> commit 86f13bc905b15e990388d634829aac13b38f1f8d > Author: Raphael Langella <raphael.lange...@gmail.com> > Date: Tue Jan 18 23:56:17 2011 +0100 > > Better movement AI for ranged attackers. > > When you leave the LOS of a monster with ranged attacks, it will try to > regain > a line of fire instead of coming straight after you. > > This is the end of the "duck behind a corner" strategy. Next CDO update is > going to be fun ;)
Interesting stuff, as Robert said. I am a bit late to the party, but let me still say something. First, the new behaviour seems to be okay in actual play (feedback on IRC), which is awesome. Second, there are limits to how far we _want to_ (as opposed to _could_) push monster AI. An example: in the smartest world, centaurs would always keep their distance (i.e. ran away instead of towards you), disperse (so that every can shoot) and retreat if their arrows are gone. This might be "realistic" but it'd be horribly unfun. So we don't want that (and Raphael's commit did nothing like this, of course.) I used to be a proponent of better AI no matter what but then Erik told me that we really should regard the staple monsters (those which come up in large numbers) as "redshirts": they're many, they're dumb (this means in particular reliable), and they're killed in masses by the player. We should definitely keep the new AI in the game. We might need to be flexible about which monsters to apply it to. Standout monsters (fitting uniques, rare/strong threats) are always okay. Those can get all the AI wa can afford, by the way. Lone centaurs regularly come up on D:4, are not too rare on D:5. If we think that Raphael's change makes them too hard [1], then we could step back, and for example, only give the new AI to centaur warriors, or to yaktaurs. [1] I realise that the commit might make it _easier_ for players to survive early centaurs because they might not follow you after ducking behind a corner. Keep up the good work! David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer-- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE (a $49 USD value)! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! Download using promo code Free_Logger_4_Dev2Dev. Offer expires February 28th, so secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsight-sfd2d _______________________________________________ Crawl-ref-discuss mailing list Crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crawl-ref-discuss
