Thoughts on a new aircraft A.i. Situation / Order (Ace Hunter)

So, before we start, lets all assume the snail could actually model a decent a.i. that works about 9/10 times.

Now with that outta the way, Here’s the idea. When playing your air matches, it slowly becomes monotonous. Shoot, rush, kill, die. the same spiel over and over. And we’ve all seen those players, with 8 kills in one match, basically wiping the floor with the enemy while leaving nothing for average players.

But what if the game actually reacted to your performance. Now by doing good in a match, the game starts to send out better and better a.i. aircraft to fight you. Over time slowly becoming harder and harder until you eventually die or are forced to retreat to the airfield.
(All a.i. start from the enemy side of the map, Heading straight to you if you’re spotted by Players or any enemy radar {Actually giving a use to ground based radar a.i.})

Here’s my example.

Spoiler

Your in the f16A and are fighting pure usa vs usa
First it’ll start off mediocre, 1 F4E phantoms with a2a loadouts. Decent enough a.i. to send out aim7’s and possibly notch as well. Any experienced f16 will wipe the floor with it.

After killing it, Next the game sends out 3 phantoms. Harder but not impossible.

Next is a higher difficulty f4S/J
It tries harder to bvr using PD and normal Radar. It’ll start Notching and flaring most missiles you send at it as well as start to use multipathing as well when it runs out of long range missiles.

Next is 3 f4S/J’s. Same thing.

Now, at this point most players will be out of missiles/fuel/ammo. After killing the last f4, you enter a 2 minute rest period to rearm. You can either Take off again, And try to kill more a.i. sent your way, Or J out and after a set amount of time, the game ends the Ace hunter situation. (This doesn’t stop you from respawning, only stops the game from sending a.i. hunters after you)
(Also, you can stop this after the very first plane sent against you is dead. Heading back to the airfield and J’ing out for lets say 2 minutes.)

If you choose to fly out again. You’ll start facing similar types of aircraft. F16’s are now being sent.
Again, Only 1 is sent. Being on par with good/great pilots. It tries to gain the altitude advantage, Notches/flares most missiles. Tries to get in the best position so that its missiles don’t get fooled by your flares/chaff. Solely focused on you.

And again, 3 are sent after you kill the first one.

Now is the last section of this order. You’ll face aircraft above your weight class. Your F16A’s now fight aircraft with an advantage against you. Things like f18C’s, f16C’s and f15C’s. ARH missiles, Flight performance, Max speed.

Now, the next match order is 1, 3, 5. 9 aircraft in total to defeat. All with an advantage against you. Only the best pilots survive.

So, you get the gist.
Your time will be spent against these a.i. when your doing great against your enemies.
But this doesn’t come benefits! This order has 3 specific reward sections!

With the First section after killing the 8 mediocre a.i. (F4’s) You’ll recieve an RP/SL reward of killing 1.5 Normal players in addition to the a.i. kills.

The second section after killing 8 Good a.i.'s. You’ll receive an RP/SL reward of 3 players as well as 1 daily crate. (The ones you usually get after playing a set amount of matches. Same rewards goes, So anywhere between 50% SL/RP Boosters to GE and 1mil SL.)

If you by chance defeat the third section, You’ll recieve a 500% booster for RP or SL, A reward of 4 players killed in RP/SL, and another daily crate.

TL;DR Wave defense of a.i. with pretty decent rewards if you make it through it all.

So, in addition, this is an order that can be activated after 5 minutes. Targeting the best player on the opposing team OR you can activate it on yourself.

(WIP) If the player is in a squad, The a.i. also increase in the order/situation based on how many are alive. so 2 squad is 2x the a.i. and so on. Every squad member gets their own rewards (Most likely change as 20vs4 is quite a bit.) (The A.i. also target squad members if they’re close

Players outside the squad that kill a.i. only receive the a.i. kill reward. A.i. might target outside player if said player is actively attacking that a.i.

Last for now. The match timer now extends with this order. A.i. killed in this order don’t degrade tickets. And If the enemy team is all gone when this order is activated, The friendly team can j out anytime they want or assist the player effected by this order/situation. (This is only for RB for now, But for arcade and sim, we could talk about its implementation there)

(Straight had this pop into my head like 20minutes ago and wanted to wright it down. But anyhow, Whats yalls thoughts on it? Is it to much? Think it should be its own game mode or stay as an addition to Air battles? Perhaps being toned down for the situation but staying the same for the order?) Sorry for the large block of text as well lol

Perhaps you do not remember . . …
image

1 Like

what?

A most formidable Ai/bot from the way back . . . .

Tetsuo was notorious for ruining a player’s day on a regular basis . . .

It was a badge of honour to say . . . “I beat Tetsuo”

1 Like

Oh dope. Learn something new every day. Never ran into the bot personally but sounds like someone who could be a miniboss these days lol

Honestly I think the core idea here has some real merit, the game really doesn’t do anything to respond to players who are dominating a match and giving skilled players an escalating challenge instead of just letting them steamroll or sealclub on-demand is a decent thought.

That said, I think the biggest hurdle isn’t even the AI quality (though that alone is a massive ask for Gaijin, it would perhaps be nice if something like AlphaDogfight was open-sourced and usable for game engines), it’s more that bolting a wave defense system onto a live PvP match creates a lot of weird friction for everyone else in the lobby with extended timers and random AI planes flying around that other players may or may not interact with.

The reward structure would also probably need to be way more conservative to have any chance of getting past Gaijin’s economy team. I do actually think this concept would work a lot better as its own standalone PvE mode (if it was implemented well at all that is… cough cough.) rather than something layered into Air RB… since then the escalation and the challenge wouldn’t mess with the flow of normal matches.

3 Likes

Fair fair. My main thought was basically like adding a hd2 modifier to a player to make it harder in the match. Having it in its own mode would be pretty dope but the snail has a habbit of half assing outside modes.

Along with normal RB just being terrible (As a game mode) on its own. thought having it as a order might make it decent lol.