We already know that various AI fighter pilots will have varying expertise levels, but how will this work with capital ships? For example, how exactly will a Navy Idris crew compare to a pirate crew or a Xenothreat crew in the future, as opposed to how they do today?
TL;DRCrew skill will affect capital ship handling and gunnery: the helmsman's piloting skill affects turns, military crews are expected to be more disciplined than pirates, and captain traits like indecisiveness could delay orders.
Sure. So yeah, we incorporated the skill levels and the expertise levels that you've mentioned. So the helmsman of a capital ship, they would take their piloting skill across, and it'll be impacting their turn circles, like broadsiding or coming up to maneuver in a battle, as well as rolling. So if they're getting pelted on the underbelly, they would be reactive enough with their piloting skill to tilt their turrets to take full capitalization on that. But also, as you say, from a Navy and a pirate faction, you could go, oh, right, one's military trained, one isn't. And therefore, maybe their turret gunners have better trigger discipline on the military side. They'll know when to shoot and work as a unit. Go, okay, starboard side are going to focus this thing here, all turrets on that. Whereas a pirate fleet, they'll just be all gung-ho: oh, there's a guy over there, there's a guy over there. And they won't work together, just go for maximum kaboom, for a little personal gain and glory. But then, as I've hinted on before with the trait system, we would apply that to the captain role, for example, but you could have a captain who's indecisive, like a negative trait, and it would take him longer to give an order to the crew because he wasn't sure what to do in this situation. So the turret gunners would be waiting to fire on a higher priority target, for example.
It's an interesting challenge that exists in AI for all games. It's the difference between making an AI that is just S tier and always hits their targets and always knows when to shoot and when not, and it's just this perfect Terminator killing machine, and then wanting to have AI that are, for lack of a better term, me, and just bad and terrible and don't really know what they're doing in a game.
Exactly. It's like sometimes perfect AI isn't fun AI, and it's that balance, of course, when trying to get the best experience.