wip How make do I make the wingman do anything in SP

[Count Sessine]

Hi guys

My wingman is totally unresponsive at all times. He just follows me around. I have used the PTT buttons and the old Comms button but nothing works. Is this a bug or is there something about the Apache comms I don't understand?

Some SP missions are quite hard with only one loadout - I need more Hellfires

[NeedzWD40]

Check your flight frequency in the briefing and ensure you're using the right radio. The AI only use the group default radio, which is quite often the UHF radio at 225MHz.

Edited January 8, 2024 by NeedzWD40

[NIGHTHAWK1]

try using Easy Comms.  Also as noted elsewhere comms are different in air then on the ground, (\) is for ground, and different key combo for in the air (need to check the settings. options, controls, all but axis commands, communications, = left win key +  ... or lft contrl +...) I don't remember what it is right now.

Edited January 8, 2024 by NIGHTHAWK1

[Count Sessine]

On 1/8/2024 at 10:04 PM, NeedzWD40 said:

Check your flight frequency in the briefing and ensure you're using the right radio. The AI only use the group default radio, which is quite often the UHF radio at 225MHz.

 

Thank you ! That was the problem. I just needed to move the frequency selector. Read the manuel, eh...

[FalcoGer]

I called him and told him to "Engage ground targets" and he said "Unable". I called him and told him to RTB, he said "Copy", and proceeded to continue to follow me. I said nothing and he flew straight into a tree and said "I'm hit". AI wingman are useless.

[NeedzWD40]

3 hours ago, FalcoGer said:

I called him and told him to "Engage ground targets" and he said "Unable". I called him and told him to RTB, he said "Copy", and proceeded to continue to follow me. I said nothing and he flew straight into a tree and said "I'm hit". AI wingman are useless.

Well, there are some improvements: he didn't call out "2, bingo fuel."

[corbu1]

I wouldn‘t say they are useless. You should treat them with care. 

I also get an unable answer when ordering ground targets. I think this happens most when he should engage and myself hasn‘t engrave so far. If I engage a group of tanks or armored vehicles doing the first shot, then he finds targets and engages as well.

Sometimes it helps when AI wingman doesn’t react, I order him to cover me. Then immediately followed by another order like engage ground targets.

I‘m more nervous about AU wingmen tending to engage infantry and light armored vehicles even with rockets in very close range. Which is most times some kind of suicide.

I also noticed that Apache  AI wingmen tendering engage BMP‘s or BTR‘s with rockets in close range even they got still a full package of hellfires loaded as well.

[Dagobert666]

I wouldn‘t say they are useless..... 
BUT---> they are, unfortunately.

I play DCS Liberation and "the AI makes stupid mistakes" is the main reason why I lose units.
The Wingman topic is particularly sad.
In airplanes, the AI as a wingman is at least occasionally able to fly a full mission without crashing for no reason.
But in a helicopter....oh man... That's quite an insult.
The AI can't do anything...not fly straight, not fight or avoid danger.
It flies into every obstacle, it constantly flies into the attacking range of enemies when it attacks itself and is then shot down bluntly.

A disaster.

[pii]

On 1/12/2024 at 12:42 PM, FalcoGer said:

I called him and told him to "Engage ground targets" and he said "Unable". I called him and told him to RTB, he said "Copy", and proceeded to continue to follow me. I said nothing and he flew straight into a tree and said "I'm hit". AI wingman are useless.

Not if you want to kill a tree.

[FalcoGer]

3 hours ago, pii said:

Not if you want to kill a tree.

The tree survived.

[markturner1960]

Much as I love DCS and what ED do for us, I must admit I do find it difficult to understand how the AI can be so useless and why it is taking so long to make improvements. I spent several years flying Falcon 4 and they were not so bad there. Surely a key part of a sim which is played extensively in single player mode.........

[aaronwhite]

20 hours ago, markturner1960 said:

Much as I love DCS and what ED do for us, I must admit I do find it difficult to understand how the AI can be so useless and why it is taking so long to make improvements. I spent several years flying Falcon 4 and they were not so bad there. Surely a key part of a sim which is played extensively in single player mode.........

I think it's like a lot of things at this moment in the game. The old way was envisioned forever ago, and made much more simple, and now that they are looking to revamp things and it's going to be a massive undertaking to fully redo it. In the case of AI, you've got flight model issues, targeting issues, prioritization issues, and communication issues, which are thankfully all things that ED has been making some big strides on the backend with.

What I'm hoping is that with the dynamic campaign progress, we'll be getting revamped AI in terms of being more self reliant. Then there's the chance for them to recreate entire dialogues (with more than just poor Wags recording everything, hopefully) or even crazier would be if there was a way for AI to be incorporated so that there's no pre-canned responses, but the AI in game will use AI to help generate real time communication in response to what is happening around them. 

In my mind, I can see a future where flight sims, especially military sims can use AI generated comms to give the battlefield the same kind of feeling that you get from the AI flights in something like BMS. Where flights are talking back and forth, dynamically, and responding to things in real time. But the AI would allow there to be more freedom in how they talk, and potentially even allow for different accents and voices, so things really feel more dynamic and alive. 

But, either way, I would guess that it's something ED is aware of and plugging away at with all of the core gameplay changes they are making. 

Edited January 25, 2024 by aaronwhite

[Chaffee]

On 1/24/2024 at 1:05 PM, markturner1960 said:

Much as I love DCS and what ED do for us, I must admit I do find it difficult to understand how the AI can be so useless and why it is taking so long to make improvements. I spent several years flying Falcon 4 and they were not so bad there. Surely a key part of a sim which is played extensively in single player mode.........

It depends on what ED is trying to achieve. I'll give an example (although I have no insight into ED's processes):

iRacing (a truly great racing sim) doesn't have rain. Other sims have had rain for years. Why?

Because other "sims" put in a simple friction-reduction algorithm. iRacing models the interaction of tires with pavement; ergo that interaction, in order to remain a legitimate model, must calculate the physical interaction of tires with wet pavement, not simply introduce a friction-reduction number.

That's harder, but it's a commitment to realism.

I go all the way back to Falcon 3.0 (and beyond), and yes, that campaign engine is great. It's also, I suspect, a "mechanical Turk," i.e. not as dynamic an AI as appears to the end-user. Brilliant, but ultimately a dead end.

IF (and I don't know this, but if...) ED's goal is a campaign that's truly dynamic and AI-driven (with all the emergent properties that entails), then investing resources into a stop-gap seemingly dynamic mechanical-Turk campaign is an investment in technical debt.

Knowingly investing in technical debt is foolishness, creating larger inefficiencies down the road. It's immediately cheap, but massively expensive later (thus the "debt" in technical debt).

Do I know any of this is actually the case? Of course not, but I do know a thing or two about how decisions RE: tech debt are made, and it'd be a real shame to go down a blind alley right now with the current outlook for AI (generally) over the next decade.

Make a wrong move in this area (or any of a dozen more), and someone else gets an edge you can't overcome, because you decided to invest resources the wrong direction. My sense, looking at its product history, is ED is in this for the long arc.