Target active link demon for 'kill' link

[Sandman25]

I have just failed to link with modified Malingee because I didn't expect that 4th Frost Ring would prefer to target another demon instead of almost dead linked demon as the spell did during previous 3 casts.
My fault in being too impatient of course but there is some room for improvement here I think.

[Ferret]

Huh. I wonder why it switched in the first place.. that seems like a fairly straightforward case for the AI to get right. Only reasonable possibility would be if there was no way to hit the malingee without hitting an ally, but you'd have noticed if that was the case anyway.

And no, it's not your fault. UI bugs are never the user's fault.

At any rate, I'll look into it. Thanks for the report.

[Sandman25]

Maybe it is specific to Frost Ring, the spell always affected at least 2 enemy demons (sometimes 3).

[Ferret]

Hmm... could be. The AI prefers to hit multiple targets with most AE abilities: it takes quite a good evaluation to make it use one on a single-target... but being a capture link target presumably near death should be more than enough to override the concern.

[Sandman25]

Is the AI too smart? Maybe it calculated that the Malingee would survive even with highest damage roll so it decided to damage other monsters instead since Malingee would heal to full HP on next turn anyway? Only myself could damage the Malingee at this point.

[Ferret]

Hmm.. that's possible... but the capture link target modifier is pretty heavy! It shouldn't be possible to overcome it so easily.

Then too, the AI isn't actually too concerned with the future (things like it healing at the end of the link) The official position of the AI is that, between not knowing turn order and there usually being 7 other combatants or so, it's not possible to make intelligent decisions about the future, so it doesn't try. This may sound short-sighted, but it usually works out.

[Sandman25]

I see. Sorry, I forgot I can send you a save file, I will try not to forget next time if it happens again.

[Ferret]

By the time it happened, it was probably too late, the game is REALLY touchy about saving quickly after important things like failed capture links. Save files *are* very, VERY good at lock up/crashes though: the game hard stops on saving after almost such event, so you usually have a save file that is right before the thing happened.

[Sandman25]

I see, anti-cheating everywhere

[Ferret]

Hah. I wouldn't go that far. I lock the door, so to speak, but the windows aren't exactly barred. It's pretty much an open secret at this point that you can copy the save folder fairly freely.

To be blunt, it is an arms race I am destined to lose. You can't really have a 100% anti-cheat game that is run locally anyway, trying is just wasted effort. I do enough to discourage completely casual heat of the moment cheating and leave it at that. I'm not swearing to never go further, but I admit "going further" would be more likely removing leaderboards than anything else: as I said, it's a battle you can't win with a game played entirely on the user's system anyway. In the end, they have all the control.