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AutoAI - Self Defense

AI Ships may attack or flee when hostile ships appear instead of blindly following the last order until dead.

"AutoAI - Self Defense" was created to give a player's AI controlled ships busy gathering resources or transporting goods the ability to fight or flee when confronted with hostile ships. After setting an AutoAI response, no longer would the player have to manually intervene to make a ship either retaliate or escape.

The configuring and enabling of the AutoAI for a ship is controlled through a new order on the galaxy map. Select a ship, select the AutoAI order icon, and configure its settings.

Currently, the self defense mode can activate in 2 conditions: detecting enemies (a.k.a. hostile entities) or based on taking a certain level of damage. So if you have a weak ship, you can have it try and escape at the first sign of danger. Or if you have a well armored miner, you can have it ignore danger and keep working until the amount of damage taken risks destroying the ship.

There are 3 general responses to danger currently, "jump away", "attack enemies", and "next jump/gate order". With "jump away", when in danger the ship will find and jump to a nearby known sector which has no known enemies in it. The ship will wait there until the enemies in the original sector are gone. It will not jump to unexplored sectors. With "attack enemies", the ship can be configured to attack enemy ships when they appear. This mode also incorporates the "jump away" behavior to escape when low on health. After escape, the ship will jump back in to attack again once the ship's health has recovered. So ships can be configured to attack without being completely suicidal. Last, the "next jump/gate order" is a very limited mode to skip to the next jump order in the ship's order list. This was originally a proof of concept test mode, but for those who want explicit control of where a ship may jump, it is available.

Note that when responding to danger, the AutoAI may replace the orders the ship was previously running. While no longer seen, the ship's original orders are not lost. When the AutoAI is done, it will restore the original orders the AutoAI preempted.

AutoAI - Self Defense is built on top of the Improved Orders Control mod and so requires the Improved Orders Control and Craft Orders Lib - Mad Edition mods.