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[thelaptop]

So sergeants scare us in many ways, whether we are playing a melee game, or a pacifist game.  Actually, they are scary because they always hit.

So here's the deal.  Make some small number of sergeants be armed with combat shotguns, and give them the ability to "hunt" the player, i.e. perform an actual A*-like search to seek the player out in order to shoot him.  This should add a little more variety to the Undead Army Corp.

I mean, sergeants should be cranky enough to go Doomguy hunting on his own, right?

[ParaSait]

That sounds ok, but I doubt the AI system is clever enough to hunt the player down like that.

[thelaptop]

That's the point -- we want to introduce a new AI system that augments the current "artifical stupidity" system that we now have.  Consider it from the perspective of avoiding exploits -- currently we know that all the monsters will end up near the centre of the map after a long enough time has passed, and many people have exploited that to their benefit at one point or another.  By having actual artifical intelligence (or in this case, the "hunter sense"), we can up the ante for the player to be vigilant.

[Game Hunter]

That's the point -- we want to introduce a new AI system that augments the current "artifical stupidity" system that we now have.  Consider it from the perspective of avoiding exploits -- currently we know that all the monsters will end up near the centre of the map after a long enough time has passed, and many people have exploited that to their benefit at one point or another.  By having actual artifical intelligence (or in this case, the "hunter sense"), we can up the ante for the player to be vigilant.

Bruiser Brothers have a lock-on AI and it makes them even easier to abuse, given decent conditions. To be honest, the most difficult AI to deal with are Arch-viles, though I wouldn't be surprised if this is also because of their speed.

Might be better to make this into a new unit type altogether, possibly paired with a double shotgun counterpart. The double would need an AI fix to deal with not being able to damage stuff at the very edge of their vision. At the very least, don't have them mixed into the other Sergeants unless it's at a certain level of difficulty (HMP+), lest we scare away newbies.

[grommile]

I'm not clear why you want to make Angel of Berserk even harder.

[thelaptop]

The intent isn't to make AoB harder, but to slowly introduce more types of AI behaviour other than the current one, which makes things a little too predictable.  It might not be sergeants with combat shotguns, but the idea remains the same -- vary the population of monsters so that some small number of them actually do something that is different from the rest of the herd.

[Fanta Hege]

Might be better to make this into a new unit type altogether, possibly paired with a double shotgun counterpart.

Or a supershotgun for Ao100
"You open the door.. oh shi-"


I don't see why not spice up some of the existing enemies with AI's aswell? Like giving lost souls a bit more unique movement pattern from the boring Demon like movement. Giving cacodemons a bit more of floaty like AI or something like that.

[MaiZure]

If it's a question of AI, maybe its best to make 3 or 4 behavior patterns and randomly assign on level generation.

Standard - Migrate to Middle
Fringe - Wanders the outside of the level in a circular pattern
Hunter - Seeks player
Camper - Guards the stairs

[thelaptop]

That sounds like a good idea.  We can also consider tweaking the proportion of each behaviour across all the enemies so that while most will use the Standard behaviour, there will be some that will be Fringers, one or two Hunters, and a couple of Campers.

We can probably proportion this across the entire floor of monsters, as opposed to each monster.  That way, we have a better control of how the overall danger level of the floor is.

[Fanta Hege]

I'm bit "eh" about the camper AI, mostly as stairs usualy are the escape route in levels.
and it would probably screw over AoPC so badly.

[MaiZure]

I'm bit "eh" about the camper AI, mostly as stairs usualy are the escape route in levels.
and it would probably screw over AoPC so badly.

Camper can really guard anything, a vault, an exotic/unique, the stairs...just so long as they camp something.

[thelaptop]

Camper can really guard anything, a vault, an exotic/unique, the stairs...just so long as they camp something.

So I think this means there are two things we want to have implemented.  One is the concept of identifying a cell in the map as being worthy of guarding, the other of course being which groups of enemies run on which AI style.

This can be interesting... might not be ready in time for DoomRL 1.0.0.0, but at least we can consider this for DoomRL 2.