by OutThere88 » Mon, 10. Mar 25, 12:03
Unfortunately, I have observed this as well.

I took a year or so break from the series, and was excited to jump back in, buy all the new DLC and start a new run. Before doing that, I loaded up one of my old saves to check out the flight model.

In said save, I had built a Raptor with 50 Chimera fighters for station assault. I've always enjoyed flying/using the small ships and carrier fleets. After flying around in a fighter for a bit, I had the fleet attack a Split shipyard.

Now a year ago, everything still had a little bit of that X4 'creative flying' but I thought by in large, the AI was able to fly around mostly without ramming anything, and acceptably dock.

I watched the fight take place...pretty poor like OP observed. Most of the fighters spent their time ramming the station at full speed, depleting their shields. Several got stuck in the geometry. It seems like they would be trying to line up attack runs while at full speed, and be drifting by the time they 'pointed' at their target. While on the attack run, there was no chance they were going to slow down in time to turn and would just end up 'drift-turning' into the station until they crashed.

Eventually, the station went boom. Unfortunately, watching them all cluster around the Raptor, crashing into each other and getting stuck in/around the carrier while they tried to dock was just as bad.

I'm all for new features, but this flight model has me scratching my head. If it improves the experience for X4 and HOTAS stuff, great! But if it prevents the AI from being able to navigate, fly and dock in high attention...is this really a net positive?

I was very disappointed and won't be making any new purchases / new runs until this is *hopefully* fixed, if it even can be at all. An obvious solution is just to go OS, but what fun is that? I want to be in the thick of things, or at least watch my ships do something (high attention), not just stare at a map