Community help needed with AI and Radio Comms

[kendo65]

AI Pilots Reactions on Sighting Enemy Aircraft

1. Friendly AI (your wingman/flight/squadron) spotting enemy aircraft.
(i) When enemy are spotted at long distance friendly AI should not immediately break formation to attack them. Instead a call on comms giving an o'clock position should be made - eg "Bandits at 3 o'clock low".

Friendly AI pilots should generally maintain discipline and await orders from flight leader as to when to attack or break formation unless...

(ii) Enemy spotted close in and attacking, friendly AI should give "Break" warning and/or take avoiding action. (lots of scope here for those with acting ability to create some drama - "Bloody hell - 109s...BREAK!!", etc, etc

2. Enemy AI
(i) Enemy formations should display a range of behaviours after spotting your formation - not necessarily attacking immediately. Enemy formation may attempt to get up-sun, or move into more advantageous position for attack, or split formation into separate flights, etc.

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I suspect some attempts have already been made to code for varying reactions in the existing AI routines, certainly Luthier said that enemy AI can be slow to react to (unseen) hostiles on their six. Unfortunately I think this feature has been mistaken at times by the uninitiated for bad AI (though it does seem to perhaps require some tweaking as to 'when' the AI start to react after planes start taking hits). Having said that there are real-life cases where near entire flights have been picked off one at a time before survivors realised what was happening!

Unfortunately, attempts to implement routines for the above have to balance on a thin edge between over-predictable, all-knowing infallibility, and inaction in cases where they should react