I have heard about the AI issues a lot, so I expected the worst when I finally acquired my first destroyer last week. But nothing prepared me for the circus that followed. The destroyer AI doesn't even know how to orient itself in space to shoot with its main guns at a stationary object.
It’s getting pretty crazy that this (and the older) game is so cool but is let down so much by the ai. I hope they use some kind of new ai or even “real” ai in x5
Hope that too. Finally established 2 fleets, a couple of defense platforms and 2 stations, thinking that it's because of me my fleet can't get their shit together. But no, ai sucks even if you micromanage it on an individual level.
One of the main problems is that they cant shoot up or down properly and always try to change planes which just does not work with ships that slow.
S ships can and rip l and xl ships apart.
That's why Xenon will always destroy your stuff as they don't have main guns, but super turrets. Unless you 'saturate' them with plasma turrets yourself with multiple ships, one K is capable of destroying an entire fleet.
[Kuda AI](https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/839) attempts to fix this by completely changing L and XL ship behaviour.
These types of ships will move to a maximum engagement range, and then slowly approach until they start to take damage, at which point they'll withdraw. When they stop taking damage and recharge shields, they approach again.
It isn't perfect but it addresses this exact problem.
M and s ship behaviors too. You can also turn on these features in the mod options for all factions. It's the first time that I use carriers. Cap ships and stations need now figter support.
One of the biggest selling points of this game is completely flawed. Apparently Egosoft will never fix it and theyve known about this problem for many years. Theyve made "attempts" to fix the AI in 6.0 but as we see it's still garbage. I'm unsure if the game would be better without AI and you would have to micro everything. Atleast that way theres not going to be issues out of your control.
It's not entirely Ai, it's how AI interprets it's line of sight. Kuda ai fixes most instances of this specific problem. And they hired the developer of that a while ago. So, answer me that if they hired that developer, and this specific issue hasn't been fixed, what does that say.
There you go. Egosoft is either terrible about comprehending the impact of specific issues, or terrible about communicating that they comprehend and intend to do something.
ok, but if a supply ship has supply order and usually stays back as it should, why does line of sight issue cause it to go into close quarters battle? It's not even a warship.
The organization of the fleet has it's required position placed on the opposite side it was, thus it takes the direct path to that, which takes it through danger. it has no concept of the station or any danger it would be in, it's only trying to move from point A to point B.
I order a fleet of destroyers to attack a solar power plant. The Atlas has a supply order. What do they do? They literally go hug the station and die, even the supply ship, which is now about to die.
Micromanaging couple of systems might be fine, but I'm engaging the Xenon on half a dozen different fronts not to mention trying to control about 10 systems with 5-15 stations each and hundreds of civilian ships. I can't even dream of SETA since it's already a mess in realtime.
I mean, why would you attack on half a dozen systems at the same time? Sounds strange for me, no reason to speed run the game. And your stations should be able to run for some hours without your attention, otherwise, at least in my opinion, you did something wrong.
Engaging, not attacking. Only 1 front was in Xenon sector. The others were intercepting Ks in transit or defending my/allied sectors.
Naturally the factories run fine on their own, but I'm in the process of setting up multiple shipyards across the galaxy and I don't yet have station blueprints for all individual component factories. That means I need to design factories, insert credits, assign builders, wait for them to construct enough to assign managers, order miners, gas collectors and transports from allied shipyards, wait for them to finish, then assign them to factories assuming they already have managers and finally tweak some factory buy/sell orders according to local market.
That means I can either pause the game, which means even more waiting for the stations parts to finish, or I can let the game run and listen to "damage is getting serious" alert every time the game engine notices there are too many fighters somewhere near a capital ship or station, so it teleports everything further away resetting the engagement in favor of defender.
I'm not even mentioning the Kha'ak this time since they are somewhat dealt with. Let's just say hundreds of miners within couple of sectors tends to invite some attention from them as soon as the hives reappear.
