harpy eagle wrote:I actually just got some ideas for how this might be done, to help the AI to keep it's ships together. It kind of relies on the AI's ships already being in a good formation to begin with though.
As you mull this over, it might be worth knowing that, at a low-level, the "game rules" do allow ships moving as part of the same tactical order to have non-symmetric destinations. More exactly, when the player does a multi-ship move, they're creating a command that says something like:
Code: Select all
order.move_ships {ship1,x1,y1,r, ship2, x2, y2, r, ship3, x3, y3, r }
Where all xi,yi are chosen in a way that preserves the relative distances between the three ships. But, technically, as long as each target xi,yi,ri destination is a legal destination for the associated ship, you can do a multiple ship move with any arguments, and the engine will accept this as 'legal'. In other words, it's possible to do a "formation move" in which the ships involved aren't actually moving in formation.
Years ago, I had plans to use this feature with an advanced tactical AI script, on the theory that it would let the AI take relatively good advantage of mutual point defense during moves without otherwise complicating the logic. Needless to say, I've yet to get around to implementing that plan, and there are various reasons why exploiting this feature in an ai script could prove to be hard and/or unwise. But... the capability is there, at least in theory.
