Do you like the new head-on attack behavior?

[KodiakJac]

A while back a change was made in the AI to almost always make a head-on attack against an enemy fighter rather than any kind of merge maneuver to gain a position of advantage on an adversary like it used to do.  Do you like this new head-on attack behavior?

[Aapje]

I would like more variety in behavior.

[Hook_Echo]

It's one of those things that needs to be more complex. It shouldn't happen every time. The lower ranked AI should be more scared. Planes with heavy firepower should do it more often than others. AI should get scared and run away too. I doubt we'll get any changes. I'd rather have it than not if it's one or the other.

 

It's easy to beat the head on attack anyway. At the moment they open fire just dip down and they won't hit you.

 

I've tweaked the AI gunnery mod to make the ace pilots as aggressive and accurate as possible, just as a training aid to teach me never to let a plane get behind me, because they will pilot kill snipe me the way I have it set up.

[KodiakJac]

5 hours ago, Aapje said:

I would like more variety in behavior.

 

Agreed.  Something like 20% head-on attacks would add more variety.  But 1C changed it from almost no head-on attacks to almost always a head-on attack, and that is unrealistic. 

[Stonehouse]

@KodiakJac No idea whether you use mods or not, but I wondered if you had tried the AI Gunnery mod? If so, did it address your concerns?

 

Some of the parameters tweaked do involve head on attacks (the conditions for it to occur are skill based). In fact, at one point I over tweaked things and had people give feedback that no head on attacks were happening so had to revisit my changes.

 

Anyway, my point is that if you do use mods and are wanting a different single player experience perhaps consider trying the mod out.

[KodiakJac]

@Stonehouse

 

Yes, I do use one Mod (historic Swastika markings for German aircraft).  Thanks for letting me know about your gunnery mod.  I'll give it a try! 👍

 

 

[Aapje]

@KodiakJac

 

Perhaps you can report here what your experience is with the gunnery mod. 

[KodiakJac]

3 hours ago, Aapje said:

@KodiakJac

 

Perhaps you can report here what your experience is with the gunnery mod. 

 

Ok...will do 

[KodiakJac]

On 2/1/2025 at 9:55 AM, Aapje said:

@KodiakJac

 

Perhaps you can report here what your experience is with the gunnery mod. 

 

Ok, here is an update on the @Stonehouse AI Gunnery Mod.  I've fought 6 or 8 missions with it so far, and overall, I love it!  It creates much more varied behavior in fighters.  I've only had a few AI head-on encounters, which feels much more realistic to me.  And the "merge" moves seem much more varied and sophisticated.  Just to test it a little bit, I've tried a few head-on passes myself, and enemy AI fighters have tried to avoid me rather than jousting with me.

 

Still early on for me, but I'd suggest others give this mod a try to see what you think.  It might be a gem!

 

My only caveat is just a question for @Stonehouse  I've only attacked two rear gunner aircraft so far...Ju-87 and He-111 bombers, and my flight got shot to pieces...lol  Both groups (Ju-87 and He-111) were set to "Low" skill level in community campaigns where I could edit skill levels.

 

First, my flight of four Yak-1 ser.69 fighters attacked 2 groups of six He-111 each in "Loose" formation.  Two of my wingmen were shot down within a couple of passes, and one was shot up enough that he headed for home.  I was also shot up after a couple of passes and barely made it back to my airfield.  And these were not 6 o'clock passes.

 

In the next mission, my flight of four Yak-1 ser.69 fighters attacked 2 groups of three Ju-87 each in "Loose" formation.  One Yak-1 was set on fire on its first pass and went down like it had been hit by a cannon!  Another Yak-1 got shot up pretty badly on its first pass.  I got a kill and then took my flight home with my tail between my legs...lol

 

Did you increase accuracy for tail gunners in the AI Gunnery Mod or was it just my bad luck on those two missions? 😄

 

Either way, thanks for this great mod! 😃  (plus, the "Pilot Despawn Delay" mod is a nice bonus)

 

Edited February 7 by KodiakJac

[Stonehouse]

10 hours ago, KodiakJac said:

Did you increase accuracy for tail gunners in the AI Gunnery Mod or was it just my bad luck on those two missions?

