We always seem to fight well trained and well armoured infantry with consistant accuracy at range. It’s fun but I was wondering if we could do a few ops where the enemies have little or no armour, and can’t shoot as well. This difficulty being offset by the fact that there are more of them in denser concentrations. I wish the AI behaved more like us, instead of firing accurately on us, they fired more bullets at our general area and manouvered.
I feel like we are overwhelmed because the enemy is just too accurate at long range and not because they have the sheer firepower to saturate the area with fire. Their spotting is far too accurate in areas where we can’t see shit, and as soon as you fire they immediately zero your position and start shooting you accurately, whereas after minutes of hearing cracks and being shot at we can’t find the enemy’s exact location and are deforesting the area with bullets.
There are considerations like lag for dense concentrations of infantry, but it seems more and more that we’re playing where’s wally whilst being shot at and expending ammo at every suspicious bush because a single enemy or element with overly extreme spacing is engaging us with pinpoint accuracy.
I don’t think a human is capable triangulating positions based on sounds with such accuracy whilst casually lying behind a bush.
Plus although better than vanilla it is still hard to suppress AI. Even though you are shooting at them, they will shoot back calmly and accurately, and shrug off stray bullets if they’re wearing armour. Filling the air with lead will be a more viable strategy on enemies with less armour.
We (well, not me) have been trying to lower the accuracy during this week (asr ai userconfig update), but it didn’t help much as evident on the thirsk op where Teddy got headshot-ed 300m away while casually running between trees without firing a single bullet. Bad luck? Eh, maybe, the AI didn’t seem that hard to me, though I noticed that a lot of our guys were simply crouching or lying down, cover-less, getting shot at. So maybe that’s part of the problem?
Honestly, I don’t think I died to the AI being overly accurate in the last month or so (well, except the bullshit single-bullet headshot over 600m), but that may be because I don’t poke my head out when I’m suppressed and virtually 100% of the time I spend stationary, I’m nearby hard cover or inside concealment.
(Not saying the AI is alright, it should be nerfed, hehe.)
[quote user_id=“13633351” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/13633351/avatar/medium.1434890353.jpeg” name=“Freghar”]We (well, not me) have been trying to lower the accuracy during this week (asr ai userconfig update), but it didn’t help much as evident on the thirsk op where Teddy got headshot-ed 300m away while casually running between trees without firing a single bullet. Bad luck? Eh, maybe, the AI didn’t seem that hard to me, though I noticed that a lot of our guys were simply crouching or lying down, cover-less, getting shot at. So maybe that’s part of the problem?
Honestly, I don’t think I died to the AI being overly accurate in the last month or so (well, except the bullshit single-bullet headshot over 600m), but that may be because I don’t poke my head out when I’m suppressed and virtually 100% of the time I spend stationary, I’m nearby hard cover or inside concealment.
(Not saying the AI is alright, it should be nerfed, hehe.)[/quote]
Not counting the times where I heroicly dashed forward, drowned in frigid water and bad internet, or entered a structurally compromised building, I was mostly killed through taking multiple well aimed successive bullets to the tip of my concealed little toe, the exposed area not in hard cover of which was the size of a tardigrade, The enemy zeroed in on it from hearing me shoot a burst and re-enter cover despite me not having a clue where the fuck they were and being shot at repeatedly, all I knew was they were a few hundred meters in front of me. At least that’s what It felt like.
Your feedback is very useful Price, but so far it’s only your feedback. It would help a lot if other members would chime in and write what exactly they don’t like with AI and would like to be changed. I see OP has 5 likes, (one of which is mine because I like the initiative you took) but those likes in general don’t tell us anything. One might partially agree with your post, one might just like some phrase you used, but it doesn’t tell us exactly what those members think about AI.
It would help a lot if instead of liking posts people would write a sentence or two about the topic at hand.
I’m highly biased here regarding AI because I’m the one who set it up. Depending on member’s feedback we’ll adjust the AI skills, we just need more than two opinions.
I think I’m with Price in that I would like to see that on some ops, but not all of them. It’d be nice to have a variety within the enemy forces, too (don’t know how feasible that is) to represent differing enemy make-ups, like we may start fighting their garrison forces and as we’ee mopping them up we get engaged by their regular or elite forces as a counter-attack.
