Enemy AI Could Use Some More AI

I’ve had a couple of play throughs now. Some of them I played very intelligently and some of them I clearly wasn’t thinking. Yet in some of those situations, I saw Crabmen sneaking up behind a soldier, but instead of attacking that soldier, it just ran right past and decided to pop the shield in the middle of the road. What?

I could name multiple situations where the decisions of the Crabmen with regards to tactics, left me confused about the AI to say the least. The Queen as well, makes some weird choices. Often, when she just spawns, she doesn’t even move. And when repeatedly ramming her, I can just cheese heal the Armadillo with the Technician.

I’ve seen that the Queen will have some AOE attacks and just more attacks in general. I hope this will also be the case for the normal grunts. Stuff like Overwatch etc and just some cool abilities, because as it’s now, you really need to play with your brain turned off, to actually lose.

The AI is only very basic at the moment as we are in pre-alpha. We have plans for complex AI, but it is a poor use of development time to implement it before all of the game mechanics and abilities have been added.

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One thing to look at is trajectories of explosive weapons. There have been a couple times where enemy grenadiers blew themselves up because they fired their grenades at the wall right in front of them XD

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Yup, had the same experience as well haha

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Love when Crabmen behind the queen hit it, but its bit dumb behaviour as AI

friendly fire isn’t (character limit)

Btw, don’t you think that ranged crabmen (those with guns and/or grenades) could make our life more complicated if they would “hug” to mindfragger eggs and to sentinels? Standing close to those colud easily trigger them. And then we would have a problem. :slight_smile: They could even position themselves at the line of fire where killing them would also risk hitting egg or sentinel being behing them.

Wouldn’t you just nade them in that situation? Also, do crabmen trigger eggs, too? That would add a new level, for sure, if they did. I’ve had a crab hang out with a Sent before, but all he did was help me kill it (he was a few steps past it).

Maybe. But explosives won’t kill sentinel or egg with one “shot”. And I prefer to use single burst to take them out. Assault Rifle for the eggs, Machine Gun for Sentinels.

If crabmen hit egg for some reason they would trigger them. But it never happend in my games. Eggs were always in such spots that enemy fire couldn’t reach them.

Yeah, that’s true, I had forgotten that. Too much time with 5 launchers lol. So, if crabmen take cover by eggs, what you’re expecting is that if we concentrate fire on the crab, a missed shot could hit egg and trigger it? A little catch-22 addition?

I dunno why, but I suddenly had a mental vision of a wall of shield crabs coming up the road with a herd of face huggers behind them. I’m not going to sleep well tonight.