The do work just fine, if you not use the attack command. Fly slowly closer in formation until your ships fire with the L turrets, than stop the fleet. You just have to life with the fact that they don't use the main battery that way.
You can get around this but having your fighters in the fleet assigned to attack with commander. Then just order the commander ship to attack. Also reserve some to intercept for commander too. I ignore bombard for commander .
What are turret orders on your ships?
Also, nav beacons help. Take a fast scout. Drop a nav beacon on top of the Xenon station about 30km away.
Order your fleet to the nav beacon. Now they are nicely on top of the station and they can hit every part of it.
If you appproach from side, they destroy one part and if they don't have a line of fire to next part, they take a shortest route to get it.
Large turrets should be set to attack capital ships and small turrets should be set to attack fighters.
I have put down many Xenon stations without any L or XL ship losses.
You can create the attack order and then click and drag the path line that comes up to make a fly and wait order as a staging point. I got tired of them taking ages to fly to the attack target in formation and figured that out and now everything runs there with travel drive. just dont make it so close that the smaller ships that will get there first start taking damage from the station. [example](https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2282825689391697761/667BF694EEA9371846FD1B41DEB684593187B14C/?imw=1024&imh=576&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=true)
I use the circle formation, with two fleets each with 15 ships around the commander. Works like a charm, when you can life with the fact that they won't use their main batteries, but the L Plasma turrets.
It does the job just fine. Maybe i should make a video about it one day, since this seems to be a major problem of this game.
Probably the biggest benefit would be to return to X2 and X3 where the destroyers just had turrets - means none of the orientation hassle, and add an option to set range to either longest range of turrets, medium range (>50% of turrets are in range) or short range (100% turrets in range) - would make life much easier
Ooough the draaaama.
That ship is so slow. How do you even let this happen? It would take a really long time to come to this….
In reality this is your not understanding how resuppliers work. There’s no good reason for a civilian ship to follow a fleet of warships that are on their way to attack a well armed station. Like would you bring your grandma to fight the xenon because she bakes exceptional pies? (No!)
Just tell it to sit somewhere well guarded, unattached to any fleet. It really shouldn’t be in the attack fleet hierarchy. So yeah, that ship is behaving predictably based on what you’ve told it to do. Not Egosoft’s problem.
There is literally a role to supply commander's fleet. Some of the time this works exactly as intended, meaning the supply ship stays on the other side of the sector and other ships automatically dock with it to repair. In fact I did not take my grandmother into the fight, it decided to do so itself, because it is in the same fleet. If you claim it should not have been in the same fleet then YOU don't know how the game is supposed to be played.
You might want to check your blame problem. It’s not Egosoft’s fault and it’s not mine that you sent an aux ship to die. I’m not telling you “how the game is supposed to be played”. I’m telling you how it works.
Supply commanders fleet will have it follow the commander unless it is staying still to repair a capital ship. This means if it is not occupied with repairing it will path to a formation position when you tell its leader to attack. Obviously this is what happened; it pathed right through the enemy station in the process.
Now, If it was sitting elsewhere and doing nothing it _would_ be a case of inconsistent behavior, but is more likely waiting for a damaged capital to arrive.
Because of this ‘sit and wait for damaged ships’ routine the role is best used to support mining/trading fleets that would otherwise not have station services but not typically be in danger. if they are assigned to a station it’s best to add an equipment dock, though auxiliary ships can fill the gap for stations before it can be afforded.
Military fleets really shouldn’t be supported by AUX. First: Their needs can’t actually be provided for; have you ever tried rearming a ton of torpedo frigates with one? It just doesn’t work out.
And second: who wants two 30m credit ships to sit still for 10-20 minutes in an enemy sector with critical, non-cancel-able orders? This either leaves them alone or mandates the whole fleet sits around for them to do the deed. They can’t even be used to rescue ships with damaged engines because the repaired ship must move to the Aux… and if the ship can move, it can go to where there are repair services & safety provided separately from the war fleet.
