UEF Commander's Notes on Activating limited AI programming in individual units and defenses

The battlefield is hectic. For the first few minutes after warping into a location, it's possible to micromanage single units at a time. However, once the battlefield reaches a point where you're executing several different assaults simultaneously, often while coordinating those assaults with allied commanders, it helps to be able to lessen the number of tasks on the list. To that end, all of our robotic warriors, from the Mech Marine Light Assault Bot to the Fat Boy Mobile Factory, have a built-in system for gaining combat experience.

Each time a unit confirms a kill, it records the diagnostic information in the unit leading up to the kill, and stores it in a memory bank on-board the unit, ranging from the target type to the weapon used in the kill to range and number of rounds fired. All of this information is stored on-board, and when enough is accumulated, the unit gains a slightly larger degree of autonomy. Not enough to have it gallivanting off across the battlefield on its own, but enough to make it more efficient in combat. Placing shots better, slight deviations in maneuvering to make it harder to take a hit.

However, trials showed that, despite the near-uniformity of each individual unit of the same type, the fact that they are created under battlefield ( conditions means that there is enough of a difference in each individual unit of the same type, be it two Snoops or two Summits, that the information cannot be reliably transferred between them.