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[Rhuen]

Yes a thread for your experiences with the AIs in video games, they can be enemy AIs or worse yet friendly AIs.

I make this thread because this is a factor that can completly take you out of a video game in an instant and have you yelling at the screen.

Now to be fair I am a person who loves turn style RPGs, I love controlling who does what and when in a tactical manner. Due to how horrible the AIs were I got put off from those Action RPGs that team you up with a group, now you can adjust their stats, what moves they have, and even have options like "auto", "focus on healing", "focus on attack" but if the AI is stupid or does something stupid it takes you out.

Now this is getting better, I played White Knight Chronicles, the AI for the friendly units was 95% great, I taught everyone the heal spell (you control what they learn by using stat points to purchase their powers), and low and behold when anyone got to around half life the others would focus on healing them; really freed me up.

but it does make 2 mistakes.
1: Magic wasting: In some battles you will need to switch between characters, like switch to the one guy who can turn into a giant. But then the game goes and takes my character and has her do automatically the high end spells that really arn't neccisary when the main guy is hacking off 300 Hp at a time with a sword that is twenty feet long. The same goes for using up these action chips for high end attacks on weak enemies.
Older games were much worse at this, or conversly they might be too conservative and be punching when they shoot be shooting like in X-men Legends.

2: Pathfinder: the killer of all AIs, and one of the main reasons I stopped playing these types of games for so long. Basically they follow you, they attack who you are fighting, and no one has ever gotten this completly right. The older ones were worse because for instance (Phantasy Star Online), turn a corner sharp enough and those slow poke AIs who are moving directly towards you get stuck on a corner, there are some worse ones where they can get stuck behind a door; but it didn't take long for programmers to fix this and give the AI the ability to open doors.

Now White Knight Chronicles isn't too bad on that, especially with the auto-teleport thing (get far enough away and the just poof to your location), but it does still make the top three problems, stuck behind a rock. They were fighting one enemy, I went up a hill to take out a sniper flower thing. They come over, but they stop at the cliff face rather than walking around to go up the path I used, so I am stuck fighting everything myself unless I go fetch them or move to where they are off the map screen so they poof to me.
or conversly the one that had me yell at the screen the most was "don't attack that!"

which happened in two ways: 1: I have a strong spell or a long distance attack. There is a dangerous enemy, I am outside its attack activation zone, so I can get one good hit in before it comes after me; but while my spell is charging (white knight chronicles is one of those with a charge up/incantation time for spells, the stronger the longer it takes and a strong enough hit can knock you out of the spell before it fires. Well anywho I am doing that, but my allies as it were rush past me and attack the thing, which the big enemies in the game seem programmed to target magic users first; this the giant troll I was going to blow up with a massive fire spell is now going to hit me and knock me out of the spell wasting my turn and energy.

2: Lack of strategy, okay even weak enemies can be dangerous in large groups. So I target some guy in the middle with an area effecting spell, but one of my allies noticing who I targeted apparently attacks them, and kills them. So while I was taking hits while charging the spell, I just lost the spell because the target was killed and I have to start over on another target. The other side of this is targeting the right opponent. If you have one big guy and a bunch of little guys, I've learned from years of roleplay you go after the little guys first because they as a group can be a big hassle and chances are some will use healing spells on the big guy. The AIs always just target the big guy or who ever hits them.

But as a whole for any AI allies game, the running blindly at an opponent and the pathfinder issues are the biggest ones for me. Its not gotten much better since Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, only now when they die it counts against you.