Gijs-Jan

Sorry; no. They only thing that happens is that the aggressiveness turns up a bit once you approach. However, they don't "know" where you are.

Ok, to clear some things up: There is no magical, unblockable behavior for the AI. It plays, and follows the exact same rules the Xenonauts have. (The AI only asks the system to execute an action; not just "executes it") So an unblockable grenadier seems out of the question (or there's some very unlikely bug). The AI only throws grenades when multiple hits are possible; or when your units have a shield equipped. (the other case) Grenade throwing does work in squad sight; and most likely, if a unit has spotted your units; was killed, but your units didn't move afterwards; you will get 'naded by different units. (AI considers it a good "chance" to just toss a grenade at a potential group he has seen if no activity is seen coming from that location. As in; if the AI doesn't see you leave; it'll assume you are still at your location. Mikhail's above post is a good example) The explicit rule is that there should have been sight on at least one of your units (or squad sight). If the AI thinks you might be holing up with several units (think walls so it doesn't have LOS), then it might just take a chance and throw a grenade in there. The AI is quite reckless in collatoral damage; as long as it is in terms of property damage. Unless it provides a real benefit, it won't use AOE damage if this causes collatoral damage for friendlies or self.

It will be in the next build.

The AI uses the same accuracy and LOS calculations as the user; as in the exact same logic calls.

A bug is always an option; so send it my way the moment it happens again

This issue will probably be fixed in the next hotfix/patch. I uploaded a patch yesterday evening. It should also deal with the infamous "I-can-block-a-door-with-a-unit" bug. @Kabill On debugging: I saw in the save(s) you provided that you used the editor to setup several situations for the AI. I want to warn you that using the editor breaks the game in a lot of places. Especially tweaking the unit values will break a lot of AI effect calculations. This isn't a bug in the AI, but in the Editor in how it incorrectly sets values sometimes. One example is where you placed a unit with a modded high HP value next to the entrance. The Editor didn't adjust the maxHP correctly and set it internally to a negative value, this in turn resulted in the AI thinking that its effects would be positive for the Xenonaut, hence it not shooting. On the moving issue: There are as many opinions as there are people with regards to this. First it was a problem that AI units were crouched in defensive positions and wouldn't move, now it's that units in the UFO move too much. For this reason I've actually made it easy to disable that; just zero out the ProbabilisticSearch value in aiprops.xml. The problem is also that the AI is pretty sensible; it's not going to run into your shotgun equipped, high reaction skilled, Xenonauts waiting to gun it down. Anyway, I'll probably release a mod / patch at some point for more advanced players with an "Unleashed AI" which, among other things, also varies the values a bit more randomly in terms of aggression. Reapers use a planner for their logic; which is completely separate behavior and is primarily influenced by the pathing value variables; not the rest.

You need to view the combat scenario from the AI perspective; its units are spread out around the map and it has vision on most tiles. Previously this lead to almost omnipotence; as the AI could with some clever statistics just figure out where you were. However it can still easily deduce which tiles will probably be dangerous and not just blindly run into them. There is extra aggressivity the moment you approach to counter this; but the AI doesn't have perfect information on where you are located. So if you position yourself correctly you will be able to "outsmart" it. As it's not fun to have your units grenaded from the other side of a wall; this was removed & dumbed down. I'm almost positively sure that the situation you described where you were grenaded from the other wall cannot happen in the current build. The AI is severely hampered with regards to grenade behavior; and will only use a grenade on a single unit in a very specific situation. (I'll let you figure out which one) As for using grenades on groups; please keep in mind that the LOS is a bit wonky sometimes and if an errant AI unit spots your group from across the wall; or through Psionics; all bets are off and you will get a grenade to the face. As for the popping out / remaining hidden; the aggressivity varies severely per the race. Would you expect the AI then to just run towards you out in the open?

All the AI issues you mentioned (except for Reapers, if you let other AI units spot you) have been fixed for quite some while ago; and this is the first in quite some time that I've heard them mentioned again.

