WhiteMage Wrote:Here are a few additional statements on bad AI and missing functionality. I only talk about battle AI and we should not mix in non-battle AI:
4. AI spell selection is suboptimal.
5. AI enemy target selection is poor.
6. AI wastes too much mana in battle for no reason: losing battles, winning battles, node battles (AI's spells are dispelled).
7. AI fights out losing battles, which wastes units (in addition to mana).
(snip)
14. AI does not use the move and shoot tactics.
(snip)
That's quite a lot of issues.
I agree that we should not mix non-battle AI.
Your statements seem to refer to areas for improvement and are rather general IMO.
Can we narrow them a bit down?
At this time I do not think we are ready to rewrite everything from scratch and I do not like to become stuck at chipping at a rock that is too large.
So I propose to single out issues in which AI can improve and make them more explicit.
So for 4: which spells are used suboptimal and under which circumstances?
For 5: same thing - when and where?
I propose to postpone 6 and 7 until AI is a lot better than it is now.
I'm jumping ahead and singling out 14 (move and shoot), which I think is a good one, since we can probably do something about it reasonably soon.
Can we zoom in on what AI does wrong exactly, and what it should do?
When should we move in and shoot, and when should we move away and shoot?
A variant is 14b (wait or move and attack).
This is to make suppression counters work for AI as much as they work for us.
We still need to formulate the proper strategy for it though.
Can we catch that in a set of simple rules?
--I like ILSe