IMPORTANT - Objective/Survival priority factor.

[laggy 0]

There is one aspect of the AI behaviour that I and many other mission designers have longed for since OFP.

To explain the idea, let's call it objective/survival priority factor.

What I mean is that in real life the military leaders (and the people involved with the operations) are aware of an undeniable fact:

To achieve important goals AND save lives in a greater perspective, you sometimes have to accomplish certain objectives no matter what. Even with great numbers of casualties.

Example 1 - A convoy transporting wounded out of a hot-zone. They would never stop or get out of their vehicles to engage the enemy. They would haul ass out of there, if they were attacked.

Example 2 - The Omaha beach assault on D-day. Those soldiers knew that their survival depended on getting past the MGs and shellings. The worst thing they could do was to stay in the line of fire.

What would seem natural for soldiers to do in those situations, is not possible to achieve with the AI in ArmAII to my knowledge. I wish that BIS would look at some kind of way to solve it. I know that many share my view, and a solution to this problem would make the warfare simulation much more realistic and unpredictable.

"Man those guys just won't give up, why is this hill is so important to them?"

- Who knows? The enemy's agenda on a grand scale becomes very relevant.

A simple factor, objective/survival (90/10, 50/50 or 10/90) depending on the situation would implement something important in this great game. A simple waypoint could have this priority factor set. Right now it seems like the AI always treats every situation like a battle that has to be fought and won on the spot, and always with the same priority, which is not always true in reality.

Thoughts?

Laggy

[madrussian 347]

Great insight here Laggy!

The AI in the OFP/ArmA series seem to have NO mechinism to tune up their desire to survive. I hope BIS implements a solution to make this a reality beyond simple increase of the "fleeing" variable.

edit:

Or at least there only currently exist very complication script-heavy solutions for this. A simply objective/survival priority factor as you are advocating is definately the way to go.

Edited August 3, 2009 by MadRussian

[dmarkwick 261]

I think this lies in the realm of the FSM. I wish BIS would release whatever FSM editor they use for common usage :)

[laggy 0]

I think this lies in the realm of the FSM. I wish BIS would release whatever FSM editor they use for common usage :)

True, but instead of having to create advanced FSM scripts (weird, difficult stuff) a simple priority factor would solve 95% of (our specific) mission editing woes.

[nomdeplume 0]

Anyone have any insights into how the Warfare commander AI works? Prior to Arma 2 I would've said there's no possibility for this kind of objective-based strategising, since it's not a RTS. Warfare does change that a bit.

Most of this kind of thing seems to be up to the mission creator to do though. It would be nice to have a way to do it more easily than with a lot of scripting. In some situations you can use "guarded by" triggers and "guard" waypoints to do something similar to this.

What you're talking about -- "why is this hill so important to them?" -- I suspect goes beyond what could be done purely in the AI. You can define locations in the mission editor though and perhaps a priority system could be integrated with that. I can't really visualise how this would work in reality though - either the AI sends everything it's got after the highest priority location(s), or it splits its forces between them. The former sounds stupid, and the latter doesn't sound like anything that can't be accomplished via the normal methods.

I suppose you could set a high-priority location that the AI engages first, and if it finds the resistance too tough retreats its units and sends reinforcements (taken from other lower-priority locations). Maybe an extension of the 'guarded by' trigger that allows the game to have multiple groups trying to "guard" it simultaneously?

What I'd love would be to be able to jump into the mission editor, give the AI a bunch of units and tell it "defend this location" (i.e. its base) and "attack this location" (i.e. your base) and then start it and have it figure out the strategy for doing so. Sending out recon to ascertain the enemy strength and disposition, intelligently placing units around its base for defence, and making intelligent attacks with appropriate amounts and types of firepower. That'd be awesome.

I don't think such a strategic layer exists though - does Warfare actually take into account the type of resistance expected or just assign tasks randomly?