Giving in to thread pressure.
minmay wrote:dpeg wrote:I believe the following approach is uncontroversial: uniques can get as good an AI as possible.
You believe incorrectly.
"Good" AI almost always makes encounters less interesting, not more; it removes options from the player. Monsters that never go into corridors? Great, now you're completely eliminating the player's ability to use terrain to their advantage! How interesting!
I thought it would go without saying -- but I believed incorrectly -- that AI improvements have to be applied judiciously. A pan lord who always start at the boundary of LOS, using haste and blink for that purpose, and spamming Fire and Ice Storms, element depending on your resistances would make near perfect AI, but lousy gameplay. Sure!
To counteract the onslaught of negativity and lack of imagination, I'll mention some successful instances of improved monster AI:
- Monsters making way for monsters of the same genus. This makes things more interesting tactically, and is great flavour-wise. Note that this kind of AI is painless enough that it can apply to all monsters, not just uniques.
- Ranged attackers trying to (a) reach LOS with you, but (b) keeping distance. This change made centaurs etc. more interesting because it has become less trivial to rid them of their ranged attack. Nonetheles,s it could be applied to all such monsters because you can generally still rely on terrain to deal with them, and in the rare cases where you can't, tools like fog and invisibility (in addition to the standard tools) are available.
- Maurice, the thief. He is using all kinds of nasty tricks, including theft, invisibility and blinking. It'd be very annoying if every humanoid could do this. Instead, it is interesting because it is the behaviour of a special opponent, a unique.
I brought up uniques, because most monsters in Crawl are dispensible. We should consider them as redshirts, and AI improvements can be done (like for ranged attackers) but should be pondered at length. On the other hand, with uniques we can run wild. Having a unique use controlled blink or silence or summoning etc. cleverly is okay. It may lead to a complicated or lengthy encounter, but that's what a unique is good for. Obviously, it can be overdone also for uniques, but then we either spawn it deeper or dress down its AI a bit.
If you think that "good AI makes monsters less interesting", i.e. the game worse, then you're shutting yourself out of one potential area where the game could be improved. This is not good -- this mode of thinking means stagnation.
To close with an example from Brogue monster AI, which surprised me a bit: Brogue monsters have perfect information. A fleeing monkey will never sleep and patiently run in circles. It is very hard to catch one, and it sounds as aggravating as it turns out to be if you try. Brogue centaurs shoot, and they keep distance: if you approach a step, they draw back a step. That is as evil as it sounds. Now, Brogue is well playable, so how can that be? For centaurs, they will approach if you wait behind a door (so in that regard their AI is intentionally not perfect). Apart from that, you're expected to use ranged damage, blink, beckoning (makes them come to you), discord (makes a monster attack other monsters, and centaurs always come in pairs) etc.
There are a number of reasons why none of this would work in Crawl, but it does teach us that we should design without fear. Bad ideas can and will be eradicated in the process -- at worst, when playing them. Good ideas will never see the light if we're afraid.