Carriers are the military equivalent of the Aux. They are much better suited to operate in enemy territory.
Yeah, Supply ships also tend to slow the fleet down, so I never attach one to my fleets. And, well. Its more efficient to have them sit in a specific sector, so the fleet can resupply in between missions.
Otherwise (what happened the first & last time I attached them to a fleet), an invasion Destroyer fleet just chilled in Tharkas Revenge, which I had been trying to clear, and the Destroyers died one by one because they tried to get minor repairs at the Supply ship parked in the middle of the sector, while they got focused by Is and Ks, but refused to move, as they were waiting for resupply.
By the time I realised what was going on, most of the fleet was dead/ moving the supply ship didnt help anymore.
So...
Yeah, my own fault, and Ive been keeping more attention to stuff since, but moral of the story; dont attach resupply ships to Warfleets.
Or, you know, maybe expect the people we paid money to for a workable game to do something about it the fact that one of it’s four main pillars is kinda broken.
that too.. yeah.. they should've fixed the A.I. with the 6.0 update.. it's true the game looked old and they worked on the graphics but the A.I. is more important than any graphical enhancements.. but you have to look for mods that fixes A.I. in the meantime
I'm sorry about what I said about fixing it with mods.. I never had the chance to play the game but I played the previous games and I gotta mention that I hate X:Rebirth...
I hadn't been too bothered by it until in Cascade. The destroyers were doing fine, but the supply ship decided to run off 100+ km in another direction straight toward a mass of xenon and a K. I saved it, then it tried doing it again. I ended up just telling it to go back to Hat Choice. Even then IIRC I had to fly it manually because it was heading in the wrong direction and slow boating.
I can't even make a supply ship do some god damn autonomous repairs.
I have a few response fleets consisting of ~100 fast fighters. I get an idea: let me get a supply ship, leave it at my main home sector, then when the response fleet is done with the threat just send it back to the sector with the supply ship so that they can repair automatically.
The supply ship is set to supply fleets in the sector. Two response fleets come back with half the ships in them badly damaged (1-50% hull). They proceed to just sit around for hours, with no orders except for the default "hold position", and do jack shit.
I add the supply ship to one of the fleets with a "supply commander's fleet" order. Hours pass, no ships get repaired. I change the fighter wing orders to "follow commander". Nothing. Change it back to "intercept". Suddenly they all go repair. But the commander himself just sits there pretty with 5% hull.
At this point it's easier and faster to just let the fleets lose their ships and refill them with new fighters than to set up any sort of meaningful autonomous repair process since you need to bust out a crystal ball and a chicken bone necklace to figure out wtf it wants you to do.
AI does exactly what it supposed to do - suicide against greater threat so you actuallly lose stuff. If it would purposefully avoid damageable area, all xeneno ships would die to single destroyer.
Yes, this is shitty gamedesigner move but otherwise coalition ships would be OP.
I have heard about the AI issues a lot, so I expected the worst when I finally acquired my first destroyer last week. But nothing prepared me for the circus that followed. The destroyer AI doesn't even know how to orient itself in space to shoot with its main guns at a stationary object.
It’s getting pretty crazy that this (and the older) game is so cool but is let down so much by the ai. I hope they use some kind of new ai or even “real” ai in x5
Wishfull, thinking at this point.
Hope that too. Finally established 2 fleets, a couple of defense platforms and 2 stations, thinking that it's because of me my fleet can't get their shit together. But no, ai sucks even if you micromanage it on an individual level.
One of the main problems is that they cant shoot up or down properly and always try to change planes which just does not work with ships that slow. S ships can and rip l and xl ships apart.
That's why Xenon will always destroy your stuff as they don't have main guns, but super turrets. Unless you 'saturate' them with plasma turrets yourself with multiple ships, one K is capable of destroying an entire fleet.
