Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition About enemy AI

some thought about how enemies behave in combat:

pros: I saw enemies using abilities to help each other. Like helping hand on a knockdowned one or other spells to remove status effects. Sometimes I have the feeling the enemies really act as team and its not just a bunch of mindless idiot who only attack the first thing they see. If you are foolish enough to let them attack, they will use all kind of CC against you (stunn, frozen, petryfied, charmed, . . .) I think more than half of the enemy attacks can cause a status effect. Of course this can go wrong like using a poison attack to heal headless Nick (now with head).

cons: Enemies move too much. Sometimes they walk around to do an attack they could have done from their initial position. Some enemies wasted their turn to walk around on the battlefied aimlessly without doing any attack or spell. The peak of insanity was an enemy who used his turn only to walk around and he did provoke 3 attacks of Opportunety against himself in this turn, what finally killed him. I have never seen that enemies use the charge attack of the warrior or the lightning jump to change their position. They never used teleport or something similar to move enemies away from themselves and right in fromt of the sword of a friendly fighter.

I have had one combat experience where the armoured skeletal knight used battering ram on one of my main characters and I have seen them use other CC attacks against me. It may be a matter of chance or of approaching from a different direction or type of mob you encounter that determines their AI response.

The developers used popular tactics that the we, the players, were using while playing the original version, and implemented those tactics to the enemy AI.. Youll see alot of team buffing prior to atacking, or positioning, and CC.. Most notable would be the use of grenades, arrows, and potions..

Thats not to say they are perfect.. I see alot of wasted AP by walking out, and right back, only to end turn.. Or AOE to hit 1 of my party, along with several of there own..Ive also seen them run through environment effects..

But, overall its far better.. The amount of healing, potions, buffing, debuffing, CC, and use of grenades and arrows is wonderful.. The few hiccups in the AI is very minor by comparison.. They really are playing like players.. As far as spell choices go..

Usually AI tries to avoid harmful surface, but sometimes they touch the area edge and burn themselves to death.

Useless walking is especialy obvious for mages/archers, sometimes they just walk instead of cast.

I notice the AI pays absolutely no attention to resistances. They will spam your party with poison attacks even if you are all Zombied up and never use heal vs zombie. They will also repeatedly charm/fear my charm/fear immune characters, oblivious to the fact it will never work.

The "move out of cloud" behavior is pretty bad as well. It's easily exploitable by spamming poison cloud arrows wherever they move to, causing them to move even further and take damage with every step.

THIS. Opononet AI do not read statuses. Also usage of Loremaster skill is zero by AI oponents. Also learning from result of attacks is zero. This is critical for scissor-rock-paper combat. Watch an enemy mage who stubornly tries again and again to burn my man with 120% fire rezistance is sad. Fix it please.

To some degree, at least, the enemies have to be manipulable. There would be no reason to even have fire resistance if the enemy just looked at it and decided to not use fire attacks...

Well, if the enemy was primarily a fire mage, it'd sure reduce its options if it decided it couldn't use fire anymore (though of course 90% of the time, it could just attack another person on your team since not everyone will have 100+ fire resist.) It'd be great for enemies to learn that an attack doesn't work, and wouldn't be THAT complicated I would think. Just reduce priority of a certain attack against a certain target if the attack healed the enemy. Or they could set a threshold for resists, so if you have 90% fire resist, an enemy will learn that, and prioritize different kinds of attacks instead (if they have them.) Hopefully Larian addresses this low-hanging fruit for improving the AI in D:OS 2. EE AI is okay, and it will decimate you well enough if you let them, though it's still pretty simple.