What's wrong with the AI?

[TxCForever]

I started playing this last week and I mostly enjoy the game so far a lot. And I say mostly because of one issue I have with the AI. In battles it seems completely random and really messes up any chance of using long term tactics. Let's take for example the final(?) battle you have on the first area against Alexander and later the giant worm. The way everyone picks their next target really feels like complete random. They don't attack their attacker, or the weaker member of the group or even the one closer to them. They just pick whatever target they feel like. For example the bad guys decide to stop attacking me and go for the worm. Ok, makes sense it is the biggest threat at least story wise. After a few turns of them hitting it with everything they have, the worm decides to ignore them completely and attack my group which never attacked it once, it's on the other side of the battle area and are pretty much completely healed at this point. How was anything was decided in the scenario I just described?

The game so far is filled with scenarios like this that don't make any sense. Also the abilities the mobs have many times don't seem to much their type. Like a random zombie would have everything from healing spells, to teleportation (I hate this, every single enemy group seems to have multiple units having teleportation spells, again messing up with any tactics you might had), to even ranged attacks. Why would I bother going for the high grounds if a random ass mob simply teleports me to the ground or just instantly teleports on my location?

Also to a less degree it really annoys me that entering a fight for the first time always puts you into a disadvantage. Like you never start from a neutral position and rush to position your units. Always the enemy is at the best possible locations for maximum damage, and you just try to survive the first few rounds so you can fight back. It's annoying at times.

[jonnin]

For example the bad guys decide to stop attacking me and go for the worm. Ok, makes sense it is the biggest threat at least story wise.

This is scripted (or, hacked into via the AI rules like making the worm biggest threat or whatever score they use inside it) into that fight I believe. So that makes the fight unusual.

The rest of what you say is pretty accurate though. The AI has some things it will do:
- it will ignore you if you have chained to an enemy (necro spell)
- it attacks anyone it thinks it can kill, including if multiple toons can reach and hit the target to kill it.
- etc

but what you are seeing looks like the flaws inherent in a rule-based system where the rules are incomplete. Eg, it lacks a proximity/last target/he hit me rule to have it sensibly keep fighting the guy next to it for max ap use; or more generally it lacks a cost benefit analysis of AP usage or if it has one, movement around the area is not penalized enough as wasteful.

Its very hard to code up an AI that does not have idiotic flaws, to be fair. Only the most simple games, eg shooters where is simple enough (get to cover and shoot at player) manage to appear 'smart' while anything with complex strategy is going to have exploits and flaws.
A glaring exploit, you can 'assassinate' one guy and run away, and the fight resets but the guy remains dead. Not talking about retreat to a waypoint, but just running too far too fast or turning invisible and running far enough. You can also trick the AI into taking hard to get to high ground and then getting out of range and it will stand there going 'hmm' for the rest of the fight.

Or, to quote a book I had to read in high-school:
Hes not bad, I just can't think of enough things to tell him not to do.

[TxCForever]

I play on classic mode.

Jonnin I don't remember having this kind of issue with other turned based RPG/strategy games. They have a set of parameters to follow in battle and usually depending on the difficulty level they can ignore some of them (like on easy an enemy will attack stronger characters or ignore near death ones).

Distance for example is usually something important for the AI to choose who to attack. But I've seen cases where an enemy will lose whole turns trying to reach a party member that didn't really do anything to justify that.

Health of a character. This is usually the one they are more faithful to. They will attack a near killed party member even ignoring immediate threats to their lives (something I don't really like, it feels too video gamey, if you have a man ready to kill you you won't ignore him to attack someone else).

Turn sequence. Another that feels not a factor. The AI doesn't seem to prefer attacking one that his turn is after his from what I've seen.

Power level of party member: I would assume they would either avoid, or gang up on a strong character but it doesn't feel they do.

