[On Hold] Fire Emblem / Advance Wars-like game

Made some significant progress with melee ranged AI and their movement. Now they really move identically to FE / Advance Wars, and try to attack the lowest HP unit in their range.

Waouh ! I tried several times during this year to reproduce this type of gameplay without success ...

Would you mind sharing your code?

Waouh ! I tried several times during this year to reproduce this type of gameplay without success ...

Would you mind sharing your code?

Domino99 I'd rather not give out my project for now, but I'd be happy to help by answering questions where you're stuck...

I'm literally using the grid-movement from the examples found here: https://www.construct.net/en/forum/game-development/game-development-design-ideas-25/simple-grid-movement-128763?kws=

For the AI all I'm doing is essentially creating the grid from that example based on a unit's movement range +1 (or now +2 for range attackers), mark all the player's units with a separate sprite, then loop through all the players with that sprite ascending by their HP from lowest to highest and checking the tiles around them if there is a place to move to :)

Ok thank for your help ! I will try to archive that :)

I've added more calculations for both the melee and ranged enemy AI.

For melee, they will first check if they are already on a tile next to the lowest HP player unit, then if they're not check if they can at least move to a tile next to them. After that, its the same exact checks with the second lowest HP unit, and so on.

For ranged, its the opposite behavior and on purpose. First they will check if they can move to the lowest HP unit, even if they were already in range. This is to open up tiles for other range units if they start to clump on maps eventually.

Have you looked into influence maps?

Here is a good read.

http://gameschoolgems.blogspot.com/2009/12/influence-maps-i.html

Have you looked into influence maps?

Here is a good read.

http://gameschoolgems.blogspot.com/2009/12/influence-maps-i.html

mOOnpunk thanks! I read most of it and will read the rest later. :)

At some point I might need to actually add some "weights" on how the AI thinks and moves based not only on HP, but other factors. For now having the AI move to and attack the lowest HP player unit is fine, but yeah taking into account how much damage they'll do, how much damage they'll receive in a counter attack, etc, is definitely imporant.

There is also one more important thing to consider however: the game shouldn't be impossible. In fact, the AI sometimes should do something we'd consider "stupid". If the AI knows and plans every single movement and attack perfectly, I don't think the player will have much chance to actually win. I'd imagine some of the game's audience could be new players to the genre as well...

Finally started working on the player's phase. I now have a simple player and enemy phase, meaning the certain units can only move and act on their phase. I also added logic to show where the player can move and red tiles to show where they can attack enemies. I haven't tested with the player's ranged units just yet, but should potentially work out of the box.

Smaller update for today, I added the logic for enemies to try to move to the player's "Lord unit" if they cannot attack anything else nearby. Also some behind the scenes work of fixing a bug with the AI, it would kind of freak out if 2 player units were next to each other.

Compared to handling the AI, implementing the player unit's actions was easy enough. I've for now added only 3 things the unit can do: move, attack (if possible) or wait. In the future I will add the ability to cancel the move (teleporting the unit back to its previous X/Y position before it moved) as long as the player doesn't lock in the decision to wait or attacks something.

Do you planning to add visual pathway as route guide?