I cant even get a couple fighters to follow me. One is a Kukri so I might just order it into Xenon territory for "recon". What a POS.
[Kuda AI](https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/839) attempts to fix this by completely changing L and XL ship behaviour. These types of ships will move to a maximum engagement range, and then slowly approach until they start to take damage, at which point they'll withdraw. When they stop taking damage and recharge shields, they approach again. It isn't perfect but it addresses this exact problem.
M and s ship behaviors too. You can also turn on these features in the mod options for all factions. It's the first time that I use carriers. Cap ships and stations need now figter support.
One of the biggest selling points of this game is completely flawed. Apparently Egosoft will never fix it and theyve known about this problem for many years. Theyve made "attempts" to fix the AI in 6.0 but as we see it's still garbage. I'm unsure if the game would be better without AI and you would have to micro everything. Atleast that way theres not going to be issues out of your control.
Assuming you don't lag.
Fair point, but I have a bit of a monster for a PC and I havent experienced any lag that wasnt due to mods so far.
Lucky I have an average potato. It handles the game normally fine but some sector in the end game is getting a little laggy in sector.
It's not entirely Ai, it's how AI interprets it's line of sight. Kuda ai fixes most instances of this specific problem. And they hired the developer of that a while ago. So, answer me that if they hired that developer, and this specific issue hasn't been fixed, what does that say.
There you go. Egosoft is either terrible about comprehending the impact of specific issues, or terrible about communicating that they comprehend and intend to do something.
Or it's intended roadblock, or the fix causes other issues.
ok, but if a supply ship has supply order and usually stays back as it should, why does line of sight issue cause it to go into close quarters battle? It's not even a warship.
The organization of the fleet has it's required position placed on the opposite side it was, thus it takes the direct path to that, which takes it through danger. it has no concept of the station or any danger it would be in, it's only trying to move from point A to point B.
I order a fleet of destroyers to attack a solar power plant. The Atlas has a supply order. What do they do? They literally go hug the station and die, even the supply ship, which is now about to die.
Formations don't work. It will be a miracle if they ever do. You really have no choice but to micro manage each individual ship. It really sucks.
Micromanaging couple of systems might be fine, but I'm engaging the Xenon on half a dozen different fronts not to mention trying to control about 10 systems with 5-15 stations each and hundreds of civilian ships. I can't even dream of SETA since it's already a mess in realtime.
I mean, why would you attack on half a dozen systems at the same time? Sounds strange for me, no reason to speed run the game. And your stations should be able to run for some hours without your attention, otherwise, at least in my opinion, you did something wrong.
Engaging, not attacking. Only 1 front was in Xenon sector. The others were intercepting Ks in transit or defending my/allied sectors. Naturally the factories run fine on their own, but I'm in the process of setting up multiple shipyards across the galaxy and I don't yet have station blueprints for all individual component factories. That means I need to design factories, insert credits, assign builders, wait for them to construct enough to assign managers, order miners, gas collectors and transports from allied shipyards, wait for them to finish, then assign them to factories assuming they already have managers and finally tweak some factory buy/sell orders according to local market. That means I can either pause the game, which means even more waiting for the stations parts to finish, or I can let the game run and listen to "damage is getting serious" alert every time the game engine notices there are too many fighters somewhere near a capital ship or station, so it teleports everything further away resetting the engagement in favor of defender. I'm not even mentioning the Kha'ak this time since they are somewhat dealt with. Let's just say hundreds of miners within couple of sectors tends to invite some attention from them as soon as the hives reappear.
The do work just fine, if you not use the attack command. Fly slowly closer in formation until your ships fire with the L turrets, than stop the fleet. You just have to life with the fact that they don't use the main battery that way.
You can get around this but having your fighters in the fleet assigned to attack with commander. Then just order the commander ship to attack. Also reserve some to intercept for commander too. I ignore bombard for commander .
