Lately, I've been doing a lot of cleanup and some more experiments with AI. The combat stats system still isn't nailed down 100%, but I am getting closer. The AI revamp is going pretty well. Most of the behaviors are cleaned up, and enemies are now much more effective at traversing terrain using whatever methods are available, and casting spells that are given to them. Enemies can build bridges to cross water much more effectively (the pathing on previous iterations was broken, but it's fixed now), they can open doors if the doors belong to their faction (making it more effective to 'fort up' and let mobs come and go), and so forth. The AI system much more closely resembles a behavior tree than the random collection of bullshit that it was before, making it much easier to assemble complicated behavior systems from small, manageable parts. Currently in progress is a system to allow selecting attacks based on obstacles encountered while pathing to a target.

Central to the AI system is the pathfinder, which will select a path to approach a selected target. The pathfinder can be tweaked to try to avoid enemies, seek out resource nodes to loot, etc... It is possible that, given the unit's specified heuristic function, along the way the unit will need to attack something that is not the ultimate target, be it an enemy door or wall or another hostile unit. In previous iterations, the mob would use melee strikes only to assault these incidental objects. I'm currently working on sub-behaviors to allow the mob to more intelligently select attacks or spells to use. For example, wooden walls will probably fall faster to fire-based attacks than they will to the pounding of tiny little goblin fists.

Some of the folks in the chat have been hassling me to release something that they can test out, so I'm working toward that. It won't be pretty, and there really still isn't much 'game' here. But what I have so far is still a pretty interesting taste of what the final game will hopefully be like. Currently, the test level is populated by two types of enemies: melee swordsman (green gobbos wielding green fiery swords) and shaman (red gobbos with a staff). The swordsmen pretty much will only approach and attack with a melee hit. The shaman are much more interesting, in that they have a single-target heal, an AoE heal, and a summon spell. They will first attempt to find a bro to heal, and if nobody needs healing they'll either approach GC and rain fireballs on his head or they will summon in Choppers to attack. Choppers are tiny 1/2 scale swordsmen with low hitpoints and high melee damage. GC can kill them quickly, but if the shaman aren't taken care of their numbers may soon become untenable.