No and yes lol. I tied the burst lengths to the ammo supply for the turret and therefore the burst length is now shorter and so their guns overheat less leading to less dispersion. I also took away the ability for the gunners to fire out to 3x normal range when they have more than 150 rounds (in stock gunners fire out to 2 plus kms but as distance is part of their error calc it is usually very wild fire indeed), so they are now limited to about 800m ish. However, I did increase their responsiveness, so you don't usually get the situation with the mod of an enemy fighter sitting at near point-blank range and the gunner ignoring them.  

There are some other tweaks along the way but most of the behind-the-scenes commentary is in the mod thread explaining my reasoning for changes made to the mod over time so I won't repeat it all verbatim here.

 

The main driver for the gunner changes were that I altered the fighters dogfight AI. For example, the aces are extremely good shots. In stock Il2 they will engage once they reach 800m from their target (novice skill was 400). So essentially, they are like MG armed expert snipers. I believe this is the reason people complain they get killed by a short burst from an AI at seemingly huge ranges. Aces in the mod will hold fire until about 400m but are still deadly accurate. Also, in stock aces were more "determined" and would ignore up to 5 hits on their aircraft and focus on their target. Novice would jink on 1 hit. I made all skill levels jink on 1. I figured aces were not stupid and novices tend to panic so without a proper morale system jinking on 1 hit seemed reasonable.

 

So if I left the gunners as per stock but fighters modded you found aces getting killed in droves as they waited until 400m to fire at the bomber but the bomber would fire at them all the way in from about 1.8kms.

 

Stock fighter aces will also climb prior to attacking a bomber so they are faster on the run in plus the offset helps mask some turrets. Lower skills didn't. I changed this. Aces gain more height in the mod, and other skills now do this too other than novice pilots. 

 

Hence the gunner tweaks above plus a reduction in accuracy and many, many, many repeated quick missions trying to achieve something believable in terms of balance and gameplay across all fighter v's fighter and fighter v bomber skill match ups. We don't have real bomber formations or numbers so going for absolute realism just doesn't work as particularly late war fighters have so much firepower they overwhelm a bomber with a shortish burst. But with the mod the gunners increased responsiveness, firing at shorter ranges (hence less error) and shorter bursts (hence less dispersion due to overheating) means if you don't generate a vector difference between you (in the fighter) and the bomber you will get shot up. Most likely it will be damage though not insta kill. Particularly AI novice fighters tend to suffer as they tend to attack only from 6 o'clock and near the bombers speed and height.

 

Main point is do not crawl up a bomber's 6 with little overtake and co-alt and expect to get away undamaged. You shouldn't expect to shoot down lots of bombers like in stock and you really need to use real life tactics when attacking bombers.

 

In any case as you will see if you read through the mod thread, I'm quite open to tweaking things if people give me real feedback. 

Edited February 7 by Stonehouse

[Aapje]

8 hours ago, Stonehouse said:

in stock aces were more "determined" and would ignore up to 5 hits on their aircraft and focus on their target. Novice would jink on 1 hit. I made all skill levels jink on 1. I figured aces were not stupid and novices tend to panic so without a proper morale system jinking on 1 hit seemed reasonable.

 

I would think that novices would need more time to process what is happening and suffer more from tunnel vision. So isn't it better to raise the number for novices?

 

And panic doesn't have to mean wild behavior. It can also cause people to freeze up.

Edited February 7 by Aapje

[Stonehouse]

11 hours ago, Aapje said:

 

I would think that novices would need more time to process what is happening and suffer more from tunnel vision. So isn't it better to raise the number for novices?

 

And panic doesn't have to mean wild behavior. It can also cause people to freeze up.

 

First thing. Apologies I said novices react on 1 hit in stock. I should have said 2. I've corrected it in my prior post.

 

Absolutely agree that panic can cause people to freeze as well as the opposite. I guess also my word choice in saying "panic" was not good - "react" would be a better choice. The parameter in question is a control over how many hits the AI pilot will accept before reacting. Stock novice is 2, normal 3, high 4 and ace 5.

