[0.18.3] - AI is not able to aim at player when constantly changing direction

[nem]

If you constantly change direction, the AI is not able to aim its acid at the player. It seems it misses by more than it should.
I have made a small video to illustrate the issue, hope youtube is OK.

Please forgive me if this is a known issue. I havent played in years and i dont remember how it used to be.
https://youtu.be/kEgf3tUxkSQ

[theolderbeholder]

This is "works as designed".

Thank the gods.

[posila]

Thanks for the report.
It's not a bug.

[traycer]

Spitters used to have acid attacks that could home in on your location, which frankly didn't make sense and made the game frustrating rather than challenging. Now, they will at least lead the target with their attacks, but if you change direction in the meantime, then obviously the attack won't correct itself in mid-flight (which it used to do). Use this to your advantage when outnumbered or outgunned by spitters and worms. You can run back and forth like you do in your video, or if you actually need to go somewhere, run in a zig-zag pattern (or any movement that frequently changes direction).

This was discussed about a year ago in an FFF (scroll down to "Worm and Spitter stream attack"):
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-279

[BlueTemplar]

The issue is that worms seem to only consider the instantaneous player speed to calculate the future position of the player.
This works IRL because inertia means that one cannot instantly change one's speed vector.
But this breaks hilariously in the game, since the player doesn't seem to have any inertia - as seen in this example.

Since adding inertia to the player would likely make the game annoying (and we already have it in vehicles),
my suggestion would be for worms to integrate over a higher time duration to get the player speed vector.

(Hopefully this would only cause performance issues for mods with army vs army mechanics ?)

EDIT : This would hopefully make for a better gameplay by rewarding players that would significantly change their trajectory after a worm has fired their spit.

[Klonan]

Since adding inertia to the player would likely make the game annoying (and we already have it in vehicles),

I think adding momentum to player movement would be cool

[eradicator]

Since adding inertia to the player would likely make the game annoying (and we already have it in vehicles),

I think adding momentum to player movement would be cool

"Momentum" is what input lag is called in real life.