.lamothe]

It tends to pull a lot of your aoe fire (flak turrets, lightning turrets) and generally waste the "edge" of some of your defenses.

[BobTheJanitor]

That devious AI! I'd always noticed this happening, but I'd never thought why it was. That's pretty nice.

[Malibu Stacey]

Heh same here. I always thought it was the AI pushing some forces through from the other side of the wormhole when the wave hits to assist the wave. It certainly runs forces back through the wormhole quick enough when they warp in to a defence fleet (which begs the question, why does it send them in the first place if they run as soon as they warp in?) & they're not caught in tractors.

[Ramsar]

It tends to pull a lot of your aoe fire (flak turrets, lightning turrets) and generally waste the "edge" of some of your defenses.

And in addition these 3 fighters always appear in the opposite direction of the main invasion fleet of an attack that is triggered by a warp counter attack guard post, thereby effectively 'baiting' your FRD force away from where it should be... 

[Red Spot]

No they dont, it is random.

[Shrugging Khan]

Who cares! MOAR DAKKA! 

[whiskeypriest]

Am I the only one who thinks this is kinda gamey and lame? It's just a flaw in the targeting AI (sorry) that my lightning turrets and bombards open up on 3 fighters just a few seconds before 800 bombers show up. The game design shouldn't be exploiting those kinds of shortcomings.

Plus you can get around this trick by switching everything into low-power for a few seconds, so the tactic kind of punishes you for not microing.

[chemical_art]

Am I the only one who thinks this is kinda gamey and lame? It's just a flaw in the targeting AI (sorry) that my lightning turrets and bombards open up on 3 fighters just a few seconds before 800 bombers show up. The game design shouldn't be exploiting those kinds of shortcomings.

Plus you can get around this trick by switching everything into low-power for a few seconds, so the tactic kind of punishes you for not microing.

Well, I must shamelessly say I do gamey things against the AI on a regular basis, so I view it more like the AI just trying to get even. I always think the AI and I play using different rules, so the AI gets a lot of tricks that I can't use and vice versa. That's just my opinion though.

[Red Spot]

Plus you can get around this trick by switching everything into low-power for a few seconds, so the tactic kind of punishes you for not microing.

That is sort of what the difficulty of the AI influences (among other things), at higher levels you need to do that micro where at lower levels you dont.

[whiskeypriest]

It just seems so pointless to me. It's not a fun tactic for the AI to always lead with 3 fighters to take advantage of a weak spot in the targeting AI, and it's not a fun countertactic to low-power your ships for a few seconds to keep them from being fooled. It's cheese and busy work respectively.

[TechSY730]

It just seems so pointless to me. It's not a fun tactic for the AI to always lead with 3 fighters to take advantage of a weak spot in the targeting AI, and it's not a fun countertactic to low-power your ships for a few seconds to keep them from being fooled. It's cheese and busy work respectively.

And the cheap distraction tactics you can pull against the AI are also not fine? As aggravating as some of the silly things the AI can do against a player, many of those things players can do against it in some way. It just doesn't seem right that we should be complaining about the AI "cheesing" our stuff with cheap tactics when we humans can do the same (or similar) cheap tricks against it (and quite frequently do).

Of course, this does bring up the whole "is it fun" vs. "is it fair" debate that seems to come up so often in game design.

[Shrugging Khan]

Well...if you want to take a look at my defence setup thread, you will see that by placing defences away from wormholes and drawing them out over an extended area, you can circumvent and/or minimise that kind of trouble.

Or just micro it, if you're fast enough. Certainly has appeal in a way, taking things into your own hands.

[Red Spot]

Honostly, how much units/turrets do you have that can shoot cross an entire planet?
So in effect it matters nothing, for instance in my current game my blade spawners send the first 3 or 4 spawns to the mk1 fighter, it still take the rest of the fleet more than a minute to close the gap towards my CC ... 3 seconds on a minute where 1% of my fleet gets distracted .. a little, that really makes a dent in my defences ... 
 

[Buttons840]

Is this an emergent behavior or was it "hard-coded" into the AI?  If it's hard-coded then it feels like a violation of the AI design principles this game was built on, at least as I understand them.

I agree with whiskypriest; although it's a small matter.