"Programmable" defense team?

It isn’t important nor priority feature, but might be interesting to consider implementing when there will be space and time for that.

So my idea was to implement some “simple” interface for a defending PVP team, where we as players can choose which gems AI should prioritize.

Example defense team:
Emperor Khorvash (Blue / Brown)
Valkyrie (Red / Yellow)
Giant Spider (Green / Blue)
Morthani’s Scythe (Purple)

My main damage source would be Morthani’s Scythe, so I would like to focus mostly on matching Purple gems, next in line I would like some Yellows for Valkyrie, then Blue, Green, Brown for Spider and Khorvash and Red at the end.

  1. Purple
  2. Yellow
  3. Blue
  4. Green
  5. Brown
  6. Red

There could be a little table, row or column where we would drag gem colors in an order which we would like the AI to priority. We wouldn’t have to fill all of the colors too, ones put would be just prioritized over the rest. Leaving everything blank would use default AI.

I do not exactly know how current AI works, is it picking gems by any priorities, does it sometimes take gems just to block player or is it just all more or less “random” :wink:

Of course playing GoW isn’t as simple as that, same teams can be played differently based on what opponent they face… but I’m just asking if it could be (if any) improvement / good addition to the AI? What about adding skulls into pool?

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in a programmable defense ai id like:

  1. to choose color priorities for feeding your team with gem matches
    (example 1-1st_ally 2-skulls 3-3rd_ally 4-starve_enemy 5-2nd_ally)

  2. to choose priority action, for each unit separately prioritising either:
    -skulls
    -cast
    -extra turns
    (for example sheggra 1-cast 2-extra turns 3-skulls)

  3. to choose priority of unit casts
    (for example 1-sheggra 2-bat 3-valkyrie etc)

sure would love super advanced programmable defense ai with stuff like ‘if health below’ ‘if enemy mana >=’ etc but that i think would be asking for too much :smiley:

It would already be a huge improvement if the AI would take into account defensive traits/status effects (stoneskin, entangle) and consider leaving skulls lying around for the opponent if them taking it wouldn’t do much and you taking it wouldn’t do much either.

yeah but i like the idea of programmable defense to be still abusable and also failurable if you dont programm it right (and still abusable a little even when you do programm it right). dont want just aurtomated-god-mode to get by default. the default the way it is now gives a fair chance for players to fight against it.

While I was making this post I really wanted to take into consideration things like prioritizing abilities, or preferable order of casts, but at the very end decided to stay at simplicity. Giving a player some control over how he wants his team to be played. For more advanced stuff there has to also be more advanced GUI and GoW has it pretty simple - that one feature would stand out if it’d went overboard.

Which is also why I suggested to first look at “relatively” simply ways to improve the current AI before making it programmable. Skull-baiting the AI is too simple right now, and I don’t think it suddenly becomes a god-mode AI if it would start deciding to leave skull matches lying around and take mana instead. It would still misfire most spells (not focusing single target spells on one enemy, taking the wrong color to convert etc etc).

It’d be something else if it gets extended to make 3-matches because that match will drop a 4-match or better or other similar look-ahead type moves. But I wouldn’t suggest to start doing that.

This would be an awesome step forward. I don’t have any faith in my defense team.

Y’all want to lose and slow down the process? That’ll be fun

I want a bit more challenge than currently

i want the ai to have flaws but not necesarely the same flaws for each fight. a little harder but sounds fun :stuck_out_tongue: