Super AI

[flyboy4612]

+1 I had an He-111 roll quicker than my Spitfire. I was just in a fight in a 109 against a Hurricane and the AI plane's flaps were deploying and retracting as quickly as the ailerons and elevator were moving. The Hurricane also seemed to have an awesome amount of thrust at certain points and leave me in the dust. And all the AI fighters do the old IL-2 barrel roll in a downward spiral.

[Blue Scorpion]

Sounds like they did go with the IL2 ai model after all, in which case this arcade rubbish is headed for the dustbin. I got sick and tired of this absurd notion of boosting ai performance to cover deficient ai routines in the earlier versions of the series.

There really is no good reason for it, we all know and accept the ai will never be as good as a competent human pilot, which is why players turn to multiplayer when they want that level of challenge. However, single player offers a more structured environment in which to play through specific scenarios, mimicking situations that occurred at the time, which generally would not work well in multiplayer.

Moreover, the number of aircraft involved in the typical single player melee, negate many ai deficiencies through weight of numbers, and the ever changing situation in a three dimensional environment, removing any need for this asinine boosting of performance. The approach of artificially boosting performance and removing physical restrictions from the ai, results in nothing but a farce, and combat situations that never happened in reality, destroying any notion that this title can be considered a simulation of the period's air war.

[reflected]

Agreed. It's the same old shitty barrel rolling über AI from Il2...even more über - in regards of cheating physics. Not so good in regards of flying abilities.

[jspec01]

I've got to agree with your very well thought out and respectful post, leadgtr81 - especially in regards to the a.i. roll rate - it really is something to behold!

I know they have a their hands full for the time being, I just really hope that it can be sorted out in the future.

[Talon89]

I spent many hours hacking and tweaking the AI in IL2 to mixed success. (I came up with the Cert AI mod).

This reeks of the same extremely simple crap they had back then, that was almost unsalvageable. I mean, I made it different, and probably better, at least more random, but it was by no means quality AI, it was poor from the ground up.

The AI in IL2 had no CEM. It had its own simplified flight model that ignored this.
The AI in IL2 had damage models that were stronger or weaker than the player based on skill level (simple multiplier, 50% stronger on ace, 25% on veteran, IIRC).
The AI in IL2 had no concept of a cockpit, perma-wonder woman.
The AI in IL2 had no concept of clouds.
The AI in IL2 knew that you were there the instant that you came within a certain range (5kmish, IIRC)
The AI in IL2 had a number of maneuvers to call upon, but in its stock form it just did the barrel roll 95% of the time.

There were also a bunch of random unfinished pieces of AI code in there based around bomber attacks, BnZ aircraft etc. They appeared to have been discarded, or maybe from an earlier build and no longer used? I used 4.08 as my base.

Anyway, I thought I would shed some light on the old IL2 AI for those curious. I really hope that they rectified at least some of those problems.

More maneuvers are easy enough to add, not seeing in clouds is doable, adding semi-randomized successful bounces based on skill was easy enough, but if it's still using a simplified FM and has no cockpit, it will probably be mostly unsalveagable as a proper AI again.

[ICDP]

The developers said in multiple interviews that the AI were much improved. They said the AI could no longer see through clouds, they actaully can see through clouds. Is this an oversight or an outright lie?

Instead we get the old IL2 AI. You can sneak up on them a bit better but watching them cheat is a real deal breaker for an offline exclusive player. They were pretty bad pre-patch, now they are worse. I think the devs just simply cannot do decent AI, we will have to learn to live with this.

[depthstar]

This was my #1 complaint when I first got into '46. I have come to love the game (online and off) but when I first began to realize that the AI was "cheating" and how deeply it affected the simulation it gave me a very disappointing feeling that the sim was just... broken.

I've read around quite a bit and from some the consensus seems to be that if you can't outrun, chase down, or outmaneuver the AI aircraft, then you just don't understand CEM enough, or that they're too easy to defeat as it is so nobody should complain that they act as if they have super-powers.

I've come to realize just how great of a sim '46 is. The better I get at shooting, the more hits I score and the more aircraft I down in a given dogfight, but sometimes it can be very distracting that setting the enemy to a higher skill level often seems to be less like "Ace" and more like "Rolls More Often". Still a blast, just distracting.

The problem with giving the computer "cheap" behaviors in response to a given situation is that those behaviors become repetitive and predictable. Most of us know that when you roll up on the six of an AI aircraft and hit your convergence distance, the enemy is always going to start rolling around for dear life, sometimes followed by settling into a long slow turn (this is where they usually get shot down) or buzzing away in a straight line without overheating (this is where the wise make a simple 90 degree right turn which is apparently so infuriating to the enemy that he must immediately change his plan to escape death and return to the battle).

Given enough time I might learn to outfight the Millenium Falcon in a Spit, but I'd rather just have the AI pilots behave within the realm of reality, rather than overcoming their miracle planes by sheer skill. The AI should have to fight with all of the same aircraft and physical limitations as the player (blackouts and overheats, etc.), and there should always be the possibility of pilot error, ineptitude and lack of piloting skill (of various degrees).

So... it's frustrating to see this behavior has found it's way into CoD. It's not what any of us had hoped for, but that's the way it is. Every game has a release date, this one came (for whatever reason) at a time when not everything was as perfect as it might have been given unlimited time and resources. I'm not giving up or complaining about a game I don't even own yet (I consider it a definite purchase, but I'm waiting to see improvement), just giving my perspective. AI is a make-it-or-break-it feature, and it's one of the hardest to do right, but it can be done.

If someone was counting votes, my vote would go to making legitimate AI a priority.

[whatnot]

After having hard time keeping in the tail of a Sunderland in my 109 I have to +1 this thread. The sunderlands and other big boys throw aerobatic moves that I haven't even seen before.

The AI at the moment is a joke. The frustrating part is that I spend most of my time with quick single player missions trying to master the CEM in combat and the new gunnery and I have to fly against these UFOs. But I guess if I can learn to down these supermen dropping real people in multiplayer will be a walk in the park.

I've had really good experiences dogfighting against Hurri's and Spits however, but I haven't really benchmarked whether they fly within the flight envelopes of their real life counterparts.

But I'm sure if the dev team can keep the same momentum and release rates that this will be addressed sooner rather than later. But indeed it seems that it'll be summer before CloD can reach it's full glory. But we'll be here waiting..

[Geronimo989]

The AI is definitely better than in IL-2. It tries to run when outnumbered or damaged, bails out when its engine is busted, and cannot see me approaching from 6 O'clock.
But it has problems of its own. Biggest complaint is that after this new patch I noticed AI hurricane having INSANE roll rate. It beats Mig-21... And in a hurricane my roll rate is pretty slow.

[mazex]

Well, as they are in the middle of a crazy code optimization Marathon in no time, I'm pretty sure a lot of the tweaks have been seeing very little testing. Sure they have been doing stuff with the AI code too - and it's nothing you can write automated tests for with any precision at least. It takes beta testing so keep good reports coming about bugs and instructions about how to reproduce them!

I'm sure a lot of these bugs where not there two weeks ago