Hi,
Currently I'm working in a project in where an AI team of NPCs must attack a squad of 4 characters manipulated by the Player. The problem I have is all the info I've found about AI against a player is related by attacking a single character. In this particular scenario attack rules changes because the AI must be aware about four characters. I'm curious if any one knows some paper about this particular scenario.
Thanks.
A good utility function will help the AI team prioritize threats. Check David Graham's Introduction to Utility Theory from Game AI Pro.
If you can get your hands on any of the AI Game Programming Wisdom books, they were published in the heyday of squad-based shooters. They're the single best resource for this kind of AI. They have entire chapters on tactical AI and group actions. You can search up PDF versions of the books, but I don't know if they're legal or pirated scans, so I won't provide any links. If you're affiliated with a university, you can probably get legal access to digital or print versions through your school.
All you have to do is score actions against all potential targets (and all potential ways of attacking) and then pick the best one.
See this for an architecture
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021848/Building-a-Better-Centaur-AI
And this for more on utility
I was thinking of mentioning Behavioral Mathematics in my earlier post. Dave Mark's book is a great resource for devising efficient utility functions, among many other things, because it really all comes down to math. It sounds like you want the AI to act as a team, so you'll probably want to read up on multi-tiered decision-making in which each agent makes some decisions but they also coordinate their actions as a team, which is a larger architectural issue.
