Hey guys! Not sure if this has been suggested before, but I have ideas for the AI! sorry if this post seems messy as I am horrible at making good forum posts lol, I also apologise if my English seems to be very broken at some points! (Even though it is my primary language... Lack of sleep does some weird stuff to you huh lol)

Improved AI types/behaviours

I always wanted to spawn some of my planes as a team of hostile AI bombers and fighters in the sandbox which can attack specific locations such as Yeager. I would then create a small team which would consist of me and 3 AI planes ready for combat, then intercept the hostile planes in an intense dogfight, so I thought of a quick team format. You can create preset behaviours for individual aircraft, or teams/factions which can have relationships with other teams. Each team will have subgroups which contain behaviours for certain plane types (which will be explained later) allowing for better team roles which are distributed among the various planes you so desire, unless it’s a multirole heavy bomber which can pull 14g turns and fight like an air supremacy fighter, in which that case then you can go [REDACTED]
Examples for AI team behaviour:

Friendly: Will fight alongside your team, even if deliberately or accidentally shot from friendly fire

Neutral: Basically the default ingame AI at the moment, will not engage your team unless you have intentionally fired at or attempted to engage them, which will then make them hostile to your team.

Hostile: Will definitely go for “first blood” and attack your team if the relationship with the player team is set to hostile. It is what the aggressive AI setting is now.

Passive: Planes set to this will not attack any planes at all, even those that intentionally or accidentally fire at it.

So what I was thinking on how you could set a factions relationship with the others is having a default AI of either of the four and then creating exceptions. These could then be applied as a faction or team which you can assign an AI aircraft or yourself before spawning them in. For example:

Team A
DefaultAI:Friendly
HostileTo:TeamB, TeamF
NeutralTo: TeamC, TeamD
PassiveTo: TeamE

This example means that Team A’s default AI is set to friendly, but will be hostile to Team B and F, and will be neutral to Team C and D. Team E’s actions against Team A will have no effect on their relationship, whether Team E defends or assaults Team A.

Now this brings me to AI types, which can give an AI plane specific behaviours and roles in flight. No longer will you have to see your heavy bombers pull an Arkbird™? and watch it comically engaging and dodging hostile aircraft with the performance of an extraterrestrial UFO, which can lead to death and/or uncontrollable laughter. Unless you want it to be like that. These AI settings have a lot of variables, such as engagement range (at what range should it attack factions), escort target, combat behaviour (prefers to keep a distance OR attack head on), target priority (identify most dangerous enemies) etc... Some preset examples are, but not limited to:

Fighter: Attack any hostile planes, can be set to defend friendly aircraft or other objectives

Bomber/Attacker: Flies at preset altitudes and primarily focuses on bombing any set targets, will not engage hostile planes unless needed

Multirole: Combination of both fighter and bomber roles, but can change roles from bombing ground targets to engaging hostile planes at any time

Cargo: Flies between any preset locations, won’t attack hostile aircraft but will attempt to dodge if set to

Passive disables any specific behaviours for aircraft so it just flies around normally

These presets have endless possibilities in customisation, allowing you to create as many universal or team specific plane AI behaviours as you like, so you can have those great SimplePlanes battles, with 6 competing teams having over 20 aircraft each, which will atleast take 15 mins of your life setting it up, or probably burn your house down to the sheer amount of plane AIs which forgot how to AI lol

Thanks for reading (if u did lol) and if you have any suggestions to add feel free to leave it below, I really hope something like this is implemented, but a name change might have to be made and turn this game into ComplexVehicles lmao