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I know many of you are experimenting and fine-tuning these values and I would appreciate more feedback (preferably in this thread: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=31573) on what values to tweak in what circumstances (bomber, fighter, etc...). Perhaps we (the CloD community) can find some good AI values and get Luthier and Co. to incorporate these into the full mission builder... This would require a slight modification to the FMB as it would need to define the values differently based on plane type. I know this is not difficult to do in C++ so I imagine they could do it to their code base in hours (not days - but we need to wait and see what the AI improvements bring as they may already have solved many AI issues in the next few months and if not we want to supply them the best settings we can come up with).
An other problem is that the mission builder will (by default) set the whole flight to 1 skill level so they all behave similarly... When building a mission I suggest setting the planes to individual skill settings rather than make the whole flight one skill level this leads to some variation in AI and if you use the default skill attribute settings (rookie, average, etc...) you can still use AITweak on your mission to tweak the values for you.
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Ok, here's my findings on AI levels. These are very empiric, and they seem to show some interaction between levels (and also some other parameters such as fuel level) which makes 'ideal' settings a bit of a problem.
Let's start with my understanding of each skill level:-
Basic flying- pretty self explanatory
Advanced flying- I think it is a mistake to think of this as purely stopping the rolling behaviour, it seems to affect other things aswell, such as ability to control ac at high speeds. Turning this down to 'realistic' levels for rolling does seem to increase 'lawndarting' by AI. Rolling also seems to be associated with the unrealistic deployment of flaps
Gunnery- again self explanatory
Awareness/visibility- these 2 seem slightly interlinked but at the moment i'm working on the basis of visibility = offensive vision and awareness is defensive/situational awareness
Tactics- this seems to alter the amount of 'vertical' in attacking manouevers
Bravery- This seems to control the 'aggression'/ stupidity but seems to combine with Tactics, and also discipline on breaking away from an enemy attack and reengaging. On breaking away from an attack there almost appears to be a clock running before deciding to get back in the fight
Discipline- this to me seems to be very related to fuel level and when AI decides to 'cut and run' . It appears something like a store of 'courage' which is depleted by fuel levels and also the number of times an enemy gets into an attacking position (for fighters) so it has quite a big effect. Damage also obviously has a big impact here.
Also, there is the 'once they've decided to bug out' AI is then stuck in dumb mode 'feature'
The above applies to fighters/fighter bombers.
Bombers can be 'interesting'
gunnery affects both aimed guns and bomb dropping accuracy .
As for the rest the differences in behaviour seem less than for fighters,
So that's my observations, I hope others will add theirs.
From this i'd say it's hard to give ideal settings as several of them are very dependent on what the mission is. Discipline's relation with fuel level being the most prominent.
I'm also very much into variations in individual skills- the more the better
