So, I’ve been playing Amethyst after not having played since…whatever 1.2 was called, and I’m enjoying it a lot. One thing bugs me though: it feels too easy to stay alive (at least once you figure out how to stop running out of fuel). A lot of the reason for this, I feel, is that the enemies are really easy to dodge. When they chase you, they steer towards your current location. This means that if, say, a baddie starts out 100 yards ahead and 100 yards to starboard of you, and you just steam in a straight line past it, it’d have to be a fair amount faster than you in order to catch you, because the path it takes ends up being so long. But if the baddie were to head not towards where you are, but towards the point 100 yards in front of you, then it could catch you much more easily. It seems to me that intelligent, veteran zee-pirates, not to mention giant, bloodthirsty zee-creatures, should know how to do this.
I guess my question/proposal is this: would it be possible to have at least the harder enemies use this sort of predictive behavior? To be mathematical about it: instead of the baddies aiming at x(t), your position at a given time, they could aim at x(t) + v(t)*dt. That is, your position plus your current velocity times some suitable time interval (i.e. where you will be at t+dt, assuming you don’t change your heading).