 

If the hits on the aircraft are less than the value, then AI pilot will just continue doing whatever it is they are doing. e.g. shooting at a target, flying straight and level etc. The value is global and non-situational.  It doesn't care whether the hits are 7.62mm or 30mm. Obviously while sitting still for small rifle caliber rounds may be ok for the AI, sitting still and accepting even just 2 20mm or 30mm rounds is likely to give the AI pilot a bad day.  However, this aspect is not considered by the parameter, and it is a one size fits all. It also doesn't appear to care whether the AI has been fired on recently or if there is combat going on around them (i.e. they are more alert) and it is just if you haven't had X hits in a certain time frame (I don't know what this is but assume it is small and something like few secs) then don't react to hits. So for example, from what I have seen in testing it appears that if an AI novice took 2 rounds of 7.62 early in a dogfight but then was not shot down or out of the fight and went for say a minute or so before getting hit again by another 2 rounds the pilot reactivity is not increased by the earlier attack.

 

The reason behind changing the value to 1 for all AI pilots in the mod, was that people complained that the AI was not challenging and often were easily killed because they just sat there unresponsive when fired on. Changing to 1 meant that this was no longer the case.

 

Only my opinion but I feel this aspect of the AI system implemented is quite a simple one and I hope the one for Korea might be an improvement so that each skill level has a range of responses for different situations and something random is selected from the range so that the AI has more personality. That way you might get the novice pilot that freezes as well as one that reacts better than expected and surprises the player. Being hit by a 7.62mm and being hit by a 20mm shell should also likely result in a different response. Possibly where the hit was should also influence the response. 

 

Perhaps I'm wrong but I'm guessing that since you asked for a review of the experience of using the mod you haven't tried it yourself? 

 

Regardless, if you find your experience with the mod still leads you to raise an issue about the novice AI pilots reactivity then please post in the AI Gunnery thread so the rest of the user base has visibility and can comment. If there ends up being a consensus or even just a reasonable level of agreement over there then it can be changed. 

 

Edited February 8 by Stonehouse

[Avimimus]

By the way Binkov's new video mentioned Gerd Barkhorn estimating that 80-90% of his kills were against unsuspecting targets (in the context of both German and U.S. doctrine shifting towards avoiding dogfights in favour of single-pass ambushes by the end of the war). That might explain the lack of manoeuvre in a lot of gun camera footage.

 

 

[Stonehouse]

1 hour ago, Avimimus said:

By the way Binkov's new video mentioned Gerd Barkhorn estimating that 80-90% of his kills were against unsuspecting targets (in the context of both German and U.S. doctrine shifting towards avoiding dogfights in favour of single-pass ambushes by the end of the war). That might explain the lack of manoeuvre in a lot of gun camera footage.

 

 

 

Hopefully Korea has something better to drive AI reaction than number of hits. It probably should be something driven by experience based situational awareness (ie more experience = better SA) with some randomness thrown in somehow so it has some unpredictability rather than number of hits and hardcoded by skill search ranges and threat thresholds.  As well other friendly aircraft should be able to provide a trigger for AI reaction. That was the reason for better formations developed during the war. Currently you often see an AI shot down because they did not react even though another AI has full view of the event. There should be the possibility for the observing AI to warn the AI under attack.

 

[kraut1]

I am flying since last August late war eastern front campaign missions with realistic settings without HUD and moving icons, only sometimes reports of enemy grid locations and warnings by the wingmen during air combat by subtitles.

The aim is just to survive a campaign until the end of the war with ca.100missions.

It is an EMG campaign were in general the leader of the flight has a higher ailevel as the wingmen.

The german flights are much more smaller than the russian ones.

On the other hand the germans have 1 step higher ailevel.

German leader high and wingmen normal.

Russian leder normal and wingmen low (but mostly with great numerical superiority)

During the whole time since last August the air combat was always interesting and the russian planes despite of the lower ailevel were always dangerous.

For the rear gunners with "low" I have modded the accuracy of the bot to medium and this is from my point of view well balanced.

Sometimes the russians are attacking far superior from above, in this case you have to retreat immediately.

And there were never very frequently head on attacks. To compensate the currently not existing Yak3 and LA7 I have modded the AI of the La5FN and Yak1s127 from "low" to "medium" and from "medium" to "high". And I fly the FW190A8 always unneccessarily with 100% fuel.

[KodiakJac]

Thanks for your explanations @Stonehouse  You have obviously put a lot of thought into this.  I'll switch over to your AI Gunnery topic if I have more questions as I get to know your mod better 🙂