Enemy Tracking Problem: Possible Ship Builder Problem

[Major Diarrhia]

As you may know, I'm building a Defiant Class ship. I'm having trouble getting it work properly, it doesn't track enemy vessels correctly. Maneuvering wise, it should work almost exactly like the Zelus, just slightly slower in speed, acceleration, and turning. I'm pretty sure I set the range of my Defiant to that of the Zelus, it seems to use 100 as it's range and it seems ideal for its weapons. It uses the Blasters rather than the Gatling Blaster, so I could and should be able to use a slightly longer distance but can't.

On the one hand, we have the Zelus which constantly closes the distance, only stopping if it's actually in range of the enemy. It'll get slightly out of range but always seems to start up just in time to make it to the target without slowing weapons fire much.

On the other hand, when my Defiant approaches a similarly fast enemy it doesn't maintain the distance properly. While the enemy retreats in order to maintain its distance from the approaching Defiant, the Defiant will stop once it gets into a position which would have allowed Blaster fire about two seconds ago, then start moving again because it isn't in range. It keeps starting and stopping, only occasionally getting in range to let off a cycle of shots.

I can't tell why this is the case when the Zelus is 6/4, speed/turning and the Defiant is 5.95/3.25 and acceleration is 0.32, I don't know the Zelus' acceleration. I recall a parameter from the text files the old ship building would create that doesn't exist in the current builder, it was a minimal acceleration, could that be the culprit, or is it something else?

[th15]

The Zelus run's its AI more often (but you can't set that variable in the shipmaker right now), thats possibly it.

[Major Diarrhia]

Can you make the default more frequent by about three times? Thanks though, at least I know I can't balance for the problem now and can concentrate on other things.

[th15]

It's a performance issue. The ship ai script has to evaluate a lot of things before deciding what to do. Run the ai too often and the game bogs down, run it too infrequently and your ships respond sluggishly. I'm trying my best to optimize things but the problem is that when I optimize code for speed, it makes it very difficult for me to change things later (because of hard-coded values and other shortcuts). So, the result is that I've been intentionally avoiding optimizing some code because I still intend to experiment with new mechanics.