I think two AI behaviours will add greatly to the possibilities of counters and counter-counters.
The first is a modifier to escort behaviour, allowing a change in the ‘circle radius’, as well as ‘how far this ship will move away to engage/how badly this ship has to want to engage before it will move away’ - this will help keep escort ships tied to a given ship, so they don’t run forward and blow up first thing, but rather stick around, wait for an attack,a nd THEN run forward.
The second is a ‘run away’ distance - this is so ships that focus on a given long range engagement distance try and maintain a given distance at all times - 1000 to 800, say.
I would love to see these orders aswell.
Having Escort Frigates engage close and then return to formation would be great, and maintaining a fixed distance from a battle would help long range Crusiers.
Something I’d personally like to see is the ‘run away when below x% hp’ taking remaining shield strength into account. Basically I want to be able to tell a shielded ship to run away the second it gets hit and come back to fight when the shields are back up.
It’s not optimistic! It’s a carefully calibrated gamble! (I want to set up one ship with heavy armour piercing gear and let it crack all the armour for me)
I’d very much like to see both of these behaviours, the current Keep Moving order give them the ship a bit of tunnel vision and escort can be a little passive. In this thread (http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2815), Cliffski gives a few suggestions on how to achieve something similar at the moment.
I’ve managed to make a quite cautious fast cruiser, it’s not the most dangerous of things and will take a while to kill most ships but it’s fast enough to get in and out:
