What worries me is fairness, I don't want an AI with "god eyes".
In a first attempt, the AI wasn't smart at all. It has a set of rules, that could be customized per possible enemy formation, that makes the AI acts as it has personality. For example: Wolves had a 80% prob of using Bite and 20% of using Tackle.
Then I tried to make the AI do things with sense, by coding a reusable algorithm, then I can use rules to give different enemies formations different personalities, like this one is more raw damage focused and this other more status ailment focused. To achieve this I was trying to make the AI player to collect stats about the human player skills and characters by looking at the log, my game has a console that logs everything like most RPGs (think Baldur's Gate). An attack looks like this in the console:
Wolf uses Bite
Mina takes 34 points of damage
Mina uses Fire Ball
Wolf takes 200 points of damage
The AI player has a function, run(), that is triggered each time a character it controls is ready to act. Then it analyzes the log and collect stats to two tables. One with stats per skills, like how many times it was used and how many times it did hit or was dodged, so the AI player knows what skills are more effective again the human player's team. These skills stats are per target. The second table is for human player's character stats. The AI player is constantly trying to guess the armor, attack power, etc, the enemies have.
But coding that is quite difficult so I switched to a simpler method. I gave the AI player "god eyes". It has now full access to human player's stats, two tables aren't required anymore as the real character structure is accessible to the AI player. But the AI player pretends that it doesn't have "god eyes" by, for example, acting like it ignores a character armor again fire, until a fire attack finally hit that character, then a boolean flag is set, and the AI player can stop pretending it doesn't know the target exact armor again fire.
Currently, the AI player can assign one of two roles to the characters it controls. Attacker and Explorer. More will be developed, like Healer, Tank, etc. For now there are Attackers and Explorers.
These roles has nothing to do with character classes. They are only for the use of AI player.
Explorer: will try to hit different targets with different skills to "reveal" their stats, like dodge rate, armor again different types of damage. They must chose which skills to use by considering all skills of all characters in the team, but I'm still figuring the algorithm so right now they are random but at least they take care to not try things that they already tried on targets that they already hit. Explorers will switch to attackers at some time during a battle.
Attacker: will try to hit the targets that can be eliminated in less turns. When no stats are known they will chose own skills based on raw power, once the different types of armors are known to the AI, they will switch to skills that exploits this info, if such skills are available to them. Attackers will try different skills if a skill chosen based on raw power was halved by half or more and all enemy armors aren't known yet, but won't try for the best possible skill if one that isn't halved by as much as half its power is already known. Attackers may be lucky an select the best possible skill in the first attempt, but I expect a formation to work better if there are some explorers.
This system opens up interesting gameplay possibilities. If you let a wolf escape, the next pack may come already knowing your stats, and that implies that their attackers will take better decisions sooner as the AI requires now less exploration.
So, the description of an enemy formation that you can encounter during the game may be:
PackOfWolves1: {
formation: ["wolf", null, "wolf", null, "wolf",
null, "wolf", null, "wolf", null,
null, null, null, null, null],
openStatrategy: ["Explorer", null, "Explorer", null, "Explorer",
null, "Attacker", null, "Attacker", null,
null, null, null, null, null]
}
What do you think about these ideas? Was something similar tried before? Would you consider unfair an AI with "god eyes"?
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