Booting up AI

Yesterday I bought this book and read it. It was a good read. I feel almost ready to design some AI now. There's a bit more theory I'd like to refresh on, mostly around min-max searches, which were not really covered since the focus was on real-time decision making, but overall I feel ready to start laying down some ideas. Legacy is going to be impossible to analyze in closed form, due to the branching factors, not to mention randomness, so a chess-like min-max approach isn't really applicable, but I think short term goals like "get in range," "deal damage", "avoid being surrounded" are pretty appropriate.

My overall goal for the mission AI, well, I keep waffling. On one hand it would be best to have creatures that acted like creatures, and on the other hand it would nice to have an opponent that played like a human. It's a PvE or PvP kind of question. Funny, when GMing a tabletop game, I landed squarely in the PvE camp, but playing Descent for a couple of years has altered my outlook.

Descent actually handles the problem in a few ways. The threat mechanic and cards give the overlord to feel powerful in a very mechanically constrained way, and restrictions on monster movement and spawning, combined with the incentive to slow down the player, and naturally expendable monsters, tend to make the monsters feel pretty much like you want them to in a fantasy game: dumb but dangerous.

I guess we'll see where Legacy ends up! I guess my goal is going to be to make the AI as good as I can, but to give it goals and abilities that lead it away from "turtling" and towards an aggressive, "mindless evil" kind of feeling. What that means in practice, I think, is giving it goals like "deal as much damage this turn as you can." and prioritizing that above "survive to next turn."