At the end I still feel like it should have some basic rules and work from there. If they have an enemy in sight they should prefer attacking him until one of the two die. If they can choose between two, they should prefer the one closer to death or the one weaker to their attacks. A character out of their field of view shouldn't even be a factor to them, let alone ignoring more immediate threats to attack him.

I get this kind of things would make the game more predictable but maybe it should.


Lostgreencats: I don't agree with so many units have basically teleporting. Not simply moving a bit further or gaining a few extra action points, but straight on jump nearly from one side of the battlefield to the other with no real consequences (in fact the action point usage for teleporting is so small it's barely a factor). Simply because you can't really plan against that at least on your first attempt at a battle.

As for positioning yeah it is a major factor but many times you can't tell when there's going to be a battle. And even then many times you have to play for a while to know what skills the enemy has so you can counter. Feels a bit cheap.

[jonnin]

Jonnin I don't remember having this kind of issue with other turned based RPG/strategy games.

The exact issues vary.
I can't recall another that had so much run across the map problems, agreed. And I agree that having 2/3 of the enemy warping all over the map at will is hard to deal with.

But I've played a couple of D&D based ones where an enemy caster will turn and run from a rogue, earning a backstab that kills it. Or where drinking a cure 10 damage potion spawns an attack of opportunity that has a 95% chance of doing more than twice the healed amount right back to them! Or where an AI casts buff spells on a summoned enemy that despawns when you cap the owner-caster guy. Or shooting someone in melee range (allows target to get a free attack). Some of the real gems, the AI will aoe itself half to death.

I can't recall too many fantasy/rpg 'pool of radiance' style games like this that did not have AI problems of some sort. I'm trying to come up with one that did not, and can't think of a one, honestly.

[LukanGamer]

yes ai is a mess well known.

[Lee]

Definitely has its issues but it's not the worst I've seen in an RPG like this. It does seem gamey that the AI might ignore what's directly in front of it to attack another target, like a mage ignoring the guy in front of him to cast on another enemy who has no magic shield left and stun him etc, but that's exactly what a player would do to you and exactly what I do to the AI, because it's the optimal choice and IMO keeps you on your toes and can catch you out. If it didn't do this, the game would be even easier and people would say the AI is stupid lol.

The worm thing in that fight seems to change positions randomly in my experience, I've seen it go under and pop back up literally right next to the original position where the enemy are, other times it goes for me.

Quick save is your friend and after playing for a while you can usually tell there's probably hidden enemies in certain locations so you can position your guys and edge in to trigger it.

[jonnin]

I've seen it go under and pop back up
-- I believe it qualifies that move as an aoe attack and it tries to maximize the # of things hit. That is often right where it just was, because Alex's goons are going to be melee on it.

[Dexter]

As You play You'll learn what abilites most mobs have, most of them are basic abilites from each class(or whatever it is called).

There are few abilites really silly, like pretend to be dead(or whatever). Yeah, guy with 100% of defences and hp drops dead without reason, lets just ignore him, makes sense.

Sometimes AI also does not know what path to take, sometimes they will walk into the fire just to stand beside You, sometimes they will aaaaaaaaaaall the way around just to avoid fire/poison.

AI is wonky like in most games but I disagree to make it as bad as You describe, perhaps my game played out little bit different.

[rasmasyean]

In Tactician Honour at least...

Actually Alex fight doesn't have them always concentrating on the worm. I reloaded this a few times to try stuff, etc. It appears if your guys are in proximity, you will "more likely" get targeted by that enemy. I'm guessing there's a "roll" going on in most cases. And the worm switches targets between you and Alex as well. It seems like it may take "opportunity" to tunnel where there are grouped units. So if you're bunched it will more likely hit you with that attack it seems. It's similar to Whirlwind where a warrior will run into the middle of your group. The computer is really good at positioning btw, even when they want to make you waste an AP because you have to move a smidgen to get closer or sight around a corner/cliff/etc.

