The two-ship rule
A day after the bots learned to shoot, the first report landed: they're too good now — they hammer you out of the sky. The obvious move was to walk the gunnery back. Before doing that we did what we did last time: measured it. The measurement said the gunnery isn't the problem. The ganging up is.
A stand-in who flies like the report reads
The playtest harness from the gunnery patch got a new instrument: a simulated human dropped into a full 36-plane match. The bots genuinely believe he's human — the ace hunts him first, vics adopt him as a target, every human-facing doctrine fires. We flew three of him: two on the regular bot brain at novice and average skill, and one greenhorn who flies the way the complaint reads — straight cruise lines, naive pure pursuit, no jinking, never breaks off. Ten sim-minutes per run, a dozen seeds per configuration, counting every hit he takes, every bot committed to him, and the seconds between the first hit of a fatal engagement and the kill.
What the probe actually saw
Not what we expected. Even the greenhorn, parked inside the furball ~80% of his life, is ignored most of the time — target stickiness keeps the bots on the victims they already have. His average life is minutes long. But when attention finally lands on him, it lands all at once: a vic leader picks him up, both wingmen adopt the leader's target, stickiness locks all three in until somebody is dead — and the probe watched a player go from 85 HP to 41 in seconds with four bots committed. Long stretches of peace, then an instant, unsurvivable pile-on. That is exactly what “they hammer you” feels like from inside the cockpit.
The nerf we didn't ship
We A/B'd the candidates head to head: fully reverting the gunnery, giving bots their old broken aim only against humans, and capping how many bots may fight one human at once. The revert was strictly worse — it cost 15–20% of the bot-versus-bot gun kills the gunnery patch bought (re-deadening the skies) while helping the greenhorn less than the cap did. The cap kept the lively skies intact, cut the damage the greenhorn takes per minute by about a third across twenty seeded matches — and, by construction, ended the three-and-four-ship gangs outright.
Doctrine, not charity
So the fix is a rule any air force would recognize: no more than two bots commit to one human at a time. A third fighter looking for work picks a different fight, and a wingman won't adopt his leader's target past the cap. Two honest exceptions: a bot already on you stays on you (breaking contact mid-fight would look broken), and self-defense always passes — shoot a bot and he will fight you back no matter how crowded you are. Nothing about the bots' aim, range, or trigger discipline changed; when you do get shot at, the rounds are as real as yesterday. You'll just never look over your shoulder at a whole flight of them again.
The two-ship rule ships as config (bots.maxAttackersPerHuman),
the probe harness stays in the tree gated behind an environment flag,
and a regression test now pins the cap, the self-defense exemption, and
the wingman's manners — so the next balance question starts from
a measurement too.