So it’s no secret that the monsters are complete idiots in this game. I am looking for an improved AI that is compatible with NWN:EE. Back in the day I know there were several updated AI scripts but I have no memory of what they were.
Any recommendations out there, something that will at least have a MoB cleric, you know heal or buff their allies, that sort of thing. Fights can be tough on new players but once they learn to game the AI (which is not a steep learning curve) they tend to take on fights well outside their weight class simply because they can cheese it.
I always code specific AI for each boss. There is no generic AI that would suit my needs.
If you can’t do that, my only recommendation is to use Jasperre’s AI for bosses and keep vanilla AI for normal npcs. But Jasperre’s AI has a weakness of not be able to use custom content feats/spells.
Also, you probably heard about community patch, it offers ton of vanilla generic AI bugfixes and improvements. It likely won’t make your boss a tough villan itself, but it is a start (and always use high AI for bosses - that will with community patch enable some of the smarter behavior such as instant BBoD dispelling, instant aura activating and few more).
There is also TonyK ai, but compared to vanilla+community patch it is not any better (I made the comparsions in a 1v1 mage copy battle which didn’t show significant difference in power, sometimes TonyK won sometimes lost). But if community patch musn’t come into your module then install TonyK’s as a generic AI replacement.
There are few more AIs available on vault like Olander, but I never tried those so can’t give you suggestion.
Planning, for now, of it being DM’d so not sure I want to dive too deep into AI coding as that feels like a pretty deep rabbit hole.
Any reason why you wouldn’t use Jasperre’s AI for normal monsters? Custom Spells and Feats for monsters and NPC’s isn’t expected to be an issue for me. At least right now.
Also haven’t heard about community patch … how compatible is that code with NWN:EE?
I find vanilla generic AI suitable for 99% monsters. Honestly, they don’t need to be super smart and since at least most of my monsters has no active feat/spell or just one they are supposed to use at the beginning (shout, cone, pulse) there is no real benefit of Jasperres AI. It improves the spell selection, feat usage and item usage, but not a strategic movement itself - which would be for these kind of monsters the only smart way to fight player - to start running when low at hp etc. But no public AI can do that afaik.
Right, I did not update it for a while, there might be some issues with tilesets - it might cause either these new tileset features be missing or crashing toolset/game if you already use them. But the scripting features are 100% compatible. But there is almost nobody that uses it on a PW besides me myself and those who do use only parts they ripped from it - which tells something. Either way, could not mention it because the AI changes are imo mandatory for anyone who is not using custom generic AI replacement from vault.
My thought then is to use Jasspere’s for casters and bosses and leave default for the rest. Do you think that would make sense / be a good approach?
In my testing the default AI won’t (or very rarely) buff or heals it’s companions even when it’s left alone and it’s companions are in combat. Basically I find in testing the default has it self buff, then cast it’s damage and CC spells and then run into melee even when it’s got buffs and heals it could use on it’s friends and I would like to see it be a little smarter than that if possible.
The community patch would seem to have more than what I am looking for in terms of content and could cause issues with other things if I bring it in.