CUSTOM VEK AI

Difficulty - MID (Pulling apart base game code required)

Often, the game’s default AI can be improved upon in the case of your particular custom Vek. Fortunately, adding a new AI for your custom Vek is relatively simple. There are two functions which compose Vek AI - scoring for movement and scoring for attacking.

Movement scoring occurs when it is due for the Vek to move. The method will be run for every tile which it is possible for the Vek to move to. It returns a numeric value. The highest value tile will be selected to move to

Attack scoring occurs after the Vek move. The method will be run for every possible tile which the vek can target. Again, it returns a numeric value and the highest value tile will be selected to be attacked.

The vanilla game’s AI scoring functions are very generic, which has benefits and issues. If you do not want to code a complex AI for your enemy, the base game’s standard AI should work fine for most people. However, the downside to this is that enemies with complex attack patterns will likely not attack very effectively. To get a good idea of how the game handles AI functions, check out global.lua lines 340-470, which contains the vanilla scoring functions.

Please note: writing AIs is relatively complex in comparison to other elements such as simply adding pawns. The details of the lua are thin on the ground in this tutorial as they are probably too extensive to effectively cover here. You should be comfortable with figuring out how to do things from the vanilla code before embarking on this. As always, the variable reference list linked at the top of the document is a useful resource.

MOVEMENT AI

Firstly, let’s add this function, which will override the vanilla functions for us, to one of your lua scripts loaded in your mod, probably pawns.lua or wherever you put your pawn declarations.

This code does not need to be changed, and should be copied and pasted directly into your code.

Now under each enemy where we want our custom AI, we should add a new function called ScorePositioning after the AddPawn() function call. This will be our position scoring function.

You are given two variables in this function - one is point which can be used in Board methods to get details about the tile candidate, and pawn, a C++ pawn instance (NOT a lua Pawn class - to access the Pawn class use _G[pawn:GetType()]) which is the pawn about to be used in movement. I won’t go into too much detail here about the actual coding - just that anything can be contained in here which will be used to calculate the numeric value. Nor will I go into much detail about what is important in an AI, and how to make good ones. Some general things to consider: Accessibility of enemies/buildings from the target tile, if the tile poses a threat to the pawn, whether it’s a corner or edge (generally to be avoided). A lot of useful functions can be found in the vanilla AI methods.

Let’s make a very simple AI for a theoretical pawn called “Magpie”. Its sole purpose is to move to where time pods are on the map. NB this pawn will likely not work at all in a practical game - this is just to illustrate the kind of thing AIs can do.

All this method will do is check if the tile has a time pod on it - if so it will return a very high number (almost guaranteed to move there), and if not it will return a very low negative number (almost guaranteed to not move there)

TARGETING AI

Targeting AI acts slightly differently, in that it is a subroutine of the weapon it acts upon and not a global method like movement AI is. But we can utilise it fairly similarly. We won’t need to add an override function like we did to the top of pawn.lua for our movement function as we can just override it on a weapon by weapon basis. The function we are going to want to override is called ScoreList(). We will do it like so, after your weapon declaration.

We are given two variables here again. This time it is list, a SkillEffect object of the weapon, and queued, a boolean value defining whether the weapon does queued damage (true) or instant damage (false). The first thing we are going to do is iterate through list, which will allow us to get and evaluate each spaceDamage object in the SkillEffect object.

Please note that you should obviously keep a score count outside of the loop, so it won’t be overwritten with each spaceDamage object iterated through. The target of the attack can be ascertained using spaceDamage.loc. Another useful variable that can be used is Pawn - A C++ pawn instance of the pawn which is currently using the weapon.

Some things which should be considered in writing a good targeting AI: how strong the targeted pawn is, what team the targeted pawn is on, will the shot kill or just wound?

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