Jeah i’m with Price, i get killed mostly from enemy’s i can’t see, i can hear there shots, take cover and wait. 10 Sec later i move and (Pew … Pew … Pew) (HIt… Hit,DOWN) i’m dead. I know it’s a lot in forest areas but the fact that they shoot 5 times more accurate standing, firing at a moving target true bushes, walls and trees, while i lay on the ground to give the perfect shoot only to get killed by the guy i hit 3 times (and he is still shooting at me) makes me feel a little bit helpless. I know AI will stay AI, but if i could at least kill them as fast as they kill me, this would be nice. The problem of enemy’s shooting true forest or grass (damn boys, i hate hills with grass) is well known and i can live with it. I wouldn’t mind to get shot at with high rate of fire instead of PEW… PEW… PEW - > DEAD…
To me it is always more interesting with more "Insurgent missions" Where we face overwhelming numbers of poorly or completly untrained oponents as it tends to require more teamwork and less induvidual skill.
I don’t want us to go soft though. We should still frequently face dangerous, well armed squads of professional soldiers. And when we do face insurgents, we face a whole lot of them.
I think you have to be very cautious of confirmation bias. We all have a tendency to remember situations that confirm our existing beliefs. For example I tend to look at examples of the AI being very accurate and being able to see through trees. Usually this is not the case and those situations can be explained by other factors. For example being hit during the Thirsk op it happened in the open (not obscured by trees) and the enemy were within 100m at least (usually nearer). When I saw a buddy get shot in the woods while we moved towards the large town I was less than 5m away hiding in a tree. The area was being suppressed and we were being attacked from the front and right by multiple enemy about 100m away. It took a lot of fire before he was hit and he was the only casualty from a group of 8. We managed to withdraw to better ground. I was hit later on in the open from about 200m but it was a position that had been taking fire for a while and was open with no tree cover.
I think the enemy AI is not that accurate from 300m+ and on almost all maps has difficulty spotting through tree cover. We tend to be very accurate at distance but just as bad at spotting enemies through tree cover. I think we get hit mainly because:
Quantity of fire: we are fighting larger numbers than we think and eventually we are unlucky. This is fine we have to expect lucky shots from the enemy.
We quickly move in the open trying to flank. We often try and flank by moving into the open into an area covered by the enemy and get shot. Flanking should happen when we have a good idea that the flanking route
is actually safe. Instead we should take cover and shoot back trying to suppress until we know where the enemy is more precisely.
We get sloppy. We pop up from behind the same piece of cover or the same point behind a ridge during a fire fight. This is a classic and we all do it. Often the terrain does not give you much choice and you are stuck behind a tree or rock with not much else near by. In this case we should all be more willing to drop smoke or ask our buddies to drop smoke near us so we can fall back to somewhere with better cover.
Given all this I am pretty happy with the AI. What I would like instead of fiddling with the AI skill levels in an endless loop is a slight change in how we play. Often the pace of an op seems slow and leaders feel pressure to push forward. However, this often leads to mass deaths as we push too fast into major opposition. If GMs and mission makers want players to move quickly it might be a good idea to give some intel during the mission that areas are clear or that opposition is light with only small patrols and sentries in an area. This might seem a bit cheaty to some but if players think there is a chance of a enemy squad with several machine guns in the next compound then you cannot blame them for moving slowly and carefully. This is the price of realism.
Forgot to actually answer Price’s question! I agree completely, it would be nice to have a less capable faction that can be used in large numbers. It might have to be made from scratch or some existing faction given less well equipped squads.
Their spotting skills however seem to be quite supernatural.[/quote]
Yeah I should be more clear… it’s the spotting that really bothers me, they get a really accurate berring on you from sounds or slight movement within seconds and fire dead on target as opposed to in suppression of a vague area where they know you are likely to be. You can break from this zeroing if you move off without being spotted and they will continue to aim at your last known location but they’re not very convincing, still quite terminator-like. I don’t want to make the missions overall easier, I just want the AI to appear more lifelike. Usually when they suppress us it’s because the gamemaster has taken control of a machine gunner to fire innacurately at our general area. Otherwise every shot will be on a specific target.
I’d like for the AI to shoot more, be less spaced out than they usually are and employ area denial tactics, or bounding retreats or advances where they shoot and move without any specific target in mind. I guess that’s an incredibly tall order though.
As far as i understand it, does ASR not hove different skills for different armies ? regular vs insurgent ? can we not try this out simply by making a mission with those AI’s ?
Why does the enemy need to be a fair challenge, because we need to win every time?
How about an enemy force big and powerfull enough to make us abort, retreat and damage-controll for once.
If the AI feels too difficult we should also adapt in addition to tweaking the AI.
Victories count for shit if every mission is built for that.
[quote user_id=“8030574” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/8030574/avatar/medium.1500627185.png” name=“Hateboarder”]Why does the enemy need to be a fair challenge, because we need to win every time?
How about an enemy force big and powerfull enough to make us abort, retreat and damage-controll for once.
