Honestly. Hire out if the in-house developer is this bad. I've heard of poor man's AI (where bots have god knowledge and 100% accuracy as a cheap form of challenge), but I can sum up BattleTech "Aritficial Unintelligence" in 2 actions.

1. If there is a downed enemy, attack them.
2. If there is no downed enemy, attack closest.

Your AI programmer should be ashamed. Such simplistic programming allows me to easily cycle which one of my teammates Tanks the damage. As soon as they get too far gone, pull them back and push a different teammate forward, and guess what? All the enemy AI go after them now instead of finishing off my damaged Mech.

Sad. Truly a field that is not on par with the quality of other fields like the Music, modeling, etc.

In their defense, I usually attack downed enemies. And I think I was programmed rather well.

Also, closer enemies often means the ones that your medium lasers and SRMs can reach.

The AI is far too predictable on attacking downed enemies though. Humans, like us, know not to always attack a downed enemy. There are times I`ve focused on the greater threat whic often isn`t the one lying on the ground. In fact it can be a waste of time since the downed enemy is already more or less out of the battle even if still walking.

The AI should sometimes choose not to attack a downed enemy, especially if there are other damgerous enemies nearby and attacking the prone mech isn`t going to take it out right away.

I also don`t like how the AI doesn`t really seem to use ganging up tactics, like I do. I always tend to have all my mechs backing eachother up so all firepower can be focused on one while it comes single-file at me.

Tanks are also stupid. Instead of coming at me in a group, say 2 -4 togther and concentrating fire on one mech; they just attack single file like robots. Their route finding is also pretty horrible.

Devs need to remember these are mostly piloted by HUMANS and need to have a human way of behaviour which means fighting like they mean to survive it.

Tactically, it's sound to attack a downed enemy.

But what I'm saying is that the AI is so simple. So stupid, that it follows those 2 principles. So as long as you can keep your Mechs upright, just put a fresh one closest to the action, and the enemy AI ignores the one they damaged, and goes after the closer, fresh one. So simple (in a bad way) that it's easy as heck to exploit and is a disgrace to even be under the category "Artificial Intelligence"

Mechs and enemies just move in regardless of terrain or tactic.

Reminds me of F.E.A.R. The AI developers in that game would program in that if enemies lost line of sight, they'd fan out, talk to each other and start to search for you. EXCELLENT and very engaging use of AI patterns, despite them being easy combatants to kill. Here, it's just mindlessness that results in unengaging combat.

I think a large part of why AI don't follow a wounded mech when you pull it back is because then it would be rather easy to abuse it to get hits of into their backs.
There are a ton of factors to consider here so keeping the AI rather simple minded might be the better solution when you can't afford to push 50 million into a more complex behavior.

Vehicles and heat management often do seem just plain stupid though.

3.If we can sensor lock farthest hidden mech then do and focus fire for one turn only then forget. Silly imho.

I understand the heat management thing. Any given enemy 'Mech only needs to consider surviving one fight, so there's no downside to overheating and tacking structural damage. If they lose, they're dead and won't fight you again. If they win, you're dead and they won't fight you again. Because there's no persistence, there's no reason to consider things like that. The only time it's especially stupid, I think, is when they'd be better off guarding to survive a round and dump heat, but in order for that to work, the player would have to spread out way thin. The maps are so small that it's almost impossible to get too far away from each other to engage a target anywhere on the map.

It`s an integral part of Battle Tech; to remove it would be like taking away swords from a sword and sorcery game. You`ve got to get into the time and the mindset.

What annoys me is that everyone in the game are wearing full body suits. In traditional Battletech they wear literally just shorts and a circulation watervest, cos it gets way too hot otherwise. This is where they didn`t get into the time or mindset.

I meant that the AI was stupid not that I wanted those parts gone from the game.

I came off a moon mission where 2 AI mechs did jump jet into overheat 2 turns in a row when I wrote that.
So they jump, overheat and lose their turn for 2 evasion and then repeated same thing the next turn.
Instead of bracing to take less damage or just sprinting away for more evasion and not overheating.
Not had anything even close to that stupid though so maybe it was a bit of a glitch?

While some Mechwarriors wear shorts and watervests, others wear cooling vests which uses toxic cooling liquids ( damage to vest = poisened mechwarrior ),
and even others that use complete CoolingSuits that are connected with the Mechcooling Systems.

Think it was this way :

shorts and circulation watervest = lowest techlevel
shorts and cooling vests with more effective toxic liquids = normal/ancient
cooling Bodysuits with toxic liquids = Solaris 7 -> Mechshowfights Gameworld
cooling Bodysuits with nontoxic liquids = available after Tomahawk and Wolfhound Mechs are developed

So I think you are right, around 3025 for a Merc Company it should be the vests.

No. That`s just been changed from what it originally was. I`m a writer and artist and know how easy it is to just write out a lore and write in a new lore, or just change it. You kids have no idea.

was editing my post, but thanks for the kids ^^

you can have my kids too

Do not think to much about that.

A Turn is something like 10 secs long.
So in 10 secs you get your mech cooking, next 10 secs it is cold again.
Water is not that good when it comes to heat transfer. There are many fluids that are better.

And then we got vehicles that can replace the overheated mech cooling liquids with fresh cool ones....
I never understood how the vehicle could get to the mech, connect some pipes, get the pumps running and replace the old liquids with fresh ones in LESS THAN 10 SECONDS.

Here the link :
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/135-K_Coolant_Truck

So just do not think to much about that.
;)