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Space Combat Pets AI
mariothebros
Member Posts: 68 Arc User
I noticed that space combat pets, i.e. Aquarius for Odyssey and Carrier Hangar Pets, are somewhat "dumb". :rolleyes: They often get blown by exploding enemies.
Is it possible to make the AI for Aquarius and Hangar Pets to be smarter?
Is it possible to make the AI for Aquarius and Hangar Pets to be smarter?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by mariothebros on
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You have no idea how good pet AI used to be before. There was a big glitch but the ships fought well. Now, the big glitch is gone but they apparently had to blow the brains of the previous AI into oblivion by mistake in order to claim victory.
:rolleyes: So I missed that moment. I hope something can be done in the near future without involving blowing up AI's brain :P
I'd have to ask just how hard it would be to do something simple like 'stay at least 3km's away from target' would be
Production Assistant & Art Director
Before the TRIBBLE up there were 2 AI's: drone and combat pets. Combat pets would receive an order (aka, attack) and execute it. Drones would receive an order over and over and over again.
So, you could literally order combat pets to attack one target, then you target another ship and fight IT while your pets take care of the ship you ordered them to hit. It was truly excellent since this is how carriers actually could provide support and manage different wings (say, BoP's to attack, ToDu's to escort a friendly ship).
Combat pets also used to fly and fight in formation and used their special abilities correctly. Your pets actually used to focus their firepower on their first attack run to provide an alpha strike and would then circle the target attacking it. This circling was a problem but carrier capt's could recall the pets (oh and btw, back then Recall actually sent them on full impulse to return to you..they'd be by your side in seconds not minutes as it is now) and send them back to attack so they'd alpha strike every 20 seconds or so. The pets back then used their special abilities correctly: BoP would fly to 6km, decloak and fire from 5km to 1km making good use of its ambush bonus. It fired high yield and cannon rapid fire every alpha strike. Now they decloak the moment you give them an attack order, fly by themselves in some jackarsed random approach to target and fire their alpha strikes at different shields. This makes the BoP damage so diluted its pathetic.
Saddest of all is the devs actually had FIXED the pets. They had fixed the big glitch (pets receiving targets from team-mates and orders from other carrier if 2nd carrier or more were in team) and the pets were working WONDERFUL.
But the next patch, just 2 days or so later, killed them. Why? Some einstein in the dev team decided that pets flying in a gaggle behind the carrier looked bad so he messed with the pet AI to make them fly into neat half-moon formation with the carrier when not in combat and under recall order.
...which only happens in the first 10 seconds of the start of every map and when combat is over...
and by doing so broke the AI so badly that for nearly a week the pets just sat in space twitching, not moving, not firing...just twitching. Only drones worked.
A fast fix was needed and thats when they apparently wiped the combat pet AI and copy/pasted the drone AI, tinkered it a little bit and voila. we have the AI we have now.
I would REALLY like the devs to get back in there and return the AI to its former glory. Heck an EFFORT rather than a pathetic band-aid fix is required. Its embarrassing for this game to fail at what MMO's have been able to do since 1990.
Why ? Because the AI can't be properly programed . Not in this game not in EVE not in any other game . We (as in developers in general) don't have the tools yet . You can either make a TRIBBLE AI that works or a smarter AI that behaves slightly better then the ******.
In theory coding this isn't rocket science but when you put the code into a super shard that has 3 year old code things go haywire very very fast . As of this moment you should be happy that they don't attack you or people in your fleet .
knowing I missed out on that.. almost brings a tear to my eye. devs, find that old code!
They behave like total *******, bumbling around the map at the speed of a lobotomized turtle.
Attack random targets, if a shot of their weapons here and there, spam the antiproton sweep at empty space away from the enemy. Ignore your selected targets and so on...