Miner A.I.
Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2015 5:43 am
Miner A.I. need some love. I'm not asking them to be as good as a human, because the fact that they aren't is an interesting part of the game, but I would consider the following 5 things bugs, not A.I. limitations:
1. If miners are upgraded to be capable of moving while mining, the A.I. bump into asteroids while mining them, eventually crashing the ship.
2. A.I.'s launch miners from BC even if there is danger all around. Immediately upon launching, they turn around and ram the BC waiting for their timer to end so they can redock. Sometimes they lose the ship before being able to redock. And if they do manage to redock, guess what they do: immediately launch right back out into space and do it all over again. In fact, even if they die they will just take another miner and crash that one too. All you have to do is spam kinetics on the enemy BC and they lose all of their miners.
3. Sometimes the miners fly around bumping into asteroids without mining anything. Usually when this happens the top check box for that A.I. in the A.I. console is unchecked. Rechecking it and issuing an order often fixes it, only to have it happen again 10 seconds later.
4. Sometimes A.I. miners just stop and do absolutely nothing. In this case, usually everything is checked in the A.I. console and issuing an order fixes it. It might be linked to #3 though.
5. It's frustrating to pull the BC alongside a large cluster of asteroids and watch the A.I. all launch out of the side with no asteroids and journey half way across the map to find some. I would suggest that they check which side has more nearby asteroids before launching. If it's too hard to program them to actually get into a hangar console on the correct side, I would be fine with them being able to launch out of either side no matter what hangar console they are in (so they could launch right side out of left hangar console). Hell, they even launch out the Construction Console sometimes so I don't see any problem with them using the wrong side of the hangar. Another little thing I noticed is that A.I. miners will move closer to an asteroid than they need to before stopping to mine it. The range of the mining laser is long enough to mine an asteroid on the other side of a BC, but since the asteroid detection radius of the A.I. is smaller it will not detect asteroids on the other side of the BC that are within mining range. Fixing that might also help. And another solution might be that when there are no asteroids within range of the miner, it goes to the nearest asteroid on the minimap instead of just moving in whatever direction it happens to be facing. There is a built in filter in the Editor for discovered units only, so you could make it not cheat by going to asteroids that have not been discovered yet, but rather, to the nearest discovered one.
I will dig up replays if requested.
1. If miners are upgraded to be capable of moving while mining, the A.I. bump into asteroids while mining them, eventually crashing the ship.
2. A.I.'s launch miners from BC even if there is danger all around. Immediately upon launching, they turn around and ram the BC waiting for their timer to end so they can redock. Sometimes they lose the ship before being able to redock. And if they do manage to redock, guess what they do: immediately launch right back out into space and do it all over again. In fact, even if they die they will just take another miner and crash that one too. All you have to do is spam kinetics on the enemy BC and they lose all of their miners.
3. Sometimes the miners fly around bumping into asteroids without mining anything. Usually when this happens the top check box for that A.I. in the A.I. console is unchecked. Rechecking it and issuing an order often fixes it, only to have it happen again 10 seconds later.
4. Sometimes A.I. miners just stop and do absolutely nothing. In this case, usually everything is checked in the A.I. console and issuing an order fixes it. It might be linked to #3 though.
5. It's frustrating to pull the BC alongside a large cluster of asteroids and watch the A.I. all launch out of the side with no asteroids and journey half way across the map to find some. I would suggest that they check which side has more nearby asteroids before launching. If it's too hard to program them to actually get into a hangar console on the correct side, I would be fine with them being able to launch out of either side no matter what hangar console they are in (so they could launch right side out of left hangar console). Hell, they even launch out the Construction Console sometimes so I don't see any problem with them using the wrong side of the hangar. Another little thing I noticed is that A.I. miners will move closer to an asteroid than they need to before stopping to mine it. The range of the mining laser is long enough to mine an asteroid on the other side of a BC, but since the asteroid detection radius of the A.I. is smaller it will not detect asteroids on the other side of the BC that are within mining range. Fixing that might also help. And another solution might be that when there are no asteroids within range of the miner, it goes to the nearest asteroid on the minimap instead of just moving in whatever direction it happens to be facing. There is a built in filter in the Editor for discovered units only, so you could make it not cheat by going to asteroids that have not been discovered yet, but rather, to the nearest discovered one.
I will dig up replays if requested.