Ship Systems Information

I thought I would start a thread where people can post information that they have learned about the modding of ship systems. Much like the Cool POG tricks thread.

Here are a few interesting pieces that I have picked up.

AI Behavior: When attacking another ship the AI has three behaviors it chooses from.

Tail Biting, where the AI ship will try to get to your tail position and then fire its weapons.

Sweeping Attack, where the AI ship will try to make sweeping passes.

Hold Position, where the AI will face the player ship and try to match course and velocity to keep your ship centered directly ahead.

The behaviors are picked mostly at random, slightly biased by ship size. You can still see fighter park themselved directly ahead of your ship and try to duke it out, blow for blow. (which they tend to lose.) Actually, many fighter kills happen when they give up trying to tail bite and sit still.

The hold position behavior can be really annoying when modding speed values of the player ship. Especially if the player ships are reduced to match the AI ships. Once the AI has picked this hold position behavior, the player can do nothing to change position against the AI ship. Both ships just move exactly the same.

The standard game deals with this by capping the AI speed to a lower value than the player. You can force a closure by hard accel towards the AI, at first nothing happens, then you exceed the AI allowed max speed and it cannot match your ship. Then you move close and pass.

One possible technique is to not allow the AI to choose hold position. Instead give the AI pilots specific orders of sweeping attack or tail biting. This is only possible with custom traffic scripts.

-Gtrout