Has the AI improved in 1.2?
 

I know AI improvements was removed from the list but 1.2 has demonstrated some unlisted fixes (type B now available for instance).
I have removed AI mods and i am testing it , so far the aircraft appear to be the same - i am not sure that is much of an issue as i have been attacked later in the campaign by aircraft in stock.
The DDs i am not so sure about, the escorts in the convoys i have attacked so far have reacted to my presence, i think this was set off by a torpedoing as it was at disatnce and my scope was only up for 30 secs max.
They headed in the right direction based on where i hit the side of the ship, i had headed off in the other direction and they didnt find me but they behaved as expected.
I have also seen destroyers race to a sinking from the nearest port, it took them 2 hrs to get there but they did come.
Has anyone else notices an improvement in any behaviour?

I don't know if this counts, but post #70 in this thread sounded very promising about enemy sub behavior:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...=169641&page=5

:salute:

When i made the first attack in the new career they actually went looking for me, and came rather close, but were unable to detect me. In the first career as far as i remember they were mostly hanging around instead of looking.. I did manage to get a cheap torpedo into one of the escorts and sink it, which made the other one stay around and look for a while until giving up. To me it does seem improved, but i will have to engage more merchants with destroyers too see for sure.

No changes were made in 1.2 in the scripts folder to any of the files that affect AI.

Does that mean that AI has not been tinkered with at another level?

Nope, they may have a another level of coding there they could have changed. In regards to the scripts we see, nothing has changed.

I suspect very little has been done to improve much on core gameplay features. From what I recall, all the chatter about this game when it was first announced revolved largely around fancy eye-candy. Too much emphasis is placed on graphics at huge expense of evolving and greatly improving on gameplay :(

That has unfortunately been a long term trend. I remember that I first stated that about 7-8 years back. It is simply that eye-candy is easily discernible, and attractive to one who walks by the shelf and looks at the boxes of games lined up. Only few people are capable and have the experience with series of similar games to judge how well a particular title is modeled, realistic, historic or much effort was put in the AI. Particularly the latter has attracted less and less development time/funds in the past decade since multiplayer has become a feasible alternative that can serve as an easy excuse to avoid investing heavily into something that people only see after they bought the thing. I guess it just adds little to the sales potential for "casual customers", but is quite challenging to program well.

The problem is, 8 - 15 years ago, graphics weren't good enough to tempt customers to buy the product, so excellent gameplay had to be developed to create a good game. Now they're capable of creating visually impressive games, they seem to leave out the real substance (like good AI) - why can't we have the best of both worlds!!!

So I guess still no one observed or participated in an exciting wolfpack battle, or even just a single sub attacking a convoy above or below the surface?

I've seen that before, but it wasn't a coordinated exciting thing, just ships on fire and escorts trying to find the other sub. No communications or anything like that. You cannot interact with other subs.

Anyway, that's not generally what people mean when they say "has the AI improved?" Usually they mean, "Will I still be able to attack with absolutely no risk at all?" Currently early war escorts are so trivial a threat as to be ignorable.

Unforuntely the answer sometimes is "Here's a mod that will kill you before you can even attack". :O: It's extremely difficult to find "scaling and challenging and rewarding" gameplay without going into "you will die without any hope of success".

And to head off the inevitable "they're supposed to be ineffective, early in the war"... yes, some historical truth to that. But this is still a game that needs to be fun and challenging for the player, at any point in the war (IMO). Half the fun of a sub sim is the feeling of risk in making an attack, and the challenge of a successful evasion. This is one area where I don't care that much about historical realism.

Yep, that's one reason I prefer RFP over TMO as a supermod when playing SH4, although I respect what Ducimus is aiming for with TMO.

I think part of the problem is the way some mods artificially enhance the ability of escorts to detect your sub, as a substitute for making their behavior "smarter" with things like coordination between DD's in running search patterns, etc. There are tactical aspects of ASW like that, which rely on sensors but it's not only about the detection power of the hydrophones. As I understand it, the tactical smarts for the AI can only be done by the game devs at a deeper level of code, whereas it's easier to tweak sensor stats for detection. And then you get those superpowered DD's that will spot you from their normal guard positions in a convoy, even when you're lining up the perfect stealth attack.

There's a bunch of unused AI files in the game already. Think we just need to figure out how those work properly.

I guess my assumptions were wrong then. I just got lucky and found a destroyed with ANY A.I =P