Meaning: they do utilize this "weapon" but only in circumstances where they should not be able to: Yoral destroyers and Human Battleships if I recall the later odd behaviour correctly (both without boarding module mind you
)So I was thinking what can reasonably done with this as it obviously provides a huge advantage to the player if we chose to use it ourselves:
1. The enemy will unlikely be countering it (not transferring troops to defend vessels or reserving PD against Shuttles)
2. Reverse engineering is a huge advantage a boarding player can have on research front
3. Integrating captured vessels is even a heavier blow on the AIs military capabilities as it not only looses a ship, but we gain that ship - there has been a discussion on this some time ago, and even DEVs admitted is is overpowered as is
So what could be done here without applying MS or Google machine learning?
1. Boarding module restricted to only Human faction. It fits them lore-wise perfectly and we can do away all the navigation and transfer AI issues that come with a close-range boarding module. Now AI would probably still not use them correctly in the end but is only one faction in many
2. Introduce a simple rule for tactical combat for shuttles as weapons:
- Always attack when enemy vessel is in range and shuttles would suffer maximum 40% during the attack (hopefully the AI can calculate this)
- Always select raiding option for assault shuttle attack except if enemy vessel crew is below 50% in which case use Boarding
3. Once AI has captured enemy ships, choose research if technologically less advanced then the player and integration if roughly equal
4. Each ship in the AI fleet should always reserve a single PD hard-point at the end of the turn, except if own HP is below 60%, or enemy ship can be destroyed with the reserved PD shot (this would also make them somewhat capable against player missile and torpedo heavy tactics)
)