I don't think it'll make it significantly easier, all things considered. You're giving up a lot of time where the ship can't otherwise move or fire, and then if you just try to jump behind, you have small ships entirely on their own. You'd have to start far away from the target ship, then jump in behind it and hope to do something before the enemy ship turns around, meaning you need to keep them otherwise engaged. It's situational. Yes, sometimes what you mention will work, but that's kind of the point. As it is, without other abilities, there's almost never any reason at all to use smaller ships. Considering cooldowns and everything, you're not just gonna be able to keep blinking around behind enemy ships, though. While stuff like microjumps and single-unit retreat do offer tools to the player, they're tools that have to be used properly, they're not just guaranteed benefits- if you start retreating or microjumping at the wrong time, you just wasted several seconds of that ships firepower and potentially lose a ship you may not have otherwise. That happened to me in my latest EotH LP episode with a Syndic. With microjumps, if you try the strategy of throwing units behind larger units but don't do it with enough support or micro it enough, you won't even have enough firepower to penetrate the shields and you'll just be making your ships easier to pick off.
More generally, anything we add to the game is almost always going to be used more efficiently by the player than the AI, from mechanics like this down to stuff that's as simple as different unit types or even weapon types that the player will know how to target better than the AI does, or the fact that pathfinding inherently favours players. Some features the AI can use, some they can't, some they'd never be able to use optimally, but it's not all a one-for-one thing. That's why strategy game AI difficult doesn't tend to be gated just by use of the mechanics themselves. If the game becomes to easy because of this stuff, we have other levers we can pull to make it harder.
Holistically, compared to 2.1, the economy is far more difficult for the player to manage, the AI properly builds and groups fleets instead of the trickle, and from the tactical level, among other things, SSD spam is no longer as guaranteed for the player, the defending forces don't just group under the shipyards facing backwards, and we're working on removing the same related behaviour with defense Platforms. We're also trying to figure out some algorithms to make the AI use corvettes and fighters/bombers better (something that, if it doesn't bog the game down too much, will be a huge advantage for the AI that the player can't have considering they can process more commands at once, unless the player makes copious use of the pause function). So, while trying to make sure the game isn't too easy or difficult is a concern, I wouldn't be too worried about the impact of any individual ability like this. Numbers can always be tuned, as well.
Topic: ICW/FotR: Microjump Preview (Read 5150 times)