Alien always target one soldier over all others

[Eegxeta]

If the aliens can see this one soldier on my team they will shoot at him. It doesn't matter if there are way better targets available, like the guy standing next to the alien, they will shoot, It doesn't matter if they are standing on the other side of the map and have such a low chance of hitting that my guys aren't even shooting back they will shoot. They don't take aimed shots ether it is usually three round burst or full-auto. I have no idea why they are going with full-auto when they are standing on the other side of the map. Makes me wonder if they can run out of ammo. So pretty much this guy has almost as many purple hearts as missions I've gone on.

I'm a little surprised wasn't able to find this anywhere.

[MonkeyHead]

IIRC Aliens will target wounded troops, and maybe troops with lower health, often the fresh meat brought in to replace last missions dead.

Aliens will run out of ammo and reload - pretty sure I have seen this evident from plasma rifle fire - after a few (3?) bursts of auto fire, there are 2 rounds left to be fired before reloading. Eventually, I have seen plasma rifle toting Taman and Sheevar drop thier rifle and rush with a plasma blade or grenades, should a combat go on for long enough (often on maps making closing in impractical).

[Unisol]

I've noticed this 'concentrated fire' behavior too. In my experience, aliens were targeting soldier with highest ordinal number possible(#8, then #7, etc).

This topic should probably be moved to bugs subforum and issue should be filed in bug tracker.

[Telok]

In the alien AI there is a check to see if a target is worth shooting at. This is a good thing. This check also calculates the probable damage and if it can kill the soldier. You probably do the same thing while deciding targets, check your hit percentages then estimate how many shots will hit and figure if you can kill the target. Then the AI prioritizes possible targets based on the kill chance and maximum probable damage.

But the AI can see the health points of you soldiers.

If the AI can probably kill one of your soldiers than that soldier becomes a very high priority target. I find that smoke grenades are a very good solution to this. A soldier in smoke is not in line of sight to anything not directly adjacent to him. This skews the kill probabilities away from the wounded soldier, protecting him because the alien has to have enough TUs to move next to the soldier and shoot him.

[Eegxeta]

Well see here is the thing it only ever targets the one guy if they can see him. I had an alien standing next to one of my soldier who was injured and he targeted and went full-auto on that one guy, who was standing halfway across the map had decent cover and was not injured. They generally use full-auto even though they have no chance of hitting the guy. The aliens generally don't move closer ether most of the time they spend all their time units on shooting even though they are shooting from a ridiculous range. 

[DarkRain]

Savegame? That would at the very least be very amusing to see.

[Eegxeta]

You mean it doesn't happen to you?

[Telok]

You mean it doesn't happen to you?

I can't recall anything like that. What version are you playing?

[Eegxeta]

The September 25th 2.5 dev nightly build.

[RealSpirit]

In the alien AI there is a check to see if a target is worth shooting at. This is a good thing. This check also calculates the probable damage and if it can kill the soldier.

imho they dont use the best hit chance, they aim at the least healthy target (that is in sight) and even try to move around another corner if it is in sight then. can be pretty annoying on maps where all the team is "in sight" at the start of the map like the one with the beach hotel.

imho someone should improve the behaviour there, not completely changing it (because it is not bad in terms of evil AI), but it should value closer targets at least a bit more, as more damage would be dealt there.