AI Engineer Priority Setting

[Gideon Alexander III]

It would be nice to have a way to instruct an AI Engineer to prioritize at least one specific part or area of the ship, as opposed to them randomly charging all over.
Being able to have them, say, sit by the balloon and rear engine of a Goldfish while a player engineer focus on the hull and side engines would prevent a lot wasted running, and help a bit when your second engineer drops out mid-fight.

[Moo]

Yes... But might that make the AIs "too good"?

The idea I had was for crew, or perhaps only captain, being able to press something while in repair range of whatever, and it'd toggle whether AIs would try to repair that part/man that gun. That way you could basically assign them to certain things and the humans to others.
By having it captain-only, it would mean it couldn't be changed in the heat of battle to get some bonus from the never-pausing AIs, but would allow the captain to improve the usefulness of them before the fighting begins.

[Skrimskraw]

maybe do it with a limitation.
example: on  a pyra the gunners sometimes uses the side guns even though the enemies are in front of you.

also i get it since ai engineers especially on goldfishes have a tendency to rebuild a hull after 1-2 seconds. is pretty damn good, so tricking them to go for engines instead of hull works well, but if they can camp a hull, that would be insane.

for this to work, the ai speed buff needs to be removed.

[HamsterIV]

I see the AI as a crutch we have to lean on when there are not enough players present. They should always be less effective than all but the most trollish/newbish human players. That said if Muse wanted to make the AI more effective I would like to see some sort of AI prioritization UI for each ship. Where you can assign a component a value 0-9 as to its repair/manning priority for the AI. Each ship could have four different manning priority modes corresponding to F5-F8 with custom names for each mode. This could also facilitate non voice captain communication as the custom text could appear at the top of each human player's screen much like the "As you were", "Attack", and "Repair" text currently sit.

[Skrimskraw]

dragon age 1 had a good way of setting up your team for combat, complicated but it worked.

you'd set priorities for each character, and how to react to situations.

Example in goio would be, hull is at 75% armor, the engineer will keep gunning, when the hull drops to 50% the engineer will start repairing.