Update: Starfield Enemy Aggression, v0.03

Progress is being made on the Starfield combat AI. The deeper I dig into it, the more obvious it becomes about why the vanilla setup is as broken as it is. Good news is, it's fixable.

First, more Unaggressive flags have been set to Aggressive. As I did more investigation, I discovered that UC, Freestar, and NA Security were already Aggressive, meaning that Bethesda intentionally set this system up to always give the "good guys" a strong combat advantage. Everyone is now on a level aggression field, thank you very much - I flipped a few more flags that I had previously missed.

More or less, this entire game was designed for the self esteem needs of the United Colonies, and my feeling is that they've had a free ride for way too long and need a dose of reality.

I've started work on AI-related game settings. The vanilla detection range was huge, covering nearly an entire POI range, meaning that once everyone was Aggressive that also meant that an entire combat zone would light up as soon as shooting started. I've reduced that range to about half vanilla, which seems to make it much more reasonable.

In 0.03 I've tweaked the settings for detection times, using the values from 4estGimp's excellent AI settings update for Fallout 4. All the search and detection times are now roughly double that of vanilla, which were originally pretty short. Enemies will take longer to forget about you.

I'm starting work on combat styles. Starfield uses a new templating structure on CS records, which threw me at first, but I'm figuring it out. I've rebalanced everyone to a better mix of fight/flight/cover behaviors, and have done some work to improve everyone's accuracy without turning them all into snipers. I'm not going to be happy with maneuver until I can get the PANPC system ported, but this should at least get their static behaviors up to Fallout 4 standards.

Finally, the Model S Bot. They don't show up often in the game, but I discovered that while the Model S has a mounted turret, it's coded to almost never use it. It literally is configured to opt for a melee/unarmed attack over 99.9% of the time in combat. So I've reconfigured the Model S into a true gun platform, making it rely much more on ranged assault and improving its gun range by about 25%. It should make those UC training missions more exciting for the rooks.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Until Creation Kit is released, these should be considered experimental. There's a lot we still don't know yet about this game, and they may have unintended effects. But this is true for any mods released for Starfield right now.

As always, this prototype patch can be found on the GreslinGames Discord, in the #aggressive-enemy-ai channel.

Have fun,

- G.