The AI is too passive in 8.x.x version for Xpiratez mod.
The game design in Xpiratez is such that the battles should be quite active.
The player's units lose morale every turn if they don't kill enemies. Also, their Freshness decreases every turn.
In a case like this isn't it even smarter for the AI to force the player to be more active and prolong the mission?
Another problem is that there are mortars in Xpiratez. In some missions, you can blow up houses from afar without taking any risks at all.
This is indeed a more valid issue. The AI should already press the attack when there is no cover anymore. But when they die inside the house when you blow it up, this of course won't help.
Now, if I put my squad under AI control, then both sides will not clash in battle at all (1.png).
Press the "c" button. This brings up the auto-combat-customization. You can right-click on the soldiers there and change their aggression to "3", which is the mode where they are forced to push ahead.
Is it possible to return scale of aggressiveness from power-balance as an option in the settings?
Or make a new option in the settings, so that in the absence of violence, the AI would start acting more aggressively after a few turns?
Or make AI more aggressive in general, as an option?
There should still be the option to set the Aggressiveness of the enemy-AI to "Inherit aggressiveness". But in a situation like on the screenshot above I'm not sure how much this will do. They also have a lower score to stay in places where they have free vision to their fallen allies.
There used to be 2 modes that forced the AI to do something dumb. One of them was to forbid picking any target-tile that is same or further away from a supposed enemy than they started on and one that forced them to get as close as possible.
All the other experiements I did where essentially different weighs between safety and getting closer. But all these in-between-modes were essentially worse than the extremes.
I could probably bring back the forced-modes. But I need to make sure that people are aware that these weaken the AI and don't complain about dumb AI-behavior as a result of it.
Another thing I'd like to look into is mission-type-specific behavior. There are mission-types the player can win without having to kill any enemies. In the base game that's Alien Base, Cydonia 1 and Cydonia 2.
In these kinds of missions it would also make sense to force the AI to be more aggressive. So I'd have to look at identifying those.