There's times I would want it, and times I wouldn't want it. I think it's only practical if there is some sort of toggle. I don't want to tell my sniper to shoot and have him decide to dive into cover instead.
Is it possible to make it so it will only activate if the unit hasn't received in order in say, 10 seconds? Would fix the the silliness of missing a squad and having them stand in the open being mowed down. I see it more as a useful crutch for lack of fine tuned player control, in situations where it isn't needed. The leapfrogging on move orders is a useful and pretty cool feature, that would be completely unreasonable to expect a player to do. Just need to balance it out in a way that doesn't interfere with orders. I would love something like ctrl+click as an order with different movement mechanics.
Squad-AI is modular.
For each of the following cases, the squad uses a different AI file:
- Attacking
- Being attacked while idle
- Being hit by a grenade/flamers
- Being pinned
Moreover, different squads can entirely different AI files.
Moreover, you can further break down squad-AI reactions to formation elements (left flank, right flank, core element and scout element). According to Lugie, you can also finetune it for support weapons (e.g., bazookas, piats, etc).
So yeah; if squad-AI were to be reintroduced, precision stuff (e.g., snipers) should be doing exactly what they are told; bazookas should fire instantly on the target the moment you tell them to.
To be honest the amount of improvement that units actually standing behind the fucking cover they're meant to fucking stand behind™ had brought to CoH2 since it was altered has improved gameplay responsiveness and importance of cover tremendously unfortunately at an expense of aesthetics.
Is there any way we can strike a nice balance between the two, and just re-introduce a small measure of squad AI?
Currently, there's only two squad-ai files left in the game:
- Dumb AI, that does nothing (live version)
- Squad AI that forces members to seek cover, if they aren't behind cover already (you can preview it at the Revamp mod, currently)
The kind of AI that remains is the pre-change Guards AI that was causing guards to dance a bit on-right click, if they weren't behind cover. Guards AI worked fine if the squad was already behind cover. That way, if you properly microed your squad behind cover before opening fire, you wouldn't get any reaction penalties.
The reason why Guards AI was bad however, was because Guards were the only squad singled out to suffer from it. Every other squad could a-move with their LMGs and ignore this out-of-cover reaction penalty. Around the same time when shitty-PTRS Guards would be forced to dance before most engagements we had:
- Super-lethal light vehicles, that needed to be killed, or would kill you
- Unrealistic expectations from the Volks-schreck blob that was annihilating tanks with two-volleys
Also, the fact that you could completely circumvent the dance by pressing 'Stop', which creates an enormous performance gap for those that know-the-trick and those that don't. Then it becomes a question of: how are you supposed to use your dancing squad to fight vs terminator robots on the other side? The easy answer is remove squad-AI (but that spawns other issues). The better answer is fix squad-ai and plug the gaps that allow people to skip performance loss when caught, e.g., out of cover.
While it might sound like a great idea to allow squads to engage targets instantly at all times, it really is not. This line of reasoning is in-line with upping repair speeds, so that there's less downtime for tanks, or adding Forward Retreat Points everywhere, so that there's less downtime for infantry to get back on the game.
The only thing that's bad is those squads jumping out of cover and getting murdered/suppressed/etc; but that can be fixed.
Schreck blobs could have been a completely different story if the guys were forced to seek cover before firing their Schrecks (still wouldn't beat bad design, but they would be way more bearable).
Without Relic's involvement, it's an all or nothing; we either use dumb AI or the silly guards-troops-AI. With minimum involvement from Relic, however (e.g., "We have prepared a few squad-ai files; could you upload them to your game so that we can test them?"), we can do a whole lot more.
For instance, we can do funky stuff, e.g., requiring that only elite squads are allowed to have instant reactions and make non-elite squads waste their initiative if they were not behind cover. We can make it so that support weapons can fire some potshots before hitting cover, or we can do the inverse to punish A-moving upgraded squads.
The reason people hated squad AI in CoH2 was because it was built with the wrong goals in mind. A good squad-Ai should last long enough (e.g., CoH1 had something like 30-second plans), and avoid completely taking over the squad at the beginning of the engagement (especially for close-combat squads).
CoH2 squad AI did the exact opposite of that; made those penalties apply only to specific forgotten squads (e.g., Guards/Captain/Shocks) and, of course people asked for it to get removed.
I believe there is a prioritization that can be made for types of cover at least. It could be made so squads only seek green cover or avoid red cover by ai, but not for yellow or open cover.
I'll have to wait til the weekend to test this ai anyway, let alone see what could be done with it.
FYI you can access the contents of squadAI files using the archive viewer on the Data archive of the live game. You will see that most plans have been neutered to be identical and contain almost nothing.
You can use whichever plan with whichever situation you want (e.g., nothing prevents you from using an attack file as an idle plan, except that your troops will probably not behave the way you want them to.
Lugie knows how to extract data from CoH1 using Corsix. If Relic would allow us to, we could pick battle pans from CoH1 and adapt them for CoH2 (e.g., to avoid unnecessary jumping-out-of-cover).
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