I am implementing a small grid based, turn based strategy in the lines of Final Fantasy tactics.
Do you have any ideas on how i can approach the target selection, movement and skill selection process?
I am considering having the decisions disconnected, but all these 3 decisions are largely coupled. (eg. i can't decide where to move unless i know who i am going to attack, and what range the skill i will use has, and vice versa, i can't decide who to attack unless i know how many turns it will take me to reach each target)
I want to move towards a unified system, but trying out things from Potential field research used in a manner like in the Killzone 1 AI has me getting stuck on local maximums.
=== Update 1
I am currently trying to use potential fields / influence maps to generate the data i take decisions upon.
I have no idea how to handle having many skills, and skills that don't do damage but rather buff/debuff or alter the world.
Someone elsewhere suggested using Monte Carlo Tree Search, used currently in Go games.
I believe the space my actors will be using is not good for it, as many many moves in the game don't result in a position from which you can attack and affect the world (i am in a world bigger than final fantasy tactics)
In final fantasy tactics it might be applied successfully, although the branching factor is much bigger than that of 9x9 Go (from what i understand)
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Thanks in advance, Xtapodi.
ps.1 - A problem is that to know accurately how far an enemy is i would need to pathfind to him, because although the enemy is near, an impassable cliff might be separating us which takes 4 turns to go around. Or worse, a unit is blocking the way on lets say a bridge so there is actually no way to reach him.
Answer
One approach I've used is to do a two-pass system.
First, find out where your unit can go. Use A* or whatever to flag out the terrain to see how far the unit can move this turn.
Once you know that, step through your available tactics (melee attack, heal friendly unit, whatever), and assign a fitness function for all available uses of the tactic. If you pass in the flagged terrain, you can very quickly determine what your space of possible tactics are.
This gives you a list of available tactics and their fitness functions for each move. Select the best one or randomize from the top. If there aren't any tactics available, repeat the process with flagging the terrain for two moves, and so on.
What I mean by fitness function is to decide on the "value" of performing the tactic on a certain unit or location. For instance, your "heal a friendly unit" tactical decision phase might step through all friendly units. If a friendly unit is within range (i.e., is reachable from a location your unit can reach), add it to the list of possible tactics and give it a fitness rating equal to, say, 100 * (1.0 - unit health), where unit health ranges from 0 to 1. Thus, healing a character down to only 10% health remaining would be worth 90 points, while a unit only down 5% would only be worth 5, and the unit wouldn't even consider healing an undamaged unit. Special units (i.e., "protect the boss" scenario units required to retain victory conditions) could be given a higher base number, so that they are given more attention by friendly units.
Similarly, your "melee attack" decision phase would step through all reachable enemy units, compute the likely damage, and compare that to the unit's health. Give each unit a "desirability" to attack, and multiply it by the percentage of remaining health you'd likely do, and you've got a pretty detailed fitness function that favors eliminating units when you can, but still goes after high-value targets.
Using a process like this, you'll get a list of options like "Move to location A and heal friendly unit B : 50 points", "Move to location C and attack hostile unit D : 15 points", etc. Suddenly, it's really easy to choose a tactic.
Further detail may be added by multiplying the fitness of the tactic by a fitness for the path you'd have to take to implement it. For instance, if the place you'd have to move to in order to heal a friendly unit puts you in severe danger (i.e., standing on a lava space or something), you might factor that in by multiplying the fitness of that tactic by .2 or so, so that the unit may still consider it, but only if it's really important. All this takes is writing an algorithm to assess the fitness of a given location, and could be as simple as a pre-computed "terrain desirability" number or as complex as maintaining "threat maps" of enemy units.
The hard part, of course, is finding the right measures to make the engine smart. But that's the fun part of your system to tweak.