Dev Blog #87: AI: What's Next

[JG4_Moltke71]

7 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

From my understanding of how the fast travel mission logic works, removing it from career missions or modifying it to allow an on/off toggle at the beginning of the mission would require a significant rework or complete rewrite of each of the mission templates that allow the time skip feature one by one. It is not hard to do in single missions or scripted campaigns, because they are being started from scratch now.

I will let you draw your own conclusions from that fact since I can't say exactly what will happen, but I do know that there are a large number of mission templates in use at the moment.  

My conclusion:

For many, this feature is surely a godsend, but for me personally, it is the exact opposite. It has ruined my gaming experience on several occasions because the window popped up while I was navigating the command menu, causing me to accidentally trigger the time function—not to mention that it is constantly annoying. "What a piece of junk," I inevitably think the moment that unwanted teleportation occurs. The developers have invested a great deal of effort into creating a realistic gaming experience that players can customize to their own needs. My conclusion, therefore, is that the very least I should have is the option—at least at the start of a mission—to enable or disable this feature; otherwise, it feels like a severe handicap.

[Husar]

I’m hoping that VR will finally get rid of the restricted head movement in the cockpit. Right now, when I want to lean down, stretch my neck upward, or move sideways, I hit an invisible barrier that even unrealistically pushes me back.

I’m not saying I want to stick my head through the canopy — I just want to be able to move my cheek closer to the canopy or the gunsight. At the moment, that’s simply not possible. 

[ZYSS]

So, the landing gear on one side of La-11 can't rebound correctly after receiving more pressure, which causes the aircraft fuselage to tilt. Can be fixed in this version?

[kama1]

@LukeFF can the improved Ai be transfered to the Il-2 series, too? 

Please ad it to the to do list. 

[BlitzPig_EL]

56 minutes ago, kama1 said:

@LukeFF can the improved Ai be transfered to the Il-2 series, too? 

Please ad it to the to do list. 

This has been gone over many times, nothing from the new Korea engine can be ported back to Great battles.  

We have to accept that fact and move on.

[PaperPilot]

On 9/28/2026 at 5:13 AM, kama1 said:

@LukeFF can the improved Ai be transfered to the Il-2 series, too? 

Please ad it to the to do list. 

I don't think so, I'm afriad. Great Battles is a nice game and I wish they would continue development on it after 2027 with the bomber dlc. But it's an old game by today's standards. Correct me on this, but I don't think it would be worth [figuratively] pulling the game's foundations apart to make room for integrating a new AI system and then closing it all up, because it would be very expensive to do so, and I think making a new game from scratch would only cost a fraction more, but you reap more of the benefits from having a new game. Or something like that. 

I empathise, as I was once in your shoes, but let this new game develop (or wait for hardware technology required to run the game to becoe more affordable if you don't have a good enough computer) and I think you'll like it. 

[Steini18778]

2 hours ago, PaperPilot said:

I don't think so, I'm afriad. Great Battles is a nice game and I wish they would continue development on it after 2027 with the bomber dlc. But it's an old game by today's standards. Correct me on this, but I don't think it would be worth [figuratively] pulling the game's foundations apart to make room for integrating a new AI system and then closing it all up, because it would be very expensive to do so, and I think making a new game from scratch would only cost a fraction more, but you reap more of the benefits from having a new game. Or something like that. 

I empathise, as I was once in your shoes, but let this new game develop (or wait for hardware technology required to run the game to becoe more affordable if you don't have a good enough computer) and I think you'll like it. 

I think that many people would spend more money in IL2 GB when there would be a better AI. You see people complaining all over the internet and social media about this. Many wont spend any further money like me only for a new map. I would love to fly new planes over new maps, but the bad AI keeps me from doing so. IL2 GB has a huge community only been waiting for this since a decade now and the WW2 is far more interesseting setting then korea for many people. 

[Aapje]

Keep in mind that making such a change can impact how campaigns and careers work, so in turn that may require further work. One of the issues with improving GB was that there was so much existing content, that making changes could break a lot of things.

By switching to a new game engine, they were able to make changes that were not feasible if it meant updating a lot of existing content.

Anyway, I don't even understand why people are asking this now when the AI improvements are not even in Korea yet. Let's first see how things improve and by how much.

[robzerg]

Is the 1.004 patch being released today, or is it just this week?

The suspense is killing me!

[AndreiTomescu]

Yes, me too. It's somehow inspiring to wait for the patch instead of playing now.....

[FuriousMeow]

8 hours ago, Steini18778 said:

Spoiler

I think that many people would spend more money in IL2 GB when there would be a better AI. You see people complaining all over the internet and social media about this. Many wont spend any further money like me only for a new map. I would love to fly new planes over new maps, but the bad AI keeps me from doing so. IL2 GB has a huge community only been waiting for this since a decade now and the WW2 is far more interesseting setting then korea for many people. 

 

Its almost certainly not going to happen. Development has shifted to the newer iteration of their engine. They've already said the new AI system is very different so whatever is done for the new iteration can't just be plugged into the old one. 

This happens with every game when a newer iteration is released. RoF stopped getting updates that went into what's become GB just as GB will stop getting core updates. 

Their focus is on the new iteration and developing that for future expansion, trying to figure out a way to strip apart any improvements that go into Korea to somehow work with GB just isn't worth it and also probably mostly impossible because of the differences.

The focus should be to finish up Korea and then hopefully move to WW2 again, to bring a better experience overall with the newer engine. 

I'm not even sure on this AI behavior, specifically the wingman/flight micromanagement. I like the AI to get to target, pick what they attack, execute, rejoin when ordnance is expended... but the last part is the problem, I can do 3 or more passes and still the flight is circling above still fully loaded. That's where the issue is for me, I don't want to have to direct every plane to do their individual attack runs - they just need to do the attack runs when on target.

Edited September 29 by FuriousMeow

[Jegirs]

From my experience flying in the F-51 Career, the wingmen are generally quite good at attacking the target on their own, and I don't interfere with them. However, there have been a couple of cases where, shortly before reaching the target, I gave them some commands, and after that they simply circled over the target...

It also seems to me that the bots in the F-80 and F-84 behave just as passively even when I don't give them any commands at all while approaching the target.

[FuriousMeow]

Sometimes a few attack and other times its like this scene from Serenity:

 

[migmadmarine]

1 hour ago, Jegirs said:

From my experience flying in the F-51 Career, the wingmen are generally quite good at attacking the target on their own, and I don't interfere with them. However, there have been a couple of cases where, shortly before reaching the target, I gave them some commands, and after that they simply circled over the target...

It also seems to me that the bots in the F-80 and F-84 behave just as passively even when I don't give them any commands at all while approaching the target.

In my F-84 career they do seem to attack, but they take a couple of minutes after arriving in the AO to actually make their first run in.