Currently, all patrolling ships travel clockwise. All ships with standoff AI turn right. Virtually all capital ships turn right during combat (causing them to constantly present the same armor on the right-side of the ship to enemies). Advanced style AI makes small gunship orbit targets...clockwise.....and so on. It's obvious that somewhere in the engine there's a piece of code that makes things turn clockwise by default.

This makes things a bit boring and unreliable and is pretty noticeable. It also means that in theory you can ignore putting armor on the left side of most capital ships and they'll be just fine as long as they can turn right fast enough.

Solution to gripes: The AI should be updated to turn left*. Patrols should have a selectable direction, and wandering should randomly select a clockwise/counter-clockwise direction.

*as well as right, obviously.

assumedpseudonym 16 Oct 2016:

 …Something something NASCAR-but-the-other-direction something… ¬.¬;
 More seriously though, they have a point. The closest any 'standoff ship really gets to making a left turn is against a faster gunship on its right side (which seems to be for the express purpose of keeping the right rear quarter pointed at said gunship), and 'advanced ships (and possibly others) might occasionally take a quick counterclockwise spin before getting back into taking right turns. This is particularly evident on the intro screen, where you can watch two ships orbit each other — and invariably clockwise — until the game engine gets bored and axes one of them. Similarly, 'patrol ships always go clockwise, with rare counterclockwise spins before settling back into their original clockwise path.

wolfy 16 Oct 2016:

It would be nice that if in-combat, the AI would try to switch directions to either: minimize hits to a damaged side, or to better counteract the turning of an enemy AI ship.

the_shrike 16 Oct 2016:

Also: There are overlapping tickets with this. If peeps link 'em, that'd be quite useful. :)

nms 16 Oct 2016:

You called? ... But actually, I'm not finding any, other than my pet peeve AI ships don't aim fixed weapons correctly, which is especially noticeable when they're circling at high speed, and AI should (sometimes) take current velocity into account when deciding which direction to thrust, which George actually implemented in a recent alpha. (Not quite as well as I'd like, but many ships are definitely better.)