Start of better combat AI

It took some time to design the combat AI so that it can do something else than just to attack enemy ships one by one. Now it, well… attacks enemy ship clusters one by one. While that is already better than the last AI, the more important thing is that now the AI system can be extended to do a lot of other things too. It basically has two state machine layers: the strategy layer and the tactic layer. The strategy layer keeps track of what it would like to achieve (attack, defend, flee) depending on the situation  and how well it is going. The tactic layer then does the commanding of the ships according to the current strategy. Now I can add as many strategies and tactics as I want. I hope this is enough to make a challenging AI for the game. The goal is to make the AI challenging by making it do smart choices and not just by giving it bonuses in resources etc. The strategy layer of the combat AI can also transmit goals from the galaxy map to a single combat. I don’t know if this is done a lot in strategy games but I think it should be an important part of these. This means that the AI should know its goal for the combat – is it a last stand and it should not flee, was it a result of a bluff attack and it should just flee, should it flee to join another army and defend/attack with that, should it try to disable enemy carriers in this combat and then flee or anything like that.