Group attacks
We spent Chapter 4, Crowd Chaos, and Chapter 5, Crowd Control, looking at group behaviors, and we won't go through a full demo of attacking in groups here, but we should discuss a few main points. With the demo in this chapter, we can add more ships and they will attack in a fairly believable manner. However, there are ways to make it better by considering other enemy positions.
When the enemy ships choose a cover position, a simple method for a group is to track each position if an enemy is already there. Then, when selecting a cover position, each enemy won't go to one that is occupied, making the enemies more diverse in their attacks.
Similarly, when attacking the player, instead of just going as close as possible, the attack pattern can be coordinated. Instead of just going directly to the player, a set of points can be defined radially around the player, so enemies surround and attack it. The key to these group behaviors is enemies taking into account the behavior of other...
