AI and Cloak

posted on May 8th, 2013, 8:59 pm

You know how in stock A2 (not sure about FO) when a ship cloaks that is at red alert it automatically gets lowered to yellow alert and you have to manually put it back to red alert or it will forever stay at yellow? Is there any setting that can be changed to make a ship stay at red alert even when cloaked? Would changing the weaponyellow or weaponred setting work?

The issue is that a fleet of 30 AI ships could be cloaked at your base but won't attack because they are at yellow alert from cloaking.

posted on May 8th, 2013, 10:17 pm

No, this is hardcoded in A2 - in Fleet Ops the craft AI will not change alert statuses during cloak

posted on May 9th, 2013, 12:11 am

Hardcoded. You always know the right word to soothe me Dominus. So I have to now remove cloaking from the game to make the AI compete properly. Fanfreakingtastic. What sucks is the AI uses it pretty well early to mid game sneaking about and showing up unexpectedly but late game it just cloaks every ship and just hangs out. I wonder what the trigger is to cause the change? It doesn't always behave this way though either.

I may have to check the very-aggrssive aip setting since its used in the endgame phase?

So if I use my mod in FO with the classic mod as a parent does my mod automatically exhibit the no alert/cloak change that FO has?

posted on May 9th, 2013, 12:18 am

yes, the alert level change on cloak has been completely removed in fleet operations.
i am not sure why the developers added it in the first place. we have found no scenario where this might be of any use.

posted on May 9th, 2013, 12:42 am

I assume it was intended so that a whole fleet of ships does not decloak to attack when one member is attacked - however, due to other problems with the ship AI, this does not work properly. And of course, it doesn't revert to red alert after decloaking...

posted on May 9th, 2013, 4:05 am

Thanks for the input. Guess it all works out since ultimately I'll be using my mod inside FO so that's good

posted on June 12th, 2013, 3:20 am

Just thought of something. In the gcloak.odf file in special weapons there is this: //Don't switch to attack mode upon cloaking
switchToAttack = 0

If changed to 1 would the AI cloak and immediately de-cloak to use other conventional weapons even if no other enemy is near? Has this ever been tested?

posted on June 12th, 2013, 3:38 am

SwitchToAttack just affects whether the craft switches to attack a target that it fires at with another special weapon. I.e. if you target a craft with a special weapon, the craft will not switch to attack it if switchToAttack = 0.