Improving AI in-combat strategy

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

I'm specifically talking about Instigator-spawned threat sitting there or even retreating when faced by enormously inferior forces: I'm aware that specific case is a bug, but it gave me the idea of a failsafe system detecting poorly located/idle threat and putting it to use (even just moving it to important worlds).

Wouldn't help. It was already sitting on 100x my power and not using it. Lowering the threshold would mean bugger all to numbers like that.

Yeah, this is a bug that was fixed last update just now. Instigators are not meant to act as threat, so when it was mentioned, I was thinking about Sentinel/Hunter units, like from CPAs, not Instigators. Bit of a miscommunication there. The threshold for attacking would apply to the mentioned Sentinel/Hunter units, not Instigators.

Instigator units are meant to, as Badger said, attack piecemeal towards your Homeworld. They don't care if they can't win, they just try anyway. When they work, that is.

Apologies for confusion!

[BadgerBadger]

Instigators, Hunter Fleet, Warden Fleet and main AI all are implemented very differently and have very different rules for when they attack. I'm interested here in the main AI.

[AnnoyingOrange]

it will send its forces to a weaker adjacent player-owned planet;

Nice, better start redesigning my conga line defenses

[Draco18s]

Wouldn't help. It was already sitting on 100x my power and not using it. Lowering the threshold would mean bugger all to numbers like that.

Yeah, this is a bug that was fixed last update just now. Instigators are not meant to act as threat, so when it was mentioned, I was thinking about Sentinel/Hunter units, like from CPAs, not Instigators. Bit of a miscommunication there. The threshold for attacking would apply to the mentioned Sentinel/Hunter units, not Instigators.

Instigator units are meant to, as Badger said, attack piecemeal towards your Homeworld. They don't care if they can't win, they just try anyway. When they work, that is.

Apologies for confusion!

Gotcha. In that case, I don't mind if they bunch up a little (2.5% of a wave is like 2 units), but definitely no more than 12% of a full wave. If they held station until the next wave hit, then attacked, they'd hit either as additional force or come in from another direction. Total strength wouldn't be much, but would at least apart to be semi-competent.

(Travel time from "where I am" to nearest player world to perform optimum timing doesn't feel arduous)

[zeusalmighty]

My response went too long to be read in this thread, so I posted it here: https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/response-to-improving-ai-strategy/

[Kesseleth]

Power's a little arbitrary if you ask me. I know it would probably be hard to implement, but if possible I wouldn't mind seeing a heuristic system put in place - if the AI has five times strength and then goes on a planet and starts getting massacred, it would retreat before losing too much and then return when it has an even larger advantage, possibly considering your defense composition versus its own ships to decide how much strength would be needed.