Designing effective AI controlled guard ships

[Mustacheion]

I am building a bunch of factories in a sector, and I want to have a small fleet of guard ships to protect them so I don't have to be bothered every couple of minutes when pirates attack.  I have built a prototype guard ship, have it all crewed and armed and it technically works but very very poorly.  It will move to and fire upon enemies but the captain is extremely inefficient.  If I jump into the ship and control it myself it has plenty of firepower and shields to clear out a typical size pirate attack.  But when the ship is under AI control it is constantly trying to turn around and around, spending very little time facing the enemy and very little time allowing the turrets to fire.  The problem is that the captain seems way too preoccupied with trying to evade enemy fire and trying to keep at an exact range from the target and spends very little time actually firing.

 

Does anybody have any experience and suggestions about designing and using ships in this way?  I just need the damn thing to stop turning so much.  My craft is pretty blocky.  It has turrets mounted on the front, top, bottom, left, and right all of which face forward.  I do have three different type of turret, although I picked them so they have pretty similar range and use type.

[Doc Savage NDMF]

I am finding if I add too many different turrets on too many faces/facets to an AI captained ship it freaks out and spends all it's time trying to figure out which one to use and where to use it.

 

I've gone to using weapons on top and bottom, and restricting weapons to similar ranges/types. This minimizes the time the AI spends trying to decide where it should be and what it should fire with, which lowers the amount of time it spends flying around instead of shooting at something. It still spends far too much time dancing, but at least it fires more often while doing it.

 

The AI can cope with this pretty well, as long as it doesn't get too close to anything. If a ship explodes close to your AI Captain he panics and stops dead. If the offending piece of ship/asteroid is moved or blown out of the sky they will recover and carry on, but until then they will sit lost in nightmares of what will happen if they scratch the paint on their precious.

 

Bottom line, try to give the AI fewer possible decisions to make at any given time. They're going to focus on one or two things tops, so any tools you give them to handle more than that are just wasted. I find making the firepower count when used and limiting the when and where help them be more useful.

 

As always, YMMV. How ships are built, what weapons are used and all that will naturally make this better or worse. I have two AI ships that tag me now, and they fight pretty well. I can go off and do other things knowing they won't be scrap when I get back. I can go off in a Pirate sector and collect the good stuff while they mop up all the ships.

 

In your case, you can play with weapons packages on ships to see which ones are most effective given your designs and weapon likes/dislikes. Instead of mixing weapons on "a" ship, mix the ships instead.

 

Oh, shields. And Armor. It's been my experience they're going to tank it out going after one or two ships while getting fired on by many, so the more you can do to prolong their average lifespan the better. With many ships on your side this may not be the case, but I'd plan for all my ships going after the same target (because, well, AI) and taking a lot of fire.

 

I am hoping future updates will allow the AI captains to focus on more than a few targets so we can mix and match weapons allowing the AI to actually use more than a simple move in and hit them with everything approach. Be nice to put all that dancing to some good use.

 

Cheers..!