dryad pls

The tower awaits!

dryad pls

Postby carnegie » Tue Mar 07, 2017 7:37 am

Dryad, I really want to love you. You're a sweet early game healer coming in at a whopping lv5 and 20 magic when my starter fairy is only level 3 maybe. But please, please stop charging into packs of ogres. If I want you to do that, I will press the "KAMIKAZE BUTTON" aka the C key. Fairy understood that perfectly. Like, you have even less of an excuse than fairy did because you can just sit there spamming 0MP Quiet Prayer over and over until your MP regens enough to cast another Heal or Punish. You don't even have anything you can do in melee combat except die. Why must you force me to shift-move and constantly swap to keep you out of trouble?
carnegie
 
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Apr 12, 2016 2:30 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby Ferret » Tue Mar 07, 2017 3:41 pm

Hehe, okay, I'll see if I can figure out why this is happening. :) I have some idea, I think, but I'll investigate and see what's what. :)
User avatar
Ferret
 
Posts: 1785
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2014 3:18 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby geminimax » Tue Mar 07, 2017 4:23 pm

From my experience, demons with any kind of attack ability like to go to the front line when out of SP. It would be nice if demons with low strength/vitality and lack of closed ranged abilities just stayed in the back, even if that meant it would be doing nothing.
User avatar
geminimax
 
Posts: 63
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 6:18 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby Ferret » Tue Mar 07, 2017 5:08 pm

Yeah, this is definitely caused by having attack abilities... just not sure why Punish translates to "go melee while Punish is on CD" yet. :D
User avatar
Ferret
 
Posts: 1785
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2014 3:18 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby Ferret » Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:32 pm

This should be *significantly* improved in the next version.

Generally speaking, if an AI can reach all visible significant (i.e.: not minion) enemies with all of its enemy-preferred abilities already, it will be much less interested in moving forward. Not to say they NEVER will, but it is much lower on the priority chart in this case now.

The important key here is "all of its enemy-preferred abilities". Dryad will only move forward a little while it remains with just Punish (which is large range and doesn't require a clear line of fire to its targets). But if you teach her Chilling Touch, she'll be much, much more interested in closing the gap, pretty much acting like she does in the current build.

Probably will be some bugs to work out with this, of course, but that's what you guys are for. :D User reports are often the only way to catch AI bugs: way too many possible situations out there for me to catch them all. :)
User avatar
Ferret
 
Posts: 1785
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2014 3:18 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby Ferret » Sun Mar 19, 2017 12:06 am

I should mention that characters with attacks that require a clear line of fire may remain quite aggressive about working to get those lines of fire when they don't have anything better to do with their time. One of the AI's basic assumptions is that if it has an ability it's supposed to be trying to use it, or at least being ready to use it when the need arises.
User avatar
Ferret
 
Posts: 1785
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2014 3:18 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby MustAskQuestions » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:43 pm

Lets say a demon knows Bask, Cleanse , Mending and Flame Dart

this demon currently has 40/50 hp and 80/100 sp
player has 30/50 hp
another demon has 20/50 hp
last allied demon has 50/50 and has infection

and there is an ignited enemy demon in flame dart's range but not in bask's range

what is the priority chart of this demon in this circumstance ? Will it heal try to heal every one starting with lowest hp and then cure infection and then walk a bit to use bask before resulting to violence? or will it spam Flame Dart?
MustAskQuestions
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:16 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby Ferret » Wed Mar 22, 2017 4:14 am

Hey MustAskQuestions, and welcome to the forum. :D

A word problem huh? :D

I definitely could give an exact answer to this, but I confess the only way I can do that to both ask you for a ton of other information and then basically step through my code figuring it out. This would be pretty time consuming.

I can give you some basic facts though:

1) The 50/50 HP guy with Infection isn't going to be a high priority. Infection isn't considered serious in most cases if the target has nothing they need to recover anyway.
2) Summoners are considered more important for healing than other allies. (Note: The player is not signaled out here: all AIs treat all summoners the same in this regard. That said, the player here is not considered to be in grave danger yet, the 20/50 demon is, so the 20/50 would get the first Mending, followed by the player. The 40/50 demon itself would likely not be Mended yet: the AI knows Mending is a one shot deal until the Mended status drops, and won't be willing to "waste" it on a target who won't receive the full effect.
3) Generally speaking, the AI *hates* moving, and views it as a last resort. If the AI has a valid target for Mending and/or Flame Dart, it will generally want to use that, HOWEVER...
4) ...there is a fuzzy element that kicks in as a demon's SP gets low that causes it to begin to become more open to passing/moving in order to keep its options open/conserve SP.

What I would expect here, assuming the situation somehow doesn't change in any other way during these turns*, would be:

1) Turn 1: Mend 20 HP demon
2) Turn 2: Mend 30 HP summoner
3) Turn 3: Flame Dart the enemy demon
4) Turn 4: SP is getting low... might Flame Dart, might move up
5) Turn 5: Depending on distance and SP, Flame Dart, move closer/Bask
6) Too hard to predict this far out

I don't know how helpful this answer is for what you want, but this is probably the most in depth I can spend time on before the build is done. :D If there are specific points you'd like more info on, feel free to ask. :D

* - Probably worth adding the AI virtually never tries to "look ahead" in its considerations. Since many other characters act each turn and have a wide, wide variety of possible actions, it's not very effective to try to make multi-turn plans anyway: it's far too likely something will change and ruin whatever you were trying to set up. The major exceptions here are the movement AI and area-effect AI: movement AI code tries to keep allies clear of each others' lines of fire when needed, and area-effect AI will at least consider "waiting" a turn to fire an AE nuke if it thinks it can get more targets and doesn't feel it will likely lose any... but this is a VERY loose calculation and certainly not an exact science.
User avatar
Ferret
 
Posts: 1785
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2014 3:18 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby MustAskQuestions » Wed Mar 22, 2017 10:51 am

Based on this I think I will value Warmth over Bask for my healer. Since he won't be using it much when enemy is faraway.

Thanks.
MustAskQuestions
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:16 pm

Re: dryad pls

Postby Ferret » Fri Mar 24, 2017 5:32 am

Ferret wrote:This should be *significantly* improved in the next version.


Well, maybe. :P There are proving to be significant issues with it, at the moment. Depending on how tricky they prove, I may have to roll this back and do it in the next build (I don't want to delay the content build for this change, as important as I think it will be.)
User avatar
Ferret
 
Posts: 1785
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2014 3:18 pm

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 14 guests

cron