Oleg, very curious on the AI in Battle of Britain.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Bloblast

Yes, correct I hope that AI wil do this in Battle of Britain. Running for home when aircraft is damaged or when clearly outnumbered. That will make sim more realistic.
Fighting continuing till all aircraft from one side are all annihilated is definitely not realistic.

What is even more interesting, is that the reason it was used so much is that it was effective. The other side simply didn't give enough chase a lot of times!

Why? Simply because these guys fought in reality and acted with survival in mind, it's pure math. An enemy fighter that decides to split-S out of the fight is one less fighter your flight has to deal with. That's it, you stop dealing with him the moment he's not interested in putting guns on you and focus on the rest of his flight.

Of course this is dependant on mission type. It's more probable to let escaping enemies go during an escort mission, or any other type of multi-flight operation that requires the pilots to maintain certain positioning. On the other hand, it would be the least possible to see this in a freijagd/fighter sweep mission, then i think it's safe to assume that the attacking pilot would give chase to a damaged and escaping enemy much more readily.

This may be one of the reasons we don't see AI that breaks for home so often. A virtual PC pilot will 99% of the time dive after that damaged enemy fighter no matter what. Older sims had AI that used to do this and it resulted in an unrealistic number of kills scored by the human player during the course of an offline career. Sure, the AI is a bit too reluctant to save their own skins, but on the other hand we're guilty of exploiting AI that does make the effort to disengage

[BadAim]

Double edged sword there. I know When doing something like an SEOW Pilots are much more economical with their virtual lives because you typically have limited, planes and lives, and getting the mission done is much more important than getting a kill (well, for most guy's anyway) because the mission is usually more important to the actual campaign than the kill count.

If a similar way of enticing the live pilot to act more realistically could be found then the AI would be less of a problem.

[winny]

I think that A.I in most games tends to favour the lot's of stupid targets instead of fewer clever ones.
I can't think of many games where the A.I just bugs out. Devs never seem to account for instinct over intelligence. They need to write some A.I with a sense of self preservation.

[Flyby]

Will AI bombers go for targets of opportunity? I never liked how the (for instance) AI Kamikaze planes would stooge about if the primary target was hit and sank. Other "targets of opportunity" got off easy instead of AI going after them. Will that change in SoW?
Flyby out

[Friendly_flyer]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

This may be one of the reasons we don't see AI that breaks for home so often. A virtual PC pilot will 99% of the time dive after that damaged enemy fighter no matter what.

One way to discourage this type of (unhistorical) behaviour could be to punish the player point-wise. Imagine negative points for leaving your squadron against orders, no points for shooting down planes that can't be confirmed (mates more than X kilometers off, enemy falling over sea or over enemy territory). Hunting that lonely plane that is buggering off for home won't be that attractive any more.