AI Follow Command

[Guest Khoi128]

So far, the only way to get a player AI ship to follow something (Or you) is to give it an escort order. But when hostiles show up, they stop following their target until it jumps sectors, preferring to engage the enemy instead. This is problematic if you simply want ships to just follow you and avoid getting into fights you can’t possibly win. 
 

I was investigating a yellow blip which turned out to be a pirate outpost I wasn’t ready to handle. While attempting to jump out of the sector, my ally AI ship got himself killed because since he was set to escort, instead of following me to recharge our hyperdrives, he flew into the group of pirates and I couldn’t order him to get out in time. 
 

Could we have just a simple follow command for ships that are too weak to fight, but ones you still want to have traveling with you, like salvaging and repair ships? 

[Noctunus]

+1 Besides the escord order needs some fixing cause when you have multiple escord ships they tend to attack each other a simple passive following command would be really nice.

One could also think about decoupling the behavior in movement and stance.

Something like
Movement:
* Hold position
*  Follow
* Patrol sector
Stance:
* Directly Attack+Follow everything tagged as Enemies
* Attack everything tagged as Enemies (without neglecting the move order)
* Return fire (Only attack agressors to the current or guarded ship/station)
* Only point-defense 
* Passive (Don't shoot back or follow even if attacked)
* Passive flee (Try to flee if getting attacked)

As I think about it that would probably fit into some kind of a AI-Behavior/Captain-Order tab into the ship panel to be able to specifically change the behavior of the ships captain on a deep level - this would most likely clutter the UI if not done in a pretty clever way.

Well - that went a bit overboard with my thoughts - adding a follow command would be a great starting point but I think the whole AI behavior thing could be improved a lot by decoupling some things.

[LiftPizzas]

"Attack my target" would be super helpful, too.