Artificial Intelligence in Turn-Based RPGs

[Charlie Fleed]

I can tell you about my approach as I am in the process of writing the AI for Hartacon Tactics. I'm not saying it is the best one, and probably it will not suit any game.
What I do is I compare all possible actions, which in my case include also movement around the map, giving them a score.

The score can be based upon several criteria, such as:
A - how much critical damage will the action cause
B - how much critical life will the action restore
C - how many enemies are likely to be killed
D - the altered states that will be inflicted
E - how many critical MP will be consumed
and so on.

The concepts of critical damage/life/MP can be explained like this: if a character has 1000HP a damage of 50HP is not critical, if the character has 60HP, the same amount of damage of 50HP is very critical. This is the logic, you need to put this in math form.
Of course actions that cause higher critical damage get higher scores, actions that use higher critical MPs get lower scores.

The trick is to find the correct weights to apply, i.e. 100pts for (A) and (B), 50pts for (C), 25 for (D) and (E).