Simple AI for enemies.

[Hannu]

It seems quite stupid when a small group of enemies attacks to dense line of laser turrets and is killed in a second before they could make any damage. It is like player would attack against the base with 20 nests full of behemoth enemies with a pistol and no armor at all. I suggest that attacking enemy groups would make some simple evaluation of situation before attack. They could check for example number of turrets or combat robots of player's equipment in area vs their own strength. That would give possibility to get (limited and temporary) peace by building very strong defenses and get rid of annoying practically false alarms of weak attacks.

Straightforward attack strategy of enemies is also boring. They should also have fear depending on health. If health of an enemy would decrease under some limit it should panic and flee instead of simply attacking against anything until death. Fear limit could have random variations between individuals and also depend on species and situation. They would have much more courage if they defend their nests than when they are attacking to the player's base. I would try to something like 20-40 % health left when attacking against the player and 5-10 % health left when defending their bases. If it did not take too much CPU or programming resources, also fear and death of other nearby enemies could affect so that there would be some kind of group morale.

I believe that these suggestions would give more natural feeling and interesting unpredictable situations in both defense and attack fighting.

[m44v]

They could check for example number of turrets or combat robots of player's equipment in area vs their own strength. That would give possibility to get (limited and temporary) peace by building very strong defenses and get rid of annoying practically false alarms of weak attacks.

Perhaps the pathfinding system could just avoid paths and targets that ended with a high casualty count during some timeframe, is a more general approach than checking for turrets, they would avoid minefields for example.

[nonstickfrypan]

Or, perhaps the biters can lay down pheromone trails

[ssilk]

That's my keyword.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3440 What do biters do in their spare time? (Pheromone pathfind)