Let me commend you guys first of all for making an excellent and profoundly enjoyable game. I purchased the game a few days ago and love it. However, while the AI is excellent overall, the vehicle AI is jarringly poor and immersion breaking. I have seen friendly jeeps TK more soldiers than I can count. Tank path-finding is seemingly non-existent, and I have captured many enemy tanks simply because they drove themselves into an obstacle and do not seem capable of backing up. This is exacerbated by finickiness of vehicles on terrain in general, where even tanks are unable to drive over small obstacles. The AI seems only rarely able to follow "driver, go here" commands and mostly just looks at you with what I can only imagine is a highly polygonal blank stare.

Because vehicles are so incredibly important to victory, their implementation seems unpolished particularly compared to the robust infantry AI. They do not seem to have any sense of tactics or the ability to assess threat, and never attempt to retreat or support infantry. As you guys approach 1.0, I think these problems should be of utmost priority.

I also suspect that solving the vehicle AI issue will result in less stalemates and a more dynamic battlefield, as the poor vehicle AI tends to "rambo" ineffectually.

Thanks for the feedback!

Not trying to sound blunt, but where are you giving orders to drive to exactly? The AI has been designed to handle driving on the roads and a few predefined invisible off-road navigation paths, usually working as shortcuts between roads, that's about it. It is true it is limited, but for the scope of the game we've deemed it good enough. We could perhaps make it more clear so that the driver would simply reject the command and just take it to the closest point on the safe route (which it mostly tries already, there are some distance thresholds which allow you to give direct go-to-points disregarding navigation). It would actually work very well with the theme of the game that the driver AI would urge you to drive instead, in various ways.

What comes to jeeps driving over friendlies, we've left that in as a funny thing, so it's partly intentional but originally not. You can see the driver trying to brake usually if the friendly soldier is in front of the vehicle for long enough time still usually failing. We will likely have the driver say "Get out of the way!", "Watch out!" in the following versions to make it more obvious that it's not a bug that it happens. Driver could also say "Oops", "That gotta hurt", stuff like that, after accidentally driving over someone. Even some of the witnessing soldiers could comment on the event.

There are certainly some clear issues I still hope to get fixed, namely some bugs with detecting being stuck (although already featuring numerous methods) and some threshold issues with resolving such a stuck situation, e.g. the driver keeps turning the steer wheel to both sides very rapidly effectively staying still.


Around 6 months ago, when we went in Steam, the AI didn't use the combat vehicles for attack at all basically, they really stayed back and concentrated on not getting the vehicle destroyed - making them mostly useless for the offensive purposes which was a huge letdown to most players. Once we changed that, things certainly became more hectic with the combat vehicle AI being very, one could say overly aggressive, but we definitely preferred the change that took place.

I personally think vehicles aren't overly important to success, not in RWR, not when playing with bots. There are times that they can be really important for both sides, sure, either providing backup for your faction or being a huge nuisance on the enemy side, but for the most part they seem to just bring variety to the events which is the primary reason they are there. At start of each map in campaign when the enemies control most of the bases, it's the best when they thus also control most of the vehicles, it's great (to me at least) when they storm in and you get to fight against those buggers - the beginning of Black Gold Estuary is a prime example of this.

Anyway, if you're hitting specific navigation issues, that something very wrong happens when going from a specific point A to a specific point B, we would be grateful to gain some info about such things. It's possible there are gaps in the navigation network although we try to be thorough with it and we've already fixed a lot of those bugs. Those and the stuck resolving issues aside, the actual navigation logic has been working very well the last time I was playing more with vehicles.

I must add, i like how you guys found a simple way to cover up the ai bad drivers with the correct chat bubble. When i see them say ugggh i can't drive ,i at least now know the guy is just dumb.

I agree, the Ai AV's are nice. I love trying to hunt down enemy AI Tanks and APCs. Plus I love when you can tell they are coming, or near and everything stalls up as they block or break an assault. You get all tense and look for cover from the sound of their cannons. Many times I have run for cover knowing what was coming, only to watch as everyone, AI and player alike, get blown to bits in a hurry and I get to pop out and knock it out with a rocket... or get shot in the face... because it is RWR and that happens too.

When it comes the Attack Vehicles, sometimes my only real wish anymore is to be able to lock players out of gunner spots. I know that sounds harsh, but I know how to handle and predict AI gunners. But many newer players are so erratic. You can only ask "AI gunners, please." so many times. It's not so much the aim abilities of the AI gunners, it's the knowledge of their priority targets and that they are focused. A lot of players get too fixated on one target or something unimportant and often you end up getting flanked by AI. But I don't know. Maybe I am just a dick, lol. Yet it would be a nice option.

Seriously though, the AI AV's are a blast to fear and fight.

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