A good place to start would be by looking at the Deathwish AI, which essentially modifies every AI to harder levels. It's how I started to learn how to mod the AI, and while its approach is a little brute-force, it really does make the AI ships give players a harder time

And... later this week-ish, I'm going to be releasing a very radical mod where I've reduced the number of AIs to 10 (3 of each manuever type, 1 torpedo) ... and you can use that mod to study how to implement AIs in a much easier fashion than previous mods have done. It's really not very complicated to make an AI for FL... what was rather complicated was un-coupling all of the NPCs from the existing AIs. But I've done that, and now assigning an AI to a given npc_ship is uber-simple

Edited by - Argh on 4/19/2005 6:20:36 PM

you can also make the AI into specific attackers, such as a missilewhore (is that word allowed here?). okay, lets just replace it with missileboat.

NPC Missileboats are made by increasing the amount of missiles they launch, decreasing the amount of normal fire, and outfitting their ships with lots of projectiles. Simple, and effective. Combine it with other stuff and you can make a whole variety of groups.

If you wanna go even further, design a formation thats very powerful.

Arrange the ships so that theres a few in front loaded with shieldbusters, then another group behind them with torps/missiles. So when they attack, they damage you hard.

Play around with it, you can make all sorts of fun stuff.