Notes

The designers were responsible for establishing battle lines, ???????????????????????

• To do this we focused on making strategic spaces

  Interconnectivity

  It's very important to make spaces that highlight the strengths of your AI

  A battle in a corridor doesn't involve much strategy

  so there are no intelligent things for the AI to do

  An interconnected space allows the AI to flank the Player, making them seem more intelligent

  It also allows the Player to flank the AI, giving him a chance to watch them react to his tactics

  One weakness of an interconnected space, however, is that it tends to be chaotic

  So we also needed to establish a Killing Zone

  an open area between two positions with good cover

  flanking is still possible in an environment with a killing zone, but the battle is much more directed

  the killing zone also allows multiple enemies to fight at once without it degenerating into chaos

• Attacking/Defending States

  Another way the designers controlled the flow of battle was through Attacking and Defending States

  Each group of actors has an aggressive territory that it wants to occupy

  it also has retreat conditions, such as a number of casualties or the position of the Player

  the retreat conditions cause a transition to a defensive state where the Actors retreat to a more defensible location

  
  
  By carefully collapsing an encounter from a large aggressive territory to a small defensive cluster

  we were able to capture the feeling of a dynamic battle

  I should mention the AI system we developed can get much more complicated,

  especially when you layer several of these attacking/defending states on top of one another

  but we rarely used that complexity

  For a large majority of encounters, I'd say around 80%, we didn't need to get any more complicated than this example