correct as-is AI mountainous/hilly terrain navigation.

[WelshZeCorgi]

AI, both wingmen and full AI flights navigate mountainous and hilly terrains very poorly. In airplanes they will often fly themselves into a "energy corner" where no matter what they do, they will fly into the ground, even when trying to avoid it. This is exacerbated when they are trying to defend. They will even fly into the ground on occasion in even slightly hilly terrain trying to avoid a Phoenix shot from 30nm away. 

 

With helicopters, it's a slightly different story. Often in campaigns and missions that require the player to follow an AI helicopter, that AI helicopter will, instead of smoothly flying around or over obstacles while maintaining meaningful speed, will fly straight and level towards said obstacle, before pulling up at the last second, narrowly avoiding collision. They will then level out, at a higher altitude, fly towards the same obstacle straight and level, before again pulling up again at the last second, narrowly avoiding collision. They will then level out, at a higher altitude and then repeat this process until they're clear of the obstacle, (this behavior is usually with a hill or mountain).

 

As you could imagine, this absolutely kills forward speed and if the mission requires that you follow an helicopter AI like this (such as in the MI8 spring tension campaign), instead of taking minutes to travel in hilly/mountainous terrain, it takes hours. It is unbelievably boring, flying at near hovering speeds, watching your AI lead fly into hills for hours before you reach the final waypoint.     

[Flappie]

1 hour ago, WelshZeCorgi said:

As you could imagine, this absolutely kills forward speed and if the mission requires that you follow an helicopter AI like this (such as in the MI8 spring tension campaign), instead of taking minutes to travel in hilly/mountainous terrain, it takes hours. It is unbelievably boring, flying at near hovering speeds, watching your AI lead fly into hills for hours before you reach the final waypoint.     

I totally agree. I remember one particular mission of the Spring Tension campaign where it was a horrendous experience to follow the AI leader.

I expect ED crew to ask for a track, but I think I'm not ready to do this mission again. Can you attach one?

[Phantom_Mark]

From my observations of the AI vs terrain it appears the "look ahead distance" for the AI controlled unit is not far enough ahead meaning the AI plans everything seemingly last moment, the AI also need to cache that information to memory for continual reference regarding the full 360 situation awareness of elevation, so that can have a hope of reacting realistically when going defensive unexpectantly as well. A cpu cycles and memory saving can be made my storing only the "highest elevation points in each direction" rather than trying to build a full virtual picture of every lump and bump in the terrain, thus the AI will always have a safe escape route in any direction with pre calculated minimums.

[NineLine]

You have to be more responsible for your AI as well, they dont have a real brain   Try setting a formation better suited for flying within terrain, remember that AI do what they are told, to their own detriment sometimes. Consider that they are trying to accomplish all they are told to do by you and the ME.