How Sophisticated is DCS World's Enemy AI?

[Infiltrator]

I've been taking on the mighty SA-19 Tunguska in the KA-50 and I was wondering how sophisticated the AI are with detecting my presence and how they actually detect the KA-50 and other aircraft. Does turning off external lights make you less detectable? Or is it a simple case of a basic tigger area? I'm guessing locking onto targets alerts them, but I'm curious to how the AI work.

[Exorcet]

The AI have multiple sensors like radar, IR, visual, etc. If they detect you with one of the sensors then they know where you are and they will pretty much have a complete fix on you until you get out of their range of sight. Overall the AI is too good at spotting and SA right now, it's something that will addressed in the future.

The visual detection component does take the amount of light into account when detecting enemies but I don't know if external lighting matters.

[LooseSeal]

They have an essentially god's eye view and will basically always see you if there is line of sight (including through clouds/fog at the moment of writing). I'm not aware of external lights making any difference whatsoever (which is something else which needs fixing).

For SAMs, you need to set their engagement range manually in the ME, otherwise they will always engage at maximum range - which is an insane thing for an air defence operator to be doing in reality. I usually set it to about 70% or so. Ideally, ED should implement a SAM intelligence that can dynamically work out on its own when to switch on radar/engage the target. I find it quite dull/predictable that we need to set it ourselves.

[Tippis]

Not very.

It's mostly a matter of comparing target parameters (size, range, altitude, possibly with some modifications) to sensor parameters (sweep time, coverage angle, minimum target size, minimum radial velocity for notching). Optical isn't all that different — it's just another sensor — but ambient light is supposed to be one of those modifiers. Very little you can do other than staying outside of the coverage zone will matter.