AI thoughts

[Bhruic]

Going to start off with a request - if we could please discuss this without blame or attacks, that would be appreciated.

With that said, I'm curious as to get people's feedback on the current state of the game's combat AI. As an example, I'm going to use the Soothsayer's "Loki's Touch" ability - the ability that allows them to "enrage" an enemy stack. There are other equally illustrative examples, but this one will suffice.

First, an analysis of how that currently works in the game: The unit that gets enraged is considered by all enemy units to be a hostile unit. So not only will the unit that receives this ability attack previously friendly units, those same units will actively attack it as well. Furthermore, units seem to prioritize attacking that unit over attacking your own units. Now, if the same ability is used on a unit in your army, I believe that most players would agree that they would not actually attack their unit that got hit with the ability. Indeed, they would likely do their best to minimize the damage that the unit both takes and inflicts.

The question, then, becomes, "Should the AI behave in a similar fashion?" There are two ways to approach the question. The first is from a humanistic point of view - do we want the AI to try and behave as a human would behave? Humans are capable of coming up with lots of creative ways to handle situations that the AI will never be capable of, but in situations like this, it certainly can approach the situation from the same viewpoint. And that viewpoint would simply be "try and minimize the damage of the situation". The AI won't be as good as you or I would be at it, but it definitely could be better.

The second viewpoint would be from a gameplay perspective. And that would simply state that the whole point of having such an ability is to cause problems like that for the AI. The skill as a whole would be substantially weaker if all the AI units completely ignored the enraged unit and went about attacking your units as usual. The AI shouldn't react as a human would react because that removes a great deal of the power of such abilities.

Personally, I'm rather on the fence between the two arguments, as I can see the appeal of both. So I'm trying to get feedback on what people believe the AI should do in this or similar situations.

Again, please keep answers constructive and on-topic. Posts such as "The AI just sucks" aren't going to be helpful.

Thanks!