I think shooting target priority need to be fixed.

[Aristocat]

The problem, is simply that game doesn't really have any attack priority, they just attack nearest target. This is problematic because this means a) Your colonists will overkill one raider at a time. b) Raiders will overkill your colonist.

Experiment :

1. 10 assault rifle, 10 snipers, 5 melees, armored bunker vs Raiders 16 gunners, 10 slashers, without any defense. Around 35 tiles away.

http://i.imgur.com/iAgdG7a.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/TX16vix.jpg


It would make sense that gunners focus on gunners and melee fight against melee right?

Nope. They attack only one target that's closest to them and overkill it.


Allowing raiders to :

a) Completely overrun the bunker. 20 guns should be enough to slaughter 10 personal shield slashers but they kill only one or two at a time(Notice second picture, most raiders are practically unharmed while around 3 slashers are dead. Again, why stone-chunk-killbox is important so raiders can't even reach in the first place.)

b) Enemy gunmen are completely unharmed because colonists are only attacking slashers. This is especially problematic if they have rocket launcher. You have to manually select and attack who to who or the colonists go complete retard.

c) If that's not stupid enough, they unload everything onto your melee guys and themselves trying to shoot at slasher.

d) Sniper rifle has low accuracy in close range, which means guaranteed to miss and hit your colonist!

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http://i.imgur.com/S5R846T.jpg

Result in almost slaughtered colony. Please don't go "It failed because inefficient defense" because this is purely done to show the flaw of AI, not optimal defense.

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This is also why infests are huge problem. around 5 bursts of assault rifle is enough to kill a megaspider, except they'll fire everything onto a target(usually smaller and faster bug.) and rest of bugs can reach colonists mostly unharmed, and then colonists will fire guns at themselves and kill each other.

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This is also why melee play(and short range guns) is harder, the closer to raiders the more likely get focus fired and lose colonist.

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This AI is actually extremely beneficial for storyteller because they have unlimited amount of raiders. It doesn't matter if they win or not as long as they can kill at least one colonist or body part per raid, to make colony eventually become too unstable it fell itself. All they need to do is unload everything onto a colonist so he would die.

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I think this is also why killboxes prevalent. Split or kill them without allowing them to take a single shot. Because as they send more raiders the more retarded AI become, this become necessary.

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Solution : Make pawns shoot targets based on factors.

If a target is targeted by more than x allies, change target. X scales to target health, so creatures like thrumbos get focus fired while small bugs targeted by only one colonist.

If shooting at target might hit allies, change target or don't shoot.

If the gun loses significant accuracy, change target.

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X-com 1 also had a similar problem that's fixed in the sequel. If you make 6 soldiers overwatch and 3 enemy moves they fire everything on the first target that moves and rest of aliens are completely unharmed.

Even realistically, if 10 soldier is in trench and 10 enemies are charging they would fire at whatever is front of them, not 8 out of 10 soldiers shoot at an unlucky guy that ran 0.10 c/s faster than others.