Matrix Games Forums

It seems that units may want to take up a particular posture when they're in an area of threat, or that the AI may want to make certain decisions based on expected threat. Such decisions and posture may be a good idea even if enemies are not yet detected in that area, so it would help if there's some way of defining that area.

RPs could be used to define such an area, similar to how mission areas are defined now. Scenarios could come with pre-defined areas, or the player could place their own based on intelligence and intuition. When a unit enters the area it could take on a new posture, or the AI could modify its decisions for those units.

Related to that, regular mission areas could be similarly defined as threat areas, depending on the nature of the mission. e.g. a BARCAP would default to being one, an ASW would not (though if an enemy detected relevant behaviour ensues). A checkbox would allow manual override. A unit en-route to a mission area could have a different posture from those already there, e.g. silent & defensive vs. full sensors & aggressive.

Exclusion zones are already in the game although at this point we just let you define a posture for the contact based on its type and violating an area. Very useful to pair with an intercept/strike mission as they have posture based triggers in their mission options

Well, for what I had in mind I don't think an exclusion zone would work, as that depends on the behaviour of non-player units. What I'm thinking of is a map-based behaviour flag which is toggled by and only affects friendly units.


I'll explain a bit better with an example:

There's some discussion here about how to best control diesel-electric submarines, in terms of AI. The current approach is that the AI runs it on battery until close to depletion, then recharges while running on diesel. However, some people reckon that's not what would happen in real life, and that's not how they'd choose to play it. I, for one, would prefer to run on diesels unless I'm pretty sure I'm liable to be sensed by enemies; I prefer to spare my battery for when I need it, and only recharge when I'm away from threats.

Arguably a better AI solution would be to run on diesels by default, but go electric when in a threat environment or making an attack run. The problem for the AI is that it has no intuition, so can't know what is a threat environment unless enemies are already detected. In which case, they may have detected my noisy sub first.

If the player has a good idea of where the enemies will be because of scenario-based intel or even just a hunch, then a defined threat area would still allow the AI to run the sub on defaults, i.e. diesels outside and electric within. There's also the potential for the AI to be finessed further, such as by leaving enough battery to exfil the threat area, then exiting and recharging.


If it could be useful for diesel-electrics subs, it could be useful in other cases too, e.g. a ferry mission entering a zone could drop to min altitude and then return to normal on exit, if it's not able to use an avoidance route. On top of that, we could set flags (e.g. in mission editor) to determine certain behaviour/posture within the zone.

Essentially it's a location-dependent boolean flag which could give the AI more to go on when making behaviour decisions, as well as allowing more detailed player configuration. As one of CMANO's strengths is using the AI to avoid micromanagement, I feel this approach would be a low-effort way of adding useful AI 'intuition'.

I understand. Pretty good idea. We would have to figure out to fit the new AI behaviors in the context of Mission behaviors and some ROE's I've added this to our list of things we need to look at and think about.

Thank you very much for taking the time to think and write about this.