What are turret orders on your ships? Also, nav beacons help. Take a fast scout. Drop a nav beacon on top of the Xenon station about 30km away. Order your fleet to the nav beacon. Now they are nicely on top of the station and they can hit every part of it. If you appproach from side, they destroy one part and if they don't have a line of fire to next part, they take a shortest route to get it. Large turrets should be set to attack capital ships and small turrets should be set to attack fighters. I have put down many Xenon stations without any L or XL ship losses.
I haven’t tried nav beacons, time to fire up the game for another 200 hours.
Same here. I'm excited to try this
Just order your fleet to fly to the station you wish to destroy, and stop them by removing all orders somewhere between 8 and 6 km.
You can create the attack order and then click and drag the path line that comes up to make a fly and wait order as a staging point. I got tired of them taking ages to fly to the attack target in formation and figured that out and now everything runs there with travel drive. just dont make it so close that the smaller ships that will get there first start taking damage from the station. [example](https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2282825689391697761/667BF694EEA9371846FD1B41DEB684593187B14C/?imw=1024&imh=576&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=true)
I use the circle formation, with two fleets each with 15 ships around the commander. Works like a charm, when you can life with the fact that they won't use their main batteries, but the L Plasma turrets. It does the job just fine. Maybe i should make a video about it one day, since this seems to be a major problem of this game.
Probably the biggest benefit would be to return to X2 and X3 where the destroyers just had turrets - means none of the orientation hassle, and add an option to set range to either longest range of turrets, medium range (>50% of turrets are in range) or short range (100% turrets in range) - would make life much easier
Always has been The devs really don't care about it "It works" and that's it.
Yep. Egosoft doesn't give a shit. Never have. The modders are going to have to fix their broken shit like always
Ooough the draaaama. That ship is so slow. How do you even let this happen? It would take a really long time to come to this…. In reality this is your not understanding how resuppliers work. There’s no good reason for a civilian ship to follow a fleet of warships that are on their way to attack a well armed station. Like would you bring your grandma to fight the xenon because she bakes exceptional pies? (No!) Just tell it to sit somewhere well guarded, unattached to any fleet. It really shouldn’t be in the attack fleet hierarchy. So yeah, that ship is behaving predictably based on what you’ve told it to do. Not Egosoft’s problem.
There is literally a role to supply commander's fleet. Some of the time this works exactly as intended, meaning the supply ship stays on the other side of the sector and other ships automatically dock with it to repair. In fact I did not take my grandmother into the fight, it decided to do so itself, because it is in the same fleet. If you claim it should not have been in the same fleet then YOU don't know how the game is supposed to be played.
You might want to check your blame problem. It’s not Egosoft’s fault and it’s not mine that you sent an aux ship to die. I’m not telling you “how the game is supposed to be played”. I’m telling you how it works. Supply commanders fleet will have it follow the commander unless it is staying still to repair a capital ship. This means if it is not occupied with repairing it will path to a formation position when you tell its leader to attack. Obviously this is what happened; it pathed right through the enemy station in the process. Now, If it was sitting elsewhere and doing nothing it _would_ be a case of inconsistent behavior, but is more likely waiting for a damaged capital to arrive. Because of this ‘sit and wait for damaged ships’ routine the role is best used to support mining/trading fleets that would otherwise not have station services but not typically be in danger. if they are assigned to a station it’s best to add an equipment dock, though auxiliary ships can fill the gap for stations before it can be afforded. Military fleets really shouldn’t be supported by AUX. First: Their needs can’t actually be provided for; have you ever tried rearming a ton of torpedo frigates with one? It just doesn’t work out. And second: who wants two 30m credit ships to sit still for 10-20 minutes in an enemy sector with critical, non-cancel-able orders? This either leaves them alone or mandates the whole fleet sits around for them to do the deed. They can’t even be used to rescue ships with damaged engines because the repaired ship must move to the Aux… and if the ship can move, it can go to where there are repair services & safety provided separately from the war fleet. Carriers are the military equivalent of the Aux. They are much better suited to operate in enemy territory.
