v1.4 is coming soonish and then will continue on with the v2.0 Rebalance and final completion of the Reimagined campaigns :)

Depending on the mission parameters, you can also assign flight groups to appear based on difficulty setting only, so you can offset this skill change by having an Easy version of a ship but have it drop 2 skill levels to compensate so its behaviour is the same as Normal.

And yes, Veteran AI is very frequently used 😅

We have a patch that fixes this yes, we are currently discussing how best to implement and to change it to Super Ace gets this AI skill (because its functionally the same as TopAce anyway) so that it has that clear 'top level' distinction in skill.

#10
And thus the original XWA campaign, plus TFTC Classic/Reimagined is all affected by this bug. Its also interesting to note, this was introduced in X-Wing Alliance. The bug is not present in any previous title.

Its fascinating the things you find sometimes!

End🧵

#9
However you might notice the code is not including 32768 in its if/else check. All values are greater/equal than 43690 or less than 21845 - Veteran gets left out thus it ends up with the highest rate of fire of all skills (TopAce/SuperAce is half this speed).

#8
The faulty code? A simple else/if statement checking the AI skill level and what rate of fire calculation should be used. In the code, AI skill looks something like this:

#7
This is most visible on something like a Corvette - it becomes a murder machine when set to Veteran AI. Now imagine you have it set to a lower or higher AI skill but the difficulty change puts it to Veteran AI, suddenly game balance gets a bit skewed, sometimes drastically.

#6
The exact functionality that go into AI skill levels and how that affects the game has only recently been really delved into and from that, we found an unexpected bug relating to weapon rate of fire - Veteran AI skill is actually more deadly than Super Ace skill!

#5
On Easy:
All friendly AI gains +2 skill levels
All enemy AI loses -1 skill level

and on Hard:
All enemy AI gains +1 skill level

And that's it. This in itself can create enormous problems for balancing, but that's another story and has already been solved for the Rebalance.

#4
An additional caveat is that setting the game difficulty affects the AI skill levels. On Normal, all AI skill levels are as they are set in the mission editor. However changing to Easy or Hard will increase or decrease those levels depending if the craft is a friend or foe.