Hey Everyone! This week, most of the team continues to crank on Alpha 17 and its various building related features. Albert, however, has been busy absorbing all your Alpha 16 feedback, and he is continuing to work on combat: in particular, on making combat AI smarter. He pushed some of his changes to A16 as a patch last week, but there’s still quite a few more optimizations he wants to make, and bugs he wants to fix. Let’s take a closer look at his recent work!
Smarter Combat
Recap from the video:
- Archers now kite enemies. This means: if an enemy closes with them, they fall back to create some distance so they can shoot at range, and not get hit.
- Since monsters pick targets based on distance from target and damage dealt by target, this helps archers avoid getting hit, especially w/ a tank along to hold aggro. Also, this motivates you to make fast people archers; maybe they can get away from their foe before having to pause to get a shot in!
- Parties using the defend banner to hold a location eat and sleep when they are hungry and tired. This happens as long as no active combat is happening, and it means that you can now set a party to defend a location, and trust that they will not starve to death while doing so. However, it is now your responsibility to make sure that food and beds are near enough to the defense banner that your troops can take care of themselves without having to wander off too far.
- Defense banners now also leash people in parties to them when placed. Unlike attack banners, which basically say: attack anyone between here and there, pursuing if necessary, defense banners now mean: defend this area only and do not leave it.
- If an enemy retreats, hearthlings w/ a defense banner command should not pursue.
- If you place a defense banner while your hearthlings are in combat, they will slowly regroup around the defense banner, finishing any attacks they might be doing in the process. This code does not work 100% of the time yet; we’re still debugging it, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.
- Hearthlings now focus fire. The target selection algorithm for hearthlings now prioritizes enemies who has the highest DPS/remaining health ratio: ie, hits hard, and has low HP. This means that in a fight b/w 4 footmen and 4 goblins, the footmen will end up focusing on the enemy with the lowest health. In a situation where they’re fighting a high damage enemy, like an archer with low HP, they’ll prioritize the archer over lower damage higher-HP enemies, like orc clerics or fighters.
- This behavior can be overridden at all times with the attack enemy command, but hopefully it will make most combats require less micro
- Target selection improvements are only on for hearthlings, because when Albert turned it on for monsters, he discovered it was catastrophically effective. We can revisit turning it on for monsters when they’re led by a smart leader, like a necromancer or something.
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- Other tactics: If you really want pple to retreat to a cleric, try putting a cleric in a separate party, and in a safe place. Then swap a wounded hearthling from their original party into the cleric party.
- In case you didn’t know, the move command will cause a unit to dump their target table at the end of the move. If your wounded footman sees a passing monster and wants to go and chase it, try using the move command to get them back near a bed so they can rest. If there are no monsters within their sight radius (64 squares) they will get back to healing up. However, if your wounded footman is in a party and the party has an active command (defend, fight, etc) they will resume the party command after they finish the individual command—in this case, the move—and they will NOT go rest. We’re looking more at how this AI should work, but for now, if you must get a wounded solider away from the front lines while their party fights on, and you don’t mind the micro, consider moving them into another party.
Some of these changes are on Steam Stable right now, via a patch to Alpha 16. However, the behavior is still a bit buggy, so we’ll be rolling more fixes into our next build of Alpha 17. In particular, Albert is tuning the defense banner, and figuring out how to advertise what it is doing. Stay tuned! 
Final note: all these fixes were inspired by all your awesome A16 feedback. Thank you for taking the time to let us know how to make it better, and keep that great feedback coming!
Other News
Tuesday and Thursday’s streams will happen at the usual times. Wednesday’s stream will happen a bit later, at 10:00am, PST.