Ideas for Improving AI, Turrets, and Docking

[ShadowHunter12]

Many larger ships that lack manuevaribility tend to compensate (or completely forego weapons in lieu of) using massive turret arrays or fighter bays, (both can be very incompetent and the second one is impractical without a crew). There are ways to foil these external defenses such as chaff drones (extremely fast and small unarmed ships that draw fire without being hit) or simply clever targetting of weakly shielded turrets.

WARNING:This post was a bit rushed and is basically a wall of text containing raw ideas

So, to solve these problems I propose a few changes and additions to ships using AI modules to make them more effective in combat and have utility and practicality.

1. Allow more orientation directions for docks, make them rotate like wedges where one full face is the direction the dock places the bounding box and the other decides which 4 directions to turn the ship. This way you can have forward facing ships on the bottom and sides of a ship or a station.
2. Expand the AI config to allow turrets to be set to target friendlies or neutral ships/players, this would mainly serve as a way to make powersupply, powerdrain, and technobeam turrets target the right kind of ships (and maybe heal players with tbeams).
3. Give AI modules their own attribute system like weapons have. This way pilots can devote points to things like max detection range, weapon effectiveness (if it's not impossible), tracking speed, and size of its firing cone(spread of bullets). Perhaps let AI stats tie In with a weapons computer and sort of share points, one affects the other. This way a pilot could play to the strengths of turrets and make specialized types. For example a shotgun/gattling turret with huge bullet skew but large firing speed and/or damage. Or a sniper turret, with incredible range, accuracy, and damage, but an extended reload time.
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     Also it would help to limit turrets from skewing the firing angle of individual amc units collectively to hit targets at odd angles, but retaining their ability to do it individually to hit small targets (also an option to make them only fire straight)
4. A block that would be a sort of Master AI controller for the parent ship that links up with any and all ships turret docked to the main ships and have bobbys on them. What it would do is use the gui from the AI config menu (therefore accessible when piloting a ship) but when It's settings are changed, It affects all turrets attached, meaning you can do all sorts of things like mass deactivation to stop shooting a ship that has surrendered, or change them to ship mode and use another device (covered in the next section) to undock all the turrets to act as fighters. (if that's not enough a really crazy idea would be to facilitate grouping of AIs with similar stats)
5. Another block with bindable action (like the docking beam) that acts as a mass docking controller, allowing multiple ships at once to be undocked instead of selecting each one by one. It would also bind undocked ships to the parent ship and they remember the parent ship and an id that corresponds to the dock they left so they can reconnect later. Main use of the linking would be to keep AI ships from wandering away from the fight or your ship.
6. Yet another block that can be used to paint targets (like missile lock, to keep it balanced) of importance out to turrets (or linked AIs) so all turrets that can aim at the ship, or ships that aren't too far away, will focus on the ship until a new target is changed or the order is cancelled. This basically would be a replacement of the selected target setting because it is better used as a means to track and distinguish items of interest than targets at a distance (I'm not the only one who does this right?).

If anyone has alternative ideas or thoughts to add to this post feel free to post them, I'll try to read them when I can and if any are really good I'll merge them with my ideas.

 

[obsidian dragon]

1. a new gui in the free space below inventory in the menu. this would control ships remote controle block(name wip) alowing you to set modes like follow ship, redock,undock, turn into turetts/ships, atack designated target, salvage planet(good for 1 man large ships which cant land to send down a lander) and of course, ram into a ship to activate the disnitergrators. this would also have a small picture of what the ship sees.

2. new versions of the ai like the remote control ai(mentioned above) the anti balistic ai(amcs would be made to be able to shoot down misiles, this ai would control the turet to shoot em down), drone ai (does thing like land on aplante if set to pod mode, fly around the ship firing a technobeam at it if set to repair and a pulsator to keep other ships that are not enemys away peacefully.

these are all the ideas i have for now, probalby think of something else later

 

[zorozeenee]

awesome idea, the master ai block that links with other ships is a fantastic idea

 

[Leutenant_Brickfix]

It would be extremly cool if you could build independent turrets on your ship, controlled by a kind of AI block. Those turrets can by singely assigned to a AI block, which can be controlled by a main AI block (just as mentioned above). By selecting the main AI block, maybe over a hotkey, a GUI shows up, and it is possible to assign different tasks to different AI blocks. The GUI can look simiular to the navigation GUI, you can select nearby entities and assign according tasks to the AI blocks.

For example, there are two enemy ships, a friendly ship and an astoroid.
The ship controlled has a missile turret, a anti-matter gun, a repair-beam and the looting gun, it shold be possible to assign each weapon, which is connected to a AI block, to do the following:
The missile turret shall attack the first enemy ship, the anti-matter gun the second, the repair-beam helps out your friend and the looting gun takes out recources out of the nearby asteroid.

I guess this is basically what is suggested in the comments above, and I really like the idea of allowing some kind of multiytaskin in the game, which is espacially cool with bigger ships.