More for future Mission Builders: AI Formation Keeping
[Note: this is just what I’ve observed and what seems to help. Not enough days in the year to test this in great detail. All to hopefully reduce frustration for others]
FWIW I’ve discovered the AI (when in the same AI group) are terrible at formation keeping under anything but simple situations, to name one: they are all thumbs when the route makes a turn of more than about 20-30 degrees, especially when climbing (think a departure climbing to altitude on some non-trivial route).
Keep it under this and they do fine. Go over and it’s a mess. It’s like the wingman can’t keep up, gets out of place; then the lead levels off (and often descends) and does one (often more) 360’s waiting for his rock to get back into place.
And the wingman seem to know nothing about lead pursuit here - they will try to re-form by following a ‘bread-crumb’ trail left by lead. All while lead continues to spin in circles. And this takes FOREVER. Totally messing up any timing you’ve hoped for. Likely if you insert a mandatory time at subsequent waypoints they will then go full reheat to catch up, burning all their gas, and crashing early.
Similar with changing the formation at a waypoint. A real flying circus when that happens. I haven’t tested this in depth.
I just wish ED would at least publish something that went into more detail about the limitations on the AI. Then we could work around these limits from the start, saving a lot of time just trying to figure out what works best.