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Will there be a system for NPCs dropping their guns and surrendering if they are in a situation where they clearly cannot win? Surely they would value their lives, right?

TL;DRSurrender behavior has been worked on for Squadron 42 but needs more polish, and it isn't fully in Star Citizen yet, partly because AI there have infinite ammo and missions would need rebalancing.

Andrew DaviesLead, AI Feature Team

Yeah, this is something that we've already worked on for Squadron, definitely surrendering. We definitely need a bit more polish on all of the states that it's got for them. So civilians, people without weapons, should immediately run away and cower and hide. And then if they're a combatant and they run out of ammo, then they will first look for more ammo if there's any available. And after that, they should run away and hide until there's basically no combatants left in the current fight situation. And when that happens, then they can go into this surrender behavior, where you will either be able to do another stealth takedown or restrain them. One of the things is that we haven't actually got some of that flow in Star Citizen, because with the AI at the moment, you have infinite ammo. And the reason for that is because we've got the option to not have infinite ammo, but it does require rebalancing quite a lot of the missions to put in ammo crates so that they've got the right amount of ammo to be able to do that. But it's definitely something that's there.

The loadouts as well for the existing ones, so that's the process that we will go through, right? I think there's also the effect that obviously they will drop the weapons if they surrender, as, I'm not sure who asked the question, but what was mentioned. And basically, what they will also do is, if you let them stay there in surrender and you go far away enough, then they might also try to find back some guns and start fighting. So if there are enemies and you leave them just in the surrender state... You can restrain them, as you said. And then the other NPCs can also unrestrain them if they find them restrained, again, try to revive them. So this is all the flow that we do have, but you don't yet see all of that in Star Citizen per se. It's quite interesting to see when it's going to be there. You guys will enjoy it and will give us feedback.

Star Citizen Live›Ask the Devs - AI for U and I·
Published on this date.15 Dec 2023