AI and its use of combat spells and aircraft in FfH2... Thoughts...

[Ket]

One of our designers and a active member of the mod community came up with an interesting way to mitigate the issues we are seeing with the AI not being able to deal with load based weapons.
(Missiles loaded onto aircraft or subs)

He noted that FfH uses an interesting system, and while I have been playing FfH2 a bit (wonderful mod by the way, you guys should all be proud) a missile attack could be "simulated" or "abstracted" similar in effort to a fireball style spell, ranged attack. We where wondering in your experience if the AI uses ranged attack "spells" with any effeciency and since you have the most experience with having the AI deal with this, if it is difficult to implement.

I hope this post is not out of place, just looking for Kael's and the groups experience with making the AI attack from a distance.

 

[Kael]

One of our designers and a active member of the mod community came up with an interesting way to mitigate the issues we are seeing with the AI not being able to deal with load based weapons.
(Missiles loaded onto aircraft or subs)

He noted that FfH uses an interesting system, and while I have been playing FfH2 a bit (wonderful mod by the way, you guys should all be proud) a missile attack could be "simulated" or "abstracted" similar in effort to a fireball style spell, ranged attack. We where wondering in your experience if the AI uses ranged attack "spells" with any effeciency and since you have the most experience with having the AI deal with this, if it is difficult to implement.

I hope this post is not out of place, just looking for Kael's and the groups experience with making the AI attack from a distance.

Talchas is the bext guy to answer this since he wrote the spellcode.

If you look in Civ4SpellInfos.xml (or in the editor) you will see a Spell Flavors section for each spell which has settinds (amoung other things) the damage and range of the spell. These are what the ai uses to determine between a big creature with a range of 1 or a smaller creature with a greater range.

The result being that the AI is decent with spellcasting. But it is bad at getting itself in good positions to spellcast (some work is still needed there). Thats more of a challenge for us because we have built mages to be glass cannons (high offence, low defence) but may not be as big of a deal in your mod.

The AI also doesn't understand that it is safer at the extent of its range then right next to its target (we took care of the ai attacking its target directly by making them defensive only).

So the AI is okay, but not wonderful, yet.