AI vs AI Kill ratio

[Storebror]

Right dimlee.
We've lately adopted the 4.13 AI into the good old Ultrapack 3 which we run on our SAS Gameserver (where we're sporting COOP missions mostly, with lots of AI) and it turned the game into something completely new, where we yet have to figure out all the new moves AI has learned.

majorfailure has a lot of good points there.
What I'm trying to say is that regardless of it's superduper abilities in terms of situational awareness, AI already now sucks bad in many other elements of the fight.
Let me give you a few examples:

• When AI is outnumbering human players and can keep the fight going, they do a really great job (with 4.13 AI code) to help each other, distribute their planes across human opponents etc., all fine, but...
• When AI is outnumbering human players but a single human player has the fastest plane in the set and can run away from the fight, if he's managing the distance to AI planes (keep it at slightly above 1km, never separate further than 1.5km from the closest opponent), he can group up all AI planes behind him in a big swarm and drag them away to a point of choice on the map, then run away and leave them there, completely confused.
• When human players are outnumbering AI and AI planes have no option to climb and run away, AI sucks big times in defending their lifes. They will do a couple of weird maneouvres but this will stop quite soon, so all a human player has to do is stay on an AI's six for half a minute and wait for it to go straight - it will keep going straight, even if you start shooting parts off the plane, until you finally kill it.
• Outnumbered AI will immediately stop helping each other, instead they'll all fight a fight on their own.
• AI bombers don't try to stay in formation when being attacked - when you hit one, he will bounce out, even if he could stay in as well.

This is why I'd suggest not only to think about how and where AI uses superior powers at the moment and how to tone them down, but also how and where AI currently lacks desireable abilities and how to improve them.
Because if we'd just tone down AI's situational awareness, this would have to be compensated elsewhere, and with AI's current abilities the only compensation available would be to give the superpowered AI flightmodel even more super powers of to make the snipers even more sniper like.

I don't think anyone would want AI to become more stupid and more deadly by surprise.

Best regards - Mike