Reduce Accuracy of Novice AAA

[PatrickAWlson]

Awhile back novice AAA was just about where it should be.  Sometimes it hit.  Usually it did not.  A subsequent patch "fixed" this and now novice level AAA would make Carlos Hathcock proud.  OK, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but a very fair characterization is that Novice today is much like what I would expect from Veteran.  They hit early and often.  

 

The problem is that this does not allow a realistic representation of AAA.  AAA was more about putting bullets in the air than having a bunch of Annie Oakleys manning the guns.  Novice really should shoot something like Novice.  Having that opens up more possibilities for mission makes to enhance the feel of a mission - specifically, seeing lots of AAA in the air as you go in for the attack without guaranteed murderous consequences.  If I want Annie behind the gun then I'll set the AI level to Ace.

 

[Gambit21]

This is bad news - novice AA was just right before...equivalent to a real world “ace”. Meaning it usually misssed.

 

If what you say is true then they went the wrong direction. The higher settings needed to be dialed down.

[PatrickAWlson]

I'm pretty convinced that it is true. 

 

The following is speculation on my part, so take it however many grains of salt you wish:

I don't know but suspect that the AAA AI is very much tied in the code to aerial gunner AI.  What I further suspect is that those AI modules are tied to pilot gunnery AI in some ways.  I know they improved the pilot gunnery, which was probably necessary.  What I suspect is that they made the gunner and AAA AI better in the process.  

 

It's a fairly easy outcome to achieve.  People might wonder how AAA gunnery could possibly be tied to pilot gunnery.  Simple.  Larger code concepts are always built on smaller building blocks.  If an aspect of gunnery is calculating lead: target speed, distance, angle, etc., and that is encapsulated in a module, and that module is used by all forms of gunnery, then it becomes entirely possible to improve airborne gunner and AAA accuracy right along with AI pilot accuracy.

 

One challenging thing about this kind of code, and I face the same situation to some extent in PWCG, is that it MUST NOT be completely deterministic.  It must not do things the best way possible.  The AI must not always hit and must not always make the best decision behind the stick ... you get the idea.  It must do things in the fuzzy, squishy realm of "believable".  So faced with a need to improve AI gunnery to the point where AI pilot accuracy was believable, they may have nudged AAA gunners (and IMHO aerial gunners as well)  into the realm of "unbelievable".

 

Ok, so that was complete speculation on my part, but after writing code for 30+ years I can usually envision how decent code should look and, when faced with an undesirable outcome, at least start with a reasonable hypothesis on the reason for that undesirable outcome.  Or I'm completely wrong and they made AAA better because they really wanted to do it  

[AEthelraedUnraed]

4 hours ago, PatrickAWlson said:

The following is speculation on my part, so take it however many grains of salt you wish:

I don't know but suspect that the AAA AI is very much tied in the code to aerial gunner AI.  What I further suspect is that those AI modules are tied to pilot gunnery AI in some ways.  I know they improved the pilot gunnery, which was probably necessary.  What I suspect is that they made the gunner and AAA AI better in the process. 

I suspect you're right about all your suspicions.

 

There's more of the pilot code that I suspect is shared with the gunners. For example, gunners don't engage enemies if the waypoint priority is set to high. For pilots, this makes absolute sense. For gunners not so much.

 

With all the AI improvements of the past year or so, I do hope they'll focus on non-pilot gunner AI at some point.

[unreasonable]

12 hours ago, PatrickAWlson said:

Awhile back novice AAA was just about where it should be.  Sometimes it hit.  Usually it did not.  A subsequent patch "fixed" this and now novice level AAA would make Carlos Hathcock proud. 

 

 

What guns are you talking about? Which fix was that?

 

I can only see 78. Aiming tables for several AA guns have been corrected;  from May2020 and:

 

86. AI-controlled ground based guns and MGs aim better in heavy wind weather conditions;

87. 76mm and 77mm AAA of World War I era aim better;

from April 2020.

 

I reran one of my Airfield attack missions recently (8*20mm LAA on normal vs 46*P47s) to see if anything dramatic had changed. I would really need to do several runs to be sure, but after a couple or runs, the numbers of planes hit looked in the same range as version 4.002  

 

One thing I did notice in another test is that gunners now allow for wind drift when firing: they used to ignore it. 

 

The one thing I have noticed is that since I did all my airfield AA tests, the reaction time of the guns to planes entering their attack area has been randomised: which makes testing the DM with a specific shell at a specific range far more difficult. 

 

 

[PatrickAWlson]

19 hours ago, unreasonable said:

 

What guns are you talking about? Which fix was that?

 

 

It wasn't an AA guns fix that I was referring to.  It was pilot gunnery accuracy improvements.

[unreasonable]

OK - but there are no significant effects on normal gunners, at least in my test. (I never tested novice). 

 

Rerunning my P47 vs Flak 38 version of the airfield test ten times I get the proportion of planes hit to be the same to the nearest whole percent as for version 4.003b

 

(Although the changes in DM since then have had a significant effect: hit P47s are less likely to stream fuel, oil etc. so losses are lower, which I think is an improvement.) 

Edited May 15, 2021 by unreasonable