DCS prop-plane and IL2 AI both have flaws but I find IL2 to be more believable. “Absent Intelligence” is a clever term for both.
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Really interesting input here…
I only know what I observe, as a veteran flightsim enthusiast.
AI has always been an issue, in one way or another. The often lackluster performance of the AI is often compensated by having the AI aircraft and weapons perfom better than the players. Many titles have allowed the AI a set of predetermined maneuvers to perform. The higher difficulty levels had more variation in theirs.
And that’s just the enemy AI. Friendly AI usually have their own problems. They tend to use up their weapons and fuel or they simply don’t do what they’re told.
And I guess we use the term AI loosely here, as it’s not exactly deep learning Artificial Intelligence we’re discussing. Hence my little play with words in the title.
Call it what you want… We flightsimmers and combat gamers want opposition that presents us with a challenge, but at the same time we don’t want them to be totally superior to us. We basically want to believe that the enemy is human.
Looking at the development of flight and systems modelling and graphics and compare this to the development of our digital enemies, I draw the same conclusion that others here have done before me; Coding intelligent behavior is hard work.
Although there seems to be some very high level research being done in this field, little of it has found its way down to us gamers. I’m thinking in particular about the Darpa trials where a real USAF Fighter Pilot was shot down by simulator AI. But this kind of AI probably need more CPU cycles than DCS and IL-2 do together…
I have no answers or solutions. Nor do I want to blame the developers of our beloved flightsims either, as I realize that it must be a monumental task. And, that thought actually gives me some comfort as well. Our human intellect isn’t easily simulated…yet. 
But one day, AI and robots will rule the world. Won’t you
@Discobot fortune
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Don’t count on it
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Hm… Maybe there is hope for humanity, after all? 
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Btw If you’d like I can give you a sort of fam-flight on Storm of War some day.
Landmarks and their names, general position of airfields and front lines and how they change with time (first mission on SoW is always 10th of June 1944, latest (as of now) is 27th of July 1944). Missions are semi accurate for the time period during the first two months after D-Day. Some of the more significant historical operations following D-Day are included in the missions.
I am usually around on weekends and regularly fly Saturday and/or Sunday between 13:00 and 16:00CEST/CET but can also fly in the evening or morning. I also fly on Friday evenings starting around 20:00 sometimes. If I manage to fly during the week it’s always in the evening as well.
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The problem with the human brain is that it’s much better at getting that something is wrong rather than what is wrong.
So we can always point odd, or in this case non-intelligent, behavior.
What’s really hard is to explain to a machine how to be human.
Talk about “shooting for the moon”.
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Eventually we are going to get what we’re asking for…and initially regret maybe. Once machine learning is incorporated into the engines driving our sims, the AI will quickly learn how to spank the best of us in a heartbeat. It will use tactics tailored to our individual behaviors. It will be glorious!
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Exactly. Is this because we humans don’t really know ourselves well enough to code a computer to mimic us…?
I actually think it’s easier to code AI that will learn from our behaviour to beat us, than to learn from us to mimic us…
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Thanks for your offer, @Derbysieger! I hope I can take you up on that. Problem for me is setting specific time aside for simming. Weekends are either work or family time. Same with evenings. I usually get to do my simming on weekdays, when I’m off duty…
Good thing I am very flexible in that regard xD
Should you have time, you want to fly and see me online on Discord you can just shoot me a message. If I am not otherwise engaged I will be happy to fly for an hour or so.
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Well I certainly don’t but there’s scores of people who can.
Maybe the video game industry doesn’t pay well enough. (HINT: definitely they don’t)
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Even the most advanced neural nets of today are orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. We simply don’t have the computational power to make anything of that complexity. You can get away with that today if you abstract away lots of stuff and look at only a few subsets of the entire problem, but if we talk about the scale of making an automaton actually behave like a human, I’m not sure if we will live to see that.
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Even when comparing against pilot brains…?
Real Artificial Intelligence is of course very demanding. This is also sort of the point I’m trying to get at here… All we want is that our single player opponents appears a bit more life-like.
I think this wish is also reflected in the wish for dynamic campaigns. We want the missions to appear more like a real war and we want the opponents we fight to act like they are real too.
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But even there and I will go from the Heron interview on the matter the AI was trained using Reinforcement learning, couldn’t actually learn anything new during the actual fight and couldn’t do anything outside of BFM in the training environment only. It had perfect state information but it still lost against a gamer…eventually. 
A lot of work has been done to Falcon over the past few years…Last week I set up a multi flight basic TE (SEAD / CAP / STRIKE / Standoff ECM) with a real weather map and put myself in the number 2 slot (don’t remember risking that before). However the formation flying and the way the lead AI calls out the formation changes during the flight was amazing.
When you are lead you can formation land with the AI or my fave is the overhead approach where the AI forms close up on you down the runway then you break into landing pattern. Also things like making sure the AI doesn’t get stuck on taxiways etc…the amount of work must have been immense.
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Even the pro’s, struggle with their AI opponents!
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Imo the screenshot below is a perfect example of AI frustrations.
That flaming ball of fire is my Player self during that particular mission. I am in autopilot mode watching the action against the ships and the next thing I know I see that Roman candle of myself go shooting across my field of view. Naturally all the enemy AI planes had teed off on me and completely ignored the Torpedo Bomber planes they were assigned to attack and even the other fighters that were attacking them.
I am mission building at the moment so I was in outside camera view looking around to see how things played out when this happened. Had I been the only plane left to be shot out of the sky it would not be so frustrating to see the conga line of planes behind me but when there are other planes in the sky I would really like them to be a priority too.
Wheels
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If you have the time I am always home for at least another week. You can hit me up on discord if you want to fly 
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Thanks! Not going to be able for at least two weeks… 
Like all of you I have been beating up AI bots for as long as I can remember. Today’s AI is far better than yesterday’s. Look at @wheelsup_cavu dragging every enemy fighter in old school il2. And that’s not even discussing the awful way that game did ai gunnery.
Nu-il2 ai is pretty darn nice imo. Probably slightly better than DCS’. But not by a wide margin. The main thing I have issue with re the DCS bots is their FM. Those bovine excrement forever vertical loops.
Sure fighting humans is more fun. Strangely it can also get more boring, as both players min-max the heck out of things and neutralise eachother in a constant merry-go-round. Bit like high level MMA grappling really.
And that’s only looking at BFM. On a larger tactical level there’s so much to be won in AI programming/scripting. Dumb as a bag of hammers is understating it.
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