Allied Fleet AI and the Lost Puppy Dog conumdrum. Suggestion&Fixes listed.

[Te'Ryn Tec]

Pre-Clarke beta I was in a game where i found myself in an federation where moronic member declared war which was immediately followed by large whooshing sound as every member of the Federation came to dock at my capitol because one fleet was at 41k.

Meanwhile i have a buncha of smaller fleets at chokepoints(hyperlane game) consisting of a range of 9k to 19k defending my borders just incase a twitchy federation president declares war.

....meanwhile the enemy fleets are spreading throughout my allies systems like herpes at a porno convention.

I decide to go on the offensive, take my 41k fleet and split it into two fleets hoping to draw fire away from enemy fleets in their systems.

So what does the "oh so brave and intelligent allies" do? Follow my 21k fleet around like a lost puppy dog, which results in 1 enemy system being attacked by my 20k fleet(which i swiftly lost due to enemy AI deciding to converge on them) and 1 other system(more specifically 1 planet) being attacked by a combined fleet size of like 400k(i bet that planets population pooped their pants).

I also noticed allies dont bother trying to land troops until i decided to select one of my transport ships and send them to land on the planet. Which was followed by a second whooshing sound as hundreds of transport ships took to space which resulted in a race of about 50 different transport fleets all scrambling to secure one planet.

Which i found funny cuz all of the above happened again as i moved onto the next and the next planet.





Post-Clarke(beta). I thought they fixed all that?!! Started a new game.

Decided to stay independent as long as possible. Got into a war i couldnt win and lost my 2nd sector. Choose to form and alliance with the new nation that took over my liberated 2nd sector. Rebuilt my fleet and let them build a fleet for themselves.

Decided it was time to expand again and get rid of a pesky and annoying smaller enemy alliance on my allies border.

............

Allied AI still follows you around. Fighting a 3 front war with his border(its only him and me) directly next to an enemies. First thing he does is send all his fleets to follow my 1 20k fleet. Meanwhile it leaves me to deal with not only the 2 enemies on my doorstep but also his.

Also i highly dislike hearing the suggestion to just blitz enemy capital systems. As if thats a proper fix.

Should be fairly simple to program AI thought process.

If Enemy A, B & C are attacking my base/systems then i will no longer stack all fleets to Players Single Fleet.

If No Enemy in my own system, check ally systems to defend.

If no Enemy Fleets in any Allied system, go attack.

If Ally is in combat with enemy fleet, send one fleet or two equaling to or greater than difference of fleet pwr. (I.E. Ally fleet=10k, Enemy fleet =15k, send one(or more) fleet closet to 5k(3 fleets of 2k power or 1 fleet of 5k, 6k, 7k etc(whichever is lowest/closest to 5k)).

If enemy fleets exist in both my own space and a Allies space, defend Own Space > defend Allies Space.



As a side note Paradox could implement personalities as well to this mix.

Aggressive - Will lean towards more attacking enemy space than defending own or allies space.
Defensive - Will lean towards defending own and allies space over attacking(patrolling alliance/federation space)

 

[Novacat]

Fixes for this are in 1.2, but should have been in 1.1. Pretty much makes alliances/federations unplayable, so you either have to play a solo game, or shelf Stellaris until 1.2 comes out late next month.

 

[Te'Ryn Tec]

Fixes for this are in 1.2, but should have been in 1.1. Pretty much makes alliances/federations unplayable, so you either have to play a solo game, or shelf Stellaris until 1.2 comes out late next month.

Thank Space Jesus. 1.2 cant get here fast enough.

 

[Serenity84]

In my current game, my allies and vassals do a decent job occupying planets. There are a lot of useless transport fleets going around, but they've occupied quite a few planets on their own. Even my "pathetic" vassals seemed to occupy planets that I promised them in the war goals.

Fleet movement is chaotic though. Usually they try to follow my biggest fleet. Unfortunately they have slower hyperdrives. But one fleet is also flying around on own its own sometimes. Not sure why, but one moment it seems to want to join me, and in the next it turns around. In my case, I actually wanted it to follow me, but one time this also led to an awesome pincer movement where an enemy fleet was trapped between us with no way of escaping via the hyperlanes

 

[Te'Ryn Tec]

Nice, i do love the strategy involved with Hyperlanes. Makes picking which planets to own and cede important as well as blocking enemy advances.

 

[Serenity84]

It was pure chance though. Earlier the enemy was in similar positions and could easily escape with me having no chance of catching up. I think my ally did his own thing for the most part and then somehow decided he wanted to follow my fleet after all. Maybe because it was the first time in a while that I moved my fleet in that direction (back towards my space rather than in enemy territory). And the direct path between him and me just happened to box in the enemy fleet.

