New Enemy behavior

[WolfgangPolska]

Hi, I think that enemy AI is soooooooooo 10*273649*o poor. They are just wandering around, and after some time attack player's colony. So there are some suggestions (by me of course)



1. Enemy morale. Enemies need separate happines/fear system than colonist. If they are afraid so much, they flee or surrender (to player, or just go away). Fear can be inspired by those gibblet cages, or by our security level (number of turrets etc.).
2. Enemy camps () Yeah. Of course it can be a problem on a small map, but It can be disabled when playing on It.
Enemy will bulid small bulidings, and request reinforcements when bulit a comms console. I think Enemy bases should by very rare.

Ya sorry for mistakes, but I'm tired, and found just a while to write it. What do you think about AI enchantment  ??

[keylocke]

hmm.. i think the combat AI is actually great. the moment the raiders started an assault, they actually try to poke around your defenses searching for weak points (for a base building game, this feels quite revolutionary for the complexity of how they implemented this feature).

if fog-of-war (fow) is implemented, you actually have to send scouting parties just to know the locations of enemies, travelers, crashed pods, etc. (by then the combat AI will become quite astounding due to the possibility of sneak attacks through weakpoints)

if they were to tweak the combat AI, i think the feature they should add is for enemies to be able to distinguish tiles with high casualty rates. this way, they will try to avoid going through a killzone area as much as possible and find alternate paths (ie: breaking through a wall rather than go through a choke point, or performing hit and run tactics from multiple directions. again, this would benefit greatly with FOW. since players would no longer have god vision to know what the AI is planning to do).

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edit : another way to increase the effectiveness of raider AI, is to ensure that they usually have a well balanced roster. (ie : a fine mix between grenadiers, rifle grunts, snipers, etc), working as a squad using mixed unit tactics.. although they probably shouldn't be called raiders by then. (maybe just call them a kill squad or something)


edit2 : i just realized this after seeing the exploding turret exploit from another thread.

what if once the enemy AI distinguishes and decides to avoid a high casualty area and was unable to find an alternate route, the raiders could have the option to just set up an ambush camp right in front of your main entrance rather than charge inside a killzone? this would force the players to change their priority to offense rather than defense. (of course the enemies should also be restricted with their line-of-sight to allow players to be able to sneak around and ambush them while they sleep.)

[JonoRig]

Or have a low priority route to shoot/grenade through rock bed if it cannot find an alternative route, sappers have been used in combat for centuries...

[Vas]

I like the idea of seeing enemy bases on the map, super strong well turret defended with sniper tower (for increased sniper range of one sniper raider) so that it would be nearly impossible for a player to take out unless they build up a colony, these raiders would then attack periodically and drop in new waves.  Of course, this means you can take them out before they build their base.  They can set up a base with the same schematics each time, and just perform whatever orders are nessicary, like dig out any rock within a certain area around their base to place walls and turrets, they'd have infinite resource stock piles of their own only usable by raiders, but they'd still need to walk to the stock pile and take 75 at a time to structures and start the building.  Once they have the coms array, they can call reinforcements and then once they have the turrets and sniper tower, you're pretty much never gonna get rid of them. 

[keylocke]

I like the idea of seeing enemy bases on the map, super strong well turret defended with sniper tower (for increased sniper range of one sniper raider) so that it would be nearly impossible for a player to take out unless they build up a colony, these raiders would then attack periodically and drop in new waves.  Of course, this means you can take them out before they build their base.  They can set up a base with the same schematics each time, and just perform whatever orders are nessicary, like dig out any rock within a certain area around their base to place walls and turrets, they'd have infinite resource stock piles of their own only usable by raiders, but they'd still need to walk to the stock pile and take 75 at a time to structures and start the building.  Once they have the coms array, they can call reinforcements and then once they have the turrets and sniper tower, you're pretty much never gonna get rid of them. 

+1 on this. i would like to see raiders slowly building their base rather than spawning with a pre-built camp (especially if raider camps function similarly to player bases). i also like the idea of raider camps being able to generate raider spawns occasionally.

question is : can players capture raider base camps? can players exploit the raider's infinite stock piles? can raiders in their base camps eat food,sleep, and suffer from mental breaks?