ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Tactical AI could be expanded to allow for some more factors, which would (theoretically) help the AI to make better decisions. My ideas:

Give some talents negative AI values, where appropriate. For example, Rush would have a negative value for "escape", as it brings you from far away to next to the target. This would (in theory) help prevent enemy ranged attackers from closing on you (as they often do with movement infusions).

This would also include sustained talents, for example, Invisibility could have MANA = -2 added to its AI information, so it isn't used when mana recovery is valued.

Make deactivating a sustain available to the AI, and give it the inverse of the AI for activation. For example, deactivating Invisibility would give AI numbers of DEFEND = -2, ESCAPE = -2, MANA = 2. Note that deactivating Invisibility becomes attractive to the AI if it needs mana much more than it needs to escape or defend.

Thoughts/criticism/ideas? I don't have a very strong understanding of the tactical AI system, so this may be way off.

Good questions, lukep. I took a look at deactivating sustains and think it would be fairly trivial to do. We could just flip the signs of whatever tactical values come out of the talent, although we would need to set a special flag in the talent to turn this behavior off in the case of deactivating mindslayer sustains. And when people start screaming because mindslayer NPCs actually spike auras... I will point at you.

In regards to negative tactical weights, that is perfectly valid as well. This should only go on talents that actively drain a resource like Invisibility used to (not sure if it still does), and even then it should be a very small weight, say 0.5 or so. Keep in mind that you need to compare the MANA value with the ones on Manasurge, etc., since those are obviously better talents to use when you need mana. Really good ideas, and I'll poke at it a bit.

Getting a little off topic, I am going to be working on GR again know that 7DRL is over. Are you interested in helping out there again? During my 7DRL I reworked tactical AI to use tactical information directly from AtomicEffects instead of on the talent, and I am pretty excited about the results. That tactical AI differs from ToME in another significant way, which is that instead of identifying the greatest need and then doing the talent with the greatest weight in that need, the 7DRL tactical AI uses a linear combination of need * weight for each talent, resulting in the talent that fits multiple needs best if you have multiple wants. I think this is what players do, thoughts on that?

That sounds like a good tactical AI system (both the slight improvements to ToME's as well as GR's unique one). As for contributing to the module, I'd love to, but with my free time recently reduced, I'm not sure how much I will be able to.

lukep wrote:That sounds like a good tactical AI system (both the slight improvements to ToME's as well as GR's unique one). As for contributing to the module, I'd love to, but with my free time recently reduced, I'm not sure how much I will be able to.

Well ideas like this are one way. Keep them coming, and if you want to design more specific things just post or drop in IRC. Cheers!