Quote:
Originally Posted by gap
I won't try again today, in fear to derail kapuhy's thread  |
I won't mind, and neither will my best 4 legged friend
Quote:
Originally Posted by gap
Talking about airships and details that no one will see, this is my unfinished Zeppelin II (only the gondola plus texture stuff missing):
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...and that's a lovely Zeppelin
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So, I did some more tests and messed with various parameters this week, and I have some progress with the flank speed bombing issue. Namely, I tried ordering AI to Strafe instead of SetCourseBombs for last phase of the attack, and results were encouraging.
Out of 8 different planes I tested with this setting:
- 3 managed to kill U-boat sailing at flank speed
- 1 dropped bombs but missed
- 2 killed both U-boat and themselves (one by kamikazing and other by getting blown up by its own bomb)
- 2 crashed into sea while trying to attack
The same 8 planes with standard TWoS AI:
- 6 went into endless loop like in my video
- 2 (level bombers) dropped bombs but missed
So, as far as lethality of attack goes, not bad: from 0/8 to 5/8 succesful and from 2/8 to 6/8 overall bomb attacks.
There are serious drawbacks though: told to strafe, planes behave differently. Instead of making a pass, flying away and returning for another attack, they keep very close to U-boat making narrow circles around it, while blazing away with turrets. This makes for very dramatic action if you choose to man AA guns and duke it out, but unfortunately also makes plane lose speed quickly. This is the cause of frequent crashes in tests described above - esentially, either the plane will drop bombs (and then fly away since it has no bombs left) in first several circles, or it will lose all speed and crash into ocean.
There's a "Avoid impact with water" routine in AI scripts, but it doesn't seem very effective. We'll have to find another way to make AI pilots call off the attack if their speed/altitude drops too low. Perhaps it is here that drag values will make some difference (because for atandard AI they made none, I tried setting even extreme values to no avail, still no bombs were dropped).
Another drawback is very frequent altitude changes during strafing - with fast planes it's even kinda cool (and makes hitting them with AA difficult) but with slower ones it just looks dumb. Like drunk pilot kinda dumb.
Yet another drawback - distinction between level bombers and dive bombers seem to be a part of SetCourseBombs command, because replacing SetCourseBombs with Strafe makes all aircraft, no matter their classification, behave in the same way.
Since it seems possible to make AI check target speed as well as depth, I think now that best approach would be to create two bombing "strategies" - one, for slow/stationary targets, will be esentially unchanged IRAI approach, and second, for fast targets, will involve changing to strafing behaviour on last leg of attack, to allow for dropping bombs while minimizing time spent on sucidally narow turns.