Now that I think about it, it's also possible that he always wanted to get to my fleet along the shortest path through the hyperlane network. And as I move around, that path changes, which causes him find a new path. But then I move again and they can never catch up with the changing paths. Not sure...

Sometimes after a battle they also left my fleet. Maybe to repair.

 

[Dalwin]

Pre-Clarke beta I was in a game where i found myself in an federation where moronic member declared war which was immediately followed by large whooshing sound as every member of the Federation came to dock at my capitol because one fleet was at 41k.

Meanwhile i have a buncha of smaller fleets at chokepoints(hyperlane game) consisting of a range of 9k to 19k defending my borders just incase a twitchy federation president declares war.

....meanwhile the enemy fleets are spreading throughout my allies systems like herpes at a porno convention.

I decide to go on the offensive, take my 41k fleet and split it into two fleets hoping to draw fire away from enemy fleets in their systems.

So what does the "oh so brave and intelligent allies" do? Follow my 21k fleet around like a lost puppy dog, which results in 1 enemy system being attacked by my 20k fleet(which i swiftly lost due to enemy AI deciding to converge on them) and 1 other system(more specifically 1 planet) being attacked by a combined fleet size of like 400k(i bet that planets population pooped their pants).

I also noticed allies dont bother trying to land troops until i decided to select one of my transport ships and send them to land on the planet. Which was followed by a second whooshing sound as hundreds of transport ships took to space which resulted in a race of about 50 different transport fleets all scrambling to secure one planet.

Which i found funny cuz all of the above happened again as i moved onto the next and the next planet.





Post-Clarke(beta). I thought they fixed all that?!! Started a new game.

Decided to stay independent as long as possible. Got into a war i couldnt win and lost my 2nd sector. Choose to form and alliance with the new nation that took over my liberated 2nd sector. Rebuilt my fleet and let them build a fleet for themselves.

Decided it was time to expand again and get rid of a pesky and annoying smaller enemy alliance on my allies border.

............

Allied AI still follows you around. Fighting a 3 front war with his border(its only him and me) directly next to an enemies. First thing he does is send all his fleets to follow my 1 20k fleet. Meanwhile it leaves me to deal with not only the 2 enemies on my doorstep but also his.

Also i highly dislike hearing the suggestion to just blitz enemy capital systems. As if thats a proper fix.

Should be fairly simple to program AI thought process.

If Enemy A, B & C are attacking my base/systems then i will no longer stack all fleets to Players Single Fleet.

If No Enemy in my own system, check ally systems to defend.

If no Enemy Fleets in any Allied system, go attack.

If Ally is in combat with enemy fleet, send one fleet or two equaling to or greater than difference of fleet pwr. (I.E. Ally fleet=10k, Enemy fleet =15k, send one(or more) fleet closet to 5k(3 fleets of 2k power or 1 fleet of 5k, 6k, 7k etc(whichever is lowest/closest to 5k)).

If enemy fleets exist in both my own space and a Allies space, defend Own Space > defend Allies Space.



As a side note Paradox could implement personalities as well to this mix.

Aggressive - Will lean towards more attacking enemy space than defending own or allies space.
Defensive - Will lean towards defending own and allies space over attacking(patrolling alliance/federation space)

They never said they were fixing this in Clarke. In fact, it is not on the list for Asimov either. If you read dev diary 33, it is included in Heinlein. This means that tentatively, MAYBE, if we are lucky, we will get something better at the end of the summer.

As a quick fix, I would accept them just turning this behavior off. That should not be hard to do and would not take major programming. Just ahe empires allied to the human player use the same wartime AI that they would if their alliance was completely composed of computer controlled empires. Most of the empires in the game are doing this. The game would be more interesting if our allies and vassals behaved normally instead of this following nonsense.

 

[Te'Ryn Tec]

They never said they were fixing this in Clarke. In fact, it is not on the list for Asimov either. If you read dev diary 33, it is included in Heinlein. This means that tentatively, MAYBE, if we are lucky, we will get something better at the end of the summer.

As a quick fix, I would accept them just turning this behavior off. That should not be hard to do and would not take major programming. Just ahe empires allied to the human player use the same wartime AI that they would if their alliance was completely composed of computer controlled empires. Most of the empires in the game are doing this. The game would be more interesting if our allies and vassals behaved normally instead of this following nonsense.

I assumed this mentioned in the Dev Diary #34 was related to this specific problem.

• Improvements and fixes to AI handling of its fleets.

*sigh* Guess not though.