Ship and Combat balance?

I was messing around with the play balance spreadsheets, and another thought occurred to me, we might be doing this all backwards.

The problem is that the AI is really good at aiming. It calculates the players vector with precision and hits the player with ease.

Now, the player has a really hard time doing those prediction calculations, and can't hit the AI worth a damn. The AI sucks at dodging, the player is just a poor shot.

This is the biggest imbalance between the player and the AI. To fix that, we have been trying to change the accel values of the player ships. But that opens up a whole nightmare of problems because the player needs really different values than the AI to allow the player to dodge.

So basically, the AI is really good at shooting, and then to fix it, we make the player super good and dodging. I think, instead, we should make the AI as lousy at shooting as the player.

I think this can be done by making the AI weapons fire slower bolts (easier to dodge). Or (not sure we can do this) increase the jitter of AI weapons. Or (I know we can do this) remove the jitter from player weapons.

It might be that we discover that 99% of our issues go away once the AI is doing swooping attacks. I guess we will see.

I will do some experiments along these lines once I get my install working again. Sounds like a nice solution. I have an uncomfortable feeling that the jitter of AI weapoins cannot be changed. I seem to recall testing this during rebalancing of the combat.