No problem; you've been a tremendous help to me so far.

Yes I have, but I cannot stress enough that the more saves provided; the better I can look into the issue. Primarily my time is spent now in setting up different missions to see how the balancing is affected in different situations. Preset missions I can quickly check cut that time down considerably.

Do you have the save of this?

So, apologies for not showing my face in this thread before. As you can imagine, we've been quite busy the past few days. After reading the thread, it looks like the issue was introduced somewhere around 1.0; We made a decision that Command units should stick to the command room, which can lead to odd behavior at times. This coupled with the new preference for upper floors could lead to some passivity. You can "solve" the sticking to command room by adjusting Decision::ChanceForExpansionFromGoalTiles for Command units in aiprops.xml. Together with upping the ProbabilisticSearch & ShotPotential, this should solve a lot of issues. I'm looking at the issue as well Hehe, yeah it is. Once things are settled down and I have some time to burn, I might make an AI mod aimed at above-insane players.

Uploading a save is the best way you can help me, speeding up the process immensely. So if you can, please upload it

I'm actually looking at the problem. Most of the problem can be fixed with the weights in ai props.xml. Did this behavior pop up in the latest builds, because I haven't seen it mentioned that much before it. Also, if you have any saves, please post them.

The psionics were enabled as a global within-range for some abilities. (Dread / Fear I think; MC is still LOS) As for the rest, it's not cheating. However, distance will trigger some aggressiveness. So what might be happening is that either there are some LOS bugs in the UFO, or the distance just triggers the aggressiveness which makes them more likely to pop out. They will not know where your units are located though. Sapare mostly described the correct behavior; if it was cheating then you wouldn't be able to catch it out in the open either..

Reapers should opt not to attack when they have enough TU. So the "running up and turning around" behavior is most definitely a bug. You could help me a lot by posting some saves where you see this behavior occuring.

That's quit disconcerting. I'll have a look then at their behavior to see what's going wrong.

To change the behavior of the civilian / local forces AI is trivial as there are not restrictions on how it operates as compared to the alien AI. The only change required is to alter the incentive set in aiprops.xml; changing those values will be more than enough. If you guys ever reach a consensus on this I'll look into it myself. :-)

Not a doctorate (not yet anyway) and thanks! But its good that people are critical; especially when we "cut corners"!

This was fixed earlier, and pathfinding does take turning into account. However due to the fact that game has a variable cost (doors, grass, walls, etc) for movement, along with discontinued paths (teleport etc), A* tends to run non-optimally in terms of time with naive estimation functions. (I probably wouldn't have opted for A* to begin with.) This shouldn't be a problem for human players, as the perceived time to create a path is still in the milliseconds range. However, for the AI this proved disastrous. Therefore, some optimizations were made in the cost & estimation function which more optimistically estimate the path, making A* run more performant; but which sometimes result in non-optimal paths. The regression happened because these optimization probably snuck into the human player path calculations as well. Tl;dr: Regression of the fix, should be easily fixed. Thanks for reporting and I will fix it, but to be honest I didn't think anyone would notice as the pathing deviance isn't as bad as before the fix. ;-)

Haha, sure thing

Could you upload the save? Then I'll take a look at it straight away.

This doesn't hang for me locally in the development environment, so this is presumably fixed in the next version.

I did not program in any restrictions on Reaper behavior towards local forces or civilians, but a bug can always happen. However, I have not heard the complaint yet on the forums and have heard several times that maps with civilians tend to be pretty hard with Reapers. (Because they infect everyone) Two things that might be happening: - Zombies turn to fully fledged Reapers in a couple of turns; so the Reapers may just have turned someone and you didn't notice. - The civilians and Reapers spawn randomly, so it might be that they are just too far apart before Reapers find your soldiers (and prioritize them). Anyway, if you have a save game of it happening; I'll take a look!

Could you detail on this or do you have a save? Because it sounds truly bizarre.