Ultimately, I think the rolls favor "targets of opportunity". Like I've seen recently an enemy may cast Acid Spell on Shield-less character, then immediately switch to Base Attack a Leadership character. It would even do this kinda thing sometimes if they've taken like half the first character's vitality. In this case it looks like the Acid Spell will 100% hit the much lower armored character, while the Base Attack has a "better chance" to hit a low dodge character (Leadership excludes Aura unit). It similarly applies to Elemental attacks, especially combined attacks where there's a favor to target a character with both low dodge AND low resists -- in above example case, it would be the Leadership character. Thus exploiting this mechanic, there's a good chance that character can Shield Reflect say...Elemental Ranger enemies which will kill themselves via preferred targeting. And since the AI ignores potion effects, you can pop resist potions to heal from it.

Like in the above example, if a character is outside the Aura, there seems to be a preference for the enemy to "go out of the way" to target the outlier because at that moment, it's "weaker" than the rest. Then moving character back within the Aura will change it's attractiveness. But if it has to run too far...maybe not. But I have seen it path around my bunched characters/objects to melee the Leader though, so I guess it depends on how far it has to run. That's also evident by the your ability to place a "Tank" like a Pet way up front to keep them busy I guess. Though one can also conjecture that Pets are usually weaker than characters too. But it works with normal tanky characters too to a certain extent I think.

This is my observations anyway as I don't really know the math behind it for sure.

Regarding high-ground, like mentioned, you can exploit their preference for it. Not just by getting them to go "hmmm", but trapping them in a Surface. They seem to like to stay there or maybe even move to a clean corner where they lose a bit of AP. In this case, even though you would take more damage, you get to put them at disadvantage as well as make them attack less. As long has you have enough ability to heal or otherwise mitigate their damage.

[DocCovington]

The engine is pretty bad altogether, the AI isn't the only issue. Camera and combat system are horrific. One of the worst game engines I have seen, which is sad come to think that Neverwinter Nights was released 18 years ago, Dragon Age: Origins 11 years ago, and both excell in pretty much all departments (except maybe for physics and special effects).

Most CRPGs released within the past ten years are a disaster, because they have outdated approaches with very limiting camera and movement, a poorly designed UI and (sometimes, like here) combat system, and all in all play anything but smoothly and intuitively. I blame the publishers who these days don't give devs the time needed to create a perfect game.

[rasmasyean]

Originally posted by dexter411:

As You play You'll learn what abilites most mobs have, most of them are basic abilites from each class(or whatever it is called).

There are few abilites really silly, like pretend to be dead(or whatever). Yeah, guy with 100% of defences and hp drops dead without reason, lets just ignore him, makes sense.

Sometimes AI also does not know what path to take, sometimes they will walk into the fire just to stand beside You, sometimes they will aaaaaaaaaaall the way around just to avoid fire/poison.

AI is wonky like in most games but I disagree to make it as bad as You describe, perhaps my game played out little bit different.

Yeah, Loremaster helps predict their spell kit, but I've seen like a Backlash come from a Warfare character or something like that too. Either it's a mislabel bug or it's intended as a surprise?

But the AI is pretty dumb sometimes. I've killed all the Act 4 boss fights (except end) with like 80% Fire Surface damage by making them run around with Teleport spell while tanking all their hits. I got it to like 250 damage (though it could be higher if I really pumped it), and they just run to their deaths.

[TxCForever]

That specific battle with Alexander (I stand mostly to this one because it was the first I think with 3 factions on the same battle so the AI behavior was more apparent) I won because Alexander and his goons decided to focus entirely on the worm and the worm entirely on them (again no clear indicator why), so I just waited for one of them to remain so I could kill easily. But it felt weird for Alexander to cross the entire battle area to attack the worm when on other occasions he would choose targets at random. The funniest thing was when they teleported one of my characters in the sea (they do that a lot in that battle) the wraith goes there to finish him and suddenly it decides to leave that character and go behind Alexander to kill the worm.

It just feels like the developers decided everything being completely random except the initial placement of units on the map would be a more dynamic experience but for me at least it kinda kills long term strategies.