Navail AI not wanting to head directly towards target

[whitefoux]

I have a naval vehicle with a uber large front facing cannon, and 4 front facing torpedos. Problem is my boat does not want to head directly towards the enemy vehicle, and so none of my weapons will fire. It just moves in a zagging path about 35 ish degrees away from the enemy while keeping on a path towards it. So none of my weapons will fire. However when I first built it, it worked fine, then I tried adding point finders and detectors etc etc, only to find they are not active yet, so I removed them, and ever since it has just been giving me these problems.

This happenes regardless of distance, except when it gets into its broadside range (which is pointless as I have no braodside weapons)

[Kethrian]

On your Naval AI card:

Set your "enter broadside range' to max, so it immediately enters broadside mode, then set your broadside angle to zero. Finally set your broadside miniumum range to a "safe" distance which will break off the attack before a collision occurs - unless of course you want it to ram!

Your ship should now go straight for the enemy and will only change course when it gets really close.

You may need to fine tune its target prioritisation when fighting fleet battles, if it changes target it will also change heading to try and face it.

If you are still struggling, check the turning circle setting is realistic, setting it to max may help stop it miscalculating turns

[whitefoux]

Originally posted by Kethrian:

On your Naval AI card:

Set your "enter broadside range' to max, so it immediately enters broadside mode, then set your broadside angle to zero. Finally set your broadside miniumum range to a "safe" distance which will break off the attack before a collision occurs - unless of course you want it to ram!

Your ship should now go straight for the enemy and will only change course when it gets really close.

You may need to fine tune its target prioritisation when fighting fleet battles, if it changes target it will also change heading to try and face it.

If you are still struggling, check the turning circle setting is realistic, setting it to max may help stop it miscalculating turns

I tried this, it just broadside at a 90 degree angle then circles the target like this. I played with the turning circle, and when I maxed it, that seemed to make it want to just circle the target, when I lowered it, it would head pretty much the same course previous to playing with these settings.

[Kage]

Can your vehicle reverse? If not, that's part of the problem as once a ship hits it's minimum range, it does whatever it can to get back to that minimum range before attempting to "broadside" again, which would cause it to skirt along the minimum range without ever looking at the ship again. But even with the power to reverse, and assuming you have a fairly quick turn speed, there will be points throughout the battle where the ship is once again at 90 degrees with the enemy as that is the quickest way for it to meet the minimum range requirements. That's just how the naval AI works. You could attempt to use Air AI, but that could lead to flying boats and kamikaze crashes.

The second part to your problem is probably your lack of properly programed Target Priority card, because even without the ability to reverse your ship could be programed to favor distant targets to the point that once it reaches a certain range with it's current target, that a different target would jump up in priority and thus force it to turn to engage.

But most of all, it's because hull mounted cannons don't work all that well to begin with because the best way to maintain range is to be traveling away and around the target, two things which front mounted cannons do not do well. Of course there are tricks one can use, such as a sideways mounted elevation cannon to give it a "80" degree firing arc, but in that case, it's going to be a fairly short ranged cannon as it won't have much in the way of "azimuth" which would be it's new elevation. Or you could embrace the proper broadside and mount your cannon to one side or both.

[Admiral Obvious]

As for the zig zag, the devs are implimenting a new type of AI piece called the PID, which smooths out (or makes worse, depending on settings) the movement the AI tries to take. It's worked out rather well in the dev test for at least keeping the gun/vehicle on target, so it doesn't need to swivel as much.

[whitefoux]

Originally posted by Kage:

Can your vehicle reverse? If not, that's part of the problem as once a ship hits it's minimum range, it does whatever it can to get back to that minimum range before attempting to "broadside" again, which would cause it to skirt along the minimum range without ever looking at the ship again. But even with the power to reverse, and assuming you have a fairly quick turn speed, there will be points throughout the battle where the ship is once again at 90 degrees with the enemy as that is the quickest way for it to meet the minimum range requirements. That's just how the naval AI works. You could attempt to use Air AI, but that could lead to flying boats and kamikaze crashes.

The second part to your problem is probably your lack of properly programed Target Priority card, because even without the ability to reverse your ship could be programed to favor distant targets to the point that once it reaches a certain range with it's current target, that a different target would jump up in priority and thus force it to turn to engage.

But most of all, it's because hull mounted cannons don't work all that well to begin with because the best way to maintain range is to be traveling away and around the target, two things which front mounted cannons do not do well. Of course there are tricks one can use, such as a sideways mounted elevation cannon to give it a "80" degree firing arc, but in that case, it's going to be a fairly short ranged cannon as it won't have much in the way of "azimuth" which would be it's new elevation. Or you could embrace the proper broadside and mount your cannon to one side or both.

Well the problem I have with that is the gauge of this cannon. The moment it turned is the moment it would capsize. It is not meant to set on the front lines and sit back and snipe and lunch some large torpedoes. However I actually posted this comment on the forums as well and had a guy rework some settings and it works quite well for its intended ourpose.

[TheLightLOD]

I had the idea to build such a ship once as well, yeah the ai is difficult. What i eventually did was making the ship extremely slow, but good to turn around its center (sideways pointing propellors), this worked somewhat unless the enemy came to close.

Another idea i had was to swap out the regular forward propulsion with ACB powered paddles, one ACB set to activate the paddles on a too large distance from the enemy (above 4000 for example) and the second ACB to stop the paddles when within the 4000 m range. Then with the ai set to use thrusters in naval mode the ai can still steer the ship but not move it closer.

[Kage]

Glad your issue is fixed, but if you're ship is capsizing from the barrel moving, then clearly you have far too large a gun on far too small a ship, I would suggest adding pontoons.