If the AI feels too difficult we should also adapt in addition to tweaking the AI.
Victories count for shit if every mission is built for that.[/quote]
Tangentially related, but speaking of armour: I’d like to see a bit more use of less good armoured assets but used better, for both us and the enemy. Despite my criticisms I did enjoy the tank cutters mission, especially when I was ducking around the fire from the BTR.
The problem when we fight with and against HE auto-cannon equipped armour is that they often feel over powered. As an infantry man I fear the BMP-2 or 3 more than a tank. I also find that, while I very much enjoy playing as vehicle crew, being gunner on one of those or a Bradley ends up being like whack-a-mole. Now the BMP-1 (which has the 76mm gun) and tanks have that powerful main gun require more skill: you have significantly less ammo and so training rounds in is much less viable. It also means you panic when you miss, and the stress really takes away from the feelings of invulnerability.
Conversely you never feel safe in a BTR. I played as a gunner on one mission in one of those and, while the vehicle is terrible, it is really really good fun. Being penetrable by .50cal rounds means that even technicals are a threat and the main gun being the Soviet beast version of a .50cal (same calibre, but the cartridge is twice the length of the American Browning) means that you can often penetrate equivalent vehicles. Arma also appears to model where the rounds actually hit, too: in one case on that mission our vehicle was strafed by another BTR and only myself and the driver died. The commander could hop onto the gun and return fire before driving the stricken vehicle back to base to pick up the crew again. The fact they are wheeled rather than tracked also means that infantry safely ignored by tracked IFVs become a significant threat to your mobility and thus your survival.
TLDR: more armour that is less of a threat to us (that can be engaged with the LAWs) and us using less powerful vehicles more often would be nice (in my opinion). I do understand that our numbers don’t always allow it, but it is one of the aspects of the game I enjoy the most.
I do agree with Price in that it would be a good idea to have a few more missions with large numbers of poor quality enemies. I also agree with Hateborder in that in that it doesn’t always need to be a fair challange one way or the other. Personally I think we need a few missions where we have no chance as I think the one thing we are really bad at is correctly assesing a situation and choosing to withdraw and try something else.
We seem to keep banging our head against a brick wall and ‘push through’ so to speak. I think this is partly because we treat this simulation a bit too much like a game at times, by that I mean the whole "games are built to be won" way of thinking, rather than as a sim and thinking "uh, lets pull back and try something else". I think another reason is, as a leader it can be really tough to order a disengagement as you may think that the it’s the wrong call and be more boring for the players. As you fear making that wrong call you just keep doing what your doing, as at least something interesting is going on, even if it is a futile effort.
I think team and vehicle leads need to be more vocal about this, just to give squad leads some support and reinforce or challenge their views. I for example am never sure if I have made the right call as SL, and welcome and encourage feedback and ideas from others.
To get back on topic, one issue I have with what Price is saying, which is more an issue with the game that I am not knowledgable enough to comment on; is how much more can we lower the AI settings? Even on a real low setting they still seem to be very acccurate at times, although I agree with Teddy in that it can usually be caused by something else.
On last Fridays event when A1 was in the rocks just north of ‘Point Iron’, there was a single infantry contact about 400m in front of us. He fired single shots and hit me almost everytime I stuck my head up. Admittidley it took him several shots before he killed me kill but still, he was bloody accurate.
Maybe another way of balancing missions against higher quality enemies is to let us have 1x or 2x scopes. Even if it is only one guy in the team such as the AT guys (gives them something else to do, as FTLs & AARs have binoculars & AR has major firepower)? I know we have never used scopes because it makes things too easy, but if the enemy can hit us accuratly at that range would this even things out?
Christ that’s a lot of words! I hope it makes sense.
Ozzie, I don’t think I would ever classify a retreat as "boring" - you retreat when things are too exciting for you to handle, not the other way around.
Regarding AI precision - just wait for when I get to run my mission, I did change the difficulty to account for an insurgent-like faction, so that could give you another reference. If I get to run it, that is.
I know it’s not boring, but as a leader you also have to make sure your players are having fun, and retreating kind of goes against that mindset, even if that thought is irrational if you know what I mean.
Well I hope we play your mission soon, even if it is as a mini-op. Though I am liking my idea of high quality enemies and one guy per FT with a 1x or 2x scopes (I was thinking out loud by writing that but actually I think it could be interesting to at least try it).
Am I right in thinking that AI settings are just out of 10, e.g. 1/10 is a 10% accuracy. Hitting us 1 time out of 10 times is still pretty accurate IMHO, or does ASR AI allow us to change things in greater detail or have you come up with some magic of your own? I may be thinking of MCC as being out of 10 so that is irrelvant now.