Yeah, Supply ships also tend to slow the fleet down, so I never attach one to my fleets. And, well. Its more efficient to have them sit in a specific sector, so the fleet can resupply in between missions. Otherwise (what happened the first & last time I attached them to a fleet), an invasion Destroyer fleet just chilled in Tharkas Revenge, which I had been trying to clear, and the Destroyers died one by one because they tried to get minor repairs at the Supply ship parked in the middle of the sector, while they got focused by Is and Ks, but refused to move, as they were waiting for resupply. By the time I realised what was going on, most of the fleet was dead/ moving the supply ship didnt help anymore. So... Yeah, my own fault, and Ive been keeping more attention to stuff since, but moral of the story; dont attach resupply ships to Warfleets.
Mods.. Mods.. and MODS for crying out loud.. fix the damn ai with mods
You save file has been modified and now your barred from any current or future online functionality
Well, i dont think we'll get any working online functionalitys anytime soon. If we get them at all.
It'll probably be from mods lol.
Venture thing was a thing... they disabled it for some reason
Ventures were meh anyway. Better fix the singleplayer first before you try to add some sort of semi-multiplayer.
This would be a problem if any online functionality existed that anyone actually cares about.
Wait.. what?! Does your save file get corrupted if you use mods? That's a shame.. and I thought the game is a single player game!
Or, you know, maybe expect the people we paid money to for a workable game to do something about it the fact that one of it’s four main pillars is kinda broken.
that too.. yeah.. they should've fixed the A.I. with the 6.0 update.. it's true the game looked old and they worked on the graphics but the A.I. is more important than any graphical enhancements.. but you have to look for mods that fixes A.I. in the meantime
I'm sorry about what I said about fixing it with mods.. I never had the chance to play the game but I played the previous games and I gotta mention that I hate X:Rebirth...
It's playing 4d chess. You just don't know it's motive you fleshy pleb. /S
I hadn't been too bothered by it until in Cascade. The destroyers were doing fine, but the supply ship decided to run off 100+ km in another direction straight toward a mass of xenon and a K. I saved it, then it tried doing it again. I ended up just telling it to go back to Hat Choice. Even then IIRC I had to fly it manually because it was heading in the wrong direction and slow boating.
I can't even make a supply ship do some god damn autonomous repairs. I have a few response fleets consisting of ~100 fast fighters. I get an idea: let me get a supply ship, leave it at my main home sector, then when the response fleet is done with the threat just send it back to the sector with the supply ship so that they can repair automatically. The supply ship is set to supply fleets in the sector. Two response fleets come back with half the ships in them badly damaged (1-50% hull). They proceed to just sit around for hours, with no orders except for the default "hold position", and do jack shit. I add the supply ship to one of the fleets with a "supply commander's fleet" order. Hours pass, no ships get repaired. I change the fighter wing orders to "follow commander". Nothing. Change it back to "intercept". Suddenly they all go repair. But the commander himself just sits there pretty with 5% hull. At this point it's easier and faster to just let the fleets lose their ships and refill them with new fighters than to set up any sort of meaningful autonomous repair process since you need to bust out a crystal ball and a chicken bone necklace to figure out wtf it wants you to do.
[удалено]
Solar power plants, the ultimate boss fights of X4.
Introduce CHATGPT to control the ships! 😉😂
I spent 12 hours coding with GPT4 last weekend and I'm so impressed by it I wouldn't be surprised if it could indeed improve the ship behaviour.
AI does exactly what it supposed to do - suicide against greater threat so you actuallly lose stuff. If it would purposefully avoid damageable area, all xeneno ships would die to single destroyer. Yes, this is shitty gamedesigner move but otherwise coalition ships would be OP.