Welcome to a new article on Infinity Defiance, the brand new Corvus Belli’s cooperative dungeon-crawler boardgame.
Keep reading if you want to know a bit more about the automatic AI (Artificial Intelligence) responsible for your Enemies’ actions.
The AI deck is the result of a request to the development team. To make the solo or cooperative gameplay viable, it was necessary to develop a game mechanic so that the system could handle the enemies actions without the players needing to intervene.
The first goal to achieve was to recognize that this AI had to be present on each Enemy’s card. This would allow us to have a customized AI for each of them. This way their actions would be so incredibly predictable that players could anticipate the result too easily. With this in mind, we discarded the option.
We then decided to produce AI decks with different gaming styles, depending on the type of troop that was going to use it. At that time, four decks of Artificial Intelligence were created: close combat enemies, ranged attackers, hackers, and the herd. In this case, the enemies weren’t as predictable anymore, but the management of four parallel decks became too difficult - not to mention the space they took up at the table. That’s why we decided to reduce the number of decks.
It was then that we came up with the idea of having double-sided enemy cards - an "easy" side and a "difficult" side. This decision made development harder since we were always very clear that the two sides should differ significantly from each other.
Both sides were allowed to have only one deck, and we worked on the development of the instructions that were used as a reference for the scope of the attacks of the enemy troops. This way, we get the same instruction to have different results. Right after testing, we found out that we had a deck that fulfilled this function, with enough randomness so that the enemy activations were not predictable and boring. We had fulfilled the objective!
Some enemies got to keep their own AI despite having an Artificial Intelligence deck. Given the special rules of the unit, such as the Taiga herds, we clearly knew that their main action would always be to advance and destroy their targets.
AI instructions will always be composed of at least two icons. The first one tells us what action the enemy unit is going to perform and the second - who will be their target.
The actions are performed in order and are carried out one by one and independently. For example, it may be the case that the first action asks us to move the enemy towards a character, but the next action specifies that we attack a different one.
So what will we find in the instructions in regards to color and how does it relate to difficulty?
On the blue “easy” side, we will find the most obvious instructions: shoot the nearest character, the one with the most aggro (we will talk in depth about it in another article), etc. You will find the same actions in most of the cases, so it will be easy to guess the result in advance.
The instructions of the red “hard” side cannot be predicted and the objectives are much more dangerous. As an example, you might have to look for the most distant rivals or the model sporting the most damage.
Hoping you like this AI System we’ve developed - see you very soon!
