I'll just throw in some thoughts based on my knowledge of the mission system. I'm not involved with this. I helped Nefarious setup some of the initial FE test missions, but he is is fully in the saddle and making his own missions now. This is his baby, but I'll just offer $0.02.
1. It is almost certainly true the AI formations are tighter than a formation of humans.
We based the formation and spacing to the best of our ability from historical information, but it is probably true that was an overly perfect ideal that real life pilots never attained either.
It would take work, but those formations can be shape spacing anyway that is decide.
2. Yeah. I was only at some of those early FE missions. Not all of it has to do with the AI. A lot of the differences in results had to do with when and where the LW were allowed to airspawn. But no doubt, there proper balancing of variables would be necessary.
Just for background info....
The definition for the AI flight of bombers has a variable, that if I understood correctly, essentially defines the angle of the cone of dispersion of their fire. You can set it small and they might not hit you as often, but when they do you are getting sliced by a laser beam. You can set it larger and they probably have better odds of pinging you, but you are less likely to get sliced in half.
The min and max of this value can be set between 0 and 15. If you set a range, each AI bomber is given a random selection from that range. So the wider the range the more variability between bombers. I can't remember what we used in the early FE missions. Something like 3-7.
We did some testing ourselves in a Custom Arena and just picked what felt reasonable. There is a fair bit of adjustment possible there though. Of course a lot of what I saw in the first FE missions were individual attackers zooming in alone and facing the combine fire alone. Of course that isn't going to turn out well. The importance of teamwork is that it gives the enemy someone else to shoot at. If there was interest, some tests could be setup and try different accuracy values to pick something that felt fair. We just had to make our best guess. But it should be a test with 3 or 4 simultaneous attackers to be meaningful, IMHO.
3. I hadn't seen that behavior. Maybe Nefarious has. It may have been fixed. It may be avoided because we do our formations in a unique way where we are not using the standard HTC flight/drone model. I suspect that may have been drone behavior which we are avoiding. I dunno about that one.
4. That's Nef's call, but I'd agree that it seems reasonable to balance the number of bombers to the number of interceptors. That may not have always occurred in the early FE missions because we were intentionally trying to push the envelope and see what the maximum number of AI bombers we could use. We were trying to find our edge conditions.
It's a lot easier to remove bombers than it was to add them. So formation can be designed large to have as a reusable resource, and then trimmed down as needed for a particular case.
5. The effectiveness of the bombers will be a function of how many you have in the formation and how tight the formation is. They drop in formation, so you can get a visual impression of the dispersion by doing a in air fly by. Actual impact dispersion will be even more dispersed than the formation due to random aerodynamic effects on the falling ord. I could run a test and take a screenshot of various impact patterns.
6. I don't have an opinion on the desirability of including them in your FSO. I am just a technical consultant.
