As a (yet another) follow-up of Difficulty/AI Skill settings proposal (also, REF:AI Configuration Analysis & this) I've decided to start a new thread dedicated not to what the AI can and can't do, but to how you, as a player, mission designer or modder can directly affect the AI's behavior.
The initial goal is to:
DEFINE
Together with slightly improved documentation of AI Sub-skills, setSkill command and under-improvement CfgAISkill & page about precision(skill)Friendly(Enemy) (currently incomplete info here, more info here) we'd like to consolidate the configuration of AI on all levels. For that purpose, we've divided the issue into 2 main branches. Global and Per-unit configuration.
Please, take a look at the documentation and let us know what you think about the current status, about current options how to configure the AI and also feel free to ask about anything you'd like to know and you feel is missing in the documentation!
PROVIDE
We'll hopefully get a chance to improve both "branches" soon or later, but our first focus is on the global settings; i.e. player more meaningful control over the difficulty of the AI in Game Options/Difficulty, defined in your .Arma3Profile.
One option is to get rid of it completely and leave the decision about how dangerous the AI is going to be purely on the mission designer. #noFlameIntended
The other option is to provide limited amount of, let's say 3, hard-set global AI skill presets - carefully tuned by us (with an assistance of your feedback) - that would give a consistent experience and would also let you know what you can expect from a MP session that uses one of such presets. (showing this parameter in server info is intended)
For your convenience there still could be one more (advanced) option - a custom preset where you could set, for example, the Skill & Precision of AI to any value. We wouldn't take responsibility for that ;). That would allow you to adjust the AI if you didn't like the presets defined by us, it would allow you to test the effects of those two multipliers on the run or drastically change the mission experience without touching the individual AI units' skills inside it. (More about how they work to be found here)
That would also come with separating the AI skill settings completely from the other "difficulty" settings, that serve mainly the purpose of "helpers" (HUD elements...).
ENABLE
In future, we'll take a look at how we can give mission makers more options for setting units in, for example, the mission editor; for now, we're focus now purely on those global settings: how would you like to adjust the AI globally?
I know it's interconnected with per-unit skill settings, but let's say we can - just for a moment - forget about that ;)