AI - August 2, 2015

Daily posting, on the topic of AI.

As control of characters can be changed on the fly (you can choose which of your 4 party members you control), your other 3 characters (if alive or present) will be controlled by AI. Since there are so many different ways to customize characters and many reasons for having them set up the way they are, Gachduine won't assume how you want them to act, and their AI can be set up to your liking.

AI commands are looked at in order until a command's conditions are triggered (and the ability has uses remaining or does no need to recharge). Standard attacks can function differently depending on the weapon. For example, Rifle users will retreat from their target while waiting for their Speed Counter to charge, as the Rifle has unlimited range and does greater damage from a distance.

Some abilities can trigger on specific conditions, such as being in a boss fight, use on fire-weak Symbiote Monsters, being surrounded by enemies, when a specific ally (or any ally) reaches 25% or 50% of HP, and more. AI commands can also be deactivated, allowing you to "manually" choose when a command is triggered. In fact, the character's entire AI schema can be disabled if you want them to stay in one place for a particular strategy (for example, if a C4 chain is going off near the enemies and you don't want your characters to run into the explosions or your Shield user is covering characters).

Sometimes, new AI commands will appear when certain passive abilities are obtained. One example is the noise-making Sonic Ball. While there is likely little point to spending a character's turn making noise while deep in combat, when the Sonic Stun ability is learned (Sonic Ball inflicts Stun on all enemies in combat and within noise radius), the Sonic Ball AI command is made available.