In the spirit of the new mentioned AI potential smartness due to Aurora C# heralding in better performance, I figure it's a good idea to start this thread up. The specific purpose of this thread being where we suggest ideas for ships and tactics for the AI to employ, for Steve to check at his leisure.
Mainly since we're lacking any sort of centralized "ship-meta", due to multiplayer being difficult, and our current iteration of AI being somewhat legged by this.
For the sake of simplicity and meaningfulness of ideas, let's try to stick to already existing weapon systems, or ones confirmed for upcoming versions of Aurora.
I'll start off with a few ideas:
-NPRs feeling a value of "threatened" by certain types of weapons systems and strategies, based on damage taken, perceived amount fielded by their enemies (such as missiles in flight and tonnage of ships mounting it (mitigated/amplified based on AI's salvage findings)). This can allow NPRs to build fleets against things they think might threaten them at some point, and making a singular potent strategy difficult to maintain if engaged in an extended campaign against an AI.
-NPR Ship: Pinnace.
A small fighter or FAC sized craft that may mount some combination of active sensors, passive sensors, gravity sensors. Always mounts a jump drive, and the most efficient engine it can.
This ship's designed to explore jump points and scout ahead of their gravity survey ships, alerting the controlling NPR of any threats and allowing them the barest intel on said threats, and have enough fuel spaces in range to justify going so far.
These designs in general are meant to be rather cheap, and not to run with any other ships in unison.
-NPR Ship: Breacher.
Designed to be uncharacteristically tough military design (for it's tech level), due to it being large and packing substantial shields and armor for it's size. It could mount light weaponry (for it's size), designed to strategically counter whatever technology the NPR feels more threatened by when it encounters you, as well as a few sensors. Anti missile designs onboard if the NPR considers itself threatened by such.
The main purpose of this ship is to draw fire, to test the waters against enemy ships of unknown capability, to waste enemy ordnance, and to be part of the leading assault squadron pushing through a jump point.
In general movement, could either sit with the main task group, or move at a position ahead of the task group at threatened bearings, to provide long range active sensor contacts for them and to take fire from enemies who do not know that that is what the ship is built for yet.
-NPR Designs: Troop transport.
Encourage NPRs to mount some amount of size of troop transport on nearly all ships, as well as to run boarding craft on occasion.
The main thing this overarching strategy would encourage is to:
--Make boarding parties a lot less potent, going both ways. Knowledge about the game that NPRs run both boarding craft and troop transport to counter such will encourage players to include such in their design to prevent hostile boarding.
--Make troop training and combat rating tech a lot more important across the board, as players will look for ways to save tons and increase the efficacy of their ship-based boarding combat defense. More potency per battalion/company means more security against boarding.
This will also make ground combat more relevant all around, as all warships will have at least some minor amount of ground troop carrying capacity, ground combat becomes an option just by incidental availability.
NPR Designs: Missiles.
Basically, allow AI to use varying combinations of ECM, armor, and sensors in their missiles. Perhaps allow them to specialize against tactics/designs they feel threatened by. (area defense fire, saturation of gauss or similar beams, fleets of fighters, respectively, but other situations can call for different things as well.)