Later game battle issues with AI

[wanderon]

I have issues with the AI constantly over riding the decisions I make by hand. I like to micromanage but I don't want to make every single decision. I call for the priest to heal someone and the AI cancels the order and gives an alternate. I call for a certain 20 pt cipher spell (which will allow me to cast it again immediately) and the AI changes it to a 40 leaving me with no focus for the following round. I tried changing the AI to auto attack only which is a pain as it seems to revert to one of the other choices at will (or maybe on a whim). the first 2/3 of the game it's just annoying and doesn't have much detrimental effects but as the late game approaches the battles get bigger and more complicated and missing the chance to cast the right spell or heal someone quickly can drag you into reload land.

 

I'm sure others have been in the same boat so any suggestions solutions or even consolation appreciated. ( I thought I posted about this before but didn't find it so here I am again (it's an old man thing) 

[thelee]

When you give a command, the AI should be respecting that (the only exception is using potions/poisons). Worst-case scenario, you can press "X" (or whatever hotkey) to stop your character and that also stops their AI script until their "Aggressive/Defensive/Defend Self" trigger is kicked off (but even then there's a delay). Do you have any mods that might be interfering with that? Or are your characters being interrupted and you're not noticing? Do you have cooldowns on your script actions?

 

Spoken as someone who's clocked 1000+ hours on this game with AI scripts and haven't had this issue (except again, with potions/poisons post-4.0).

 

Though in all but a handful of my runs, I leave casters without any AI script (other than auto attack) because I want to be sure to micromanage every single spellcast decision, since the default scripts are mostly terrible and the default unmodded AI scripting really limits what you can do with spells and conditionals.

[wanderon]

Well I have been playing a LOT this year between being retired and social distancing (and I was isolating long before the virus came around anyway) 

(according to GOG I reached 800 hours a year ago and started playing again 3 months ago and I now have 1898 hours (3 Deadfire games the last of which is winding up as we speak)

Can't say exactly when this started but it has been a while - as mentioned in OP it isn't as much of an issue early on as it is when things start getting more difficult (I typically start on classic but may drop down a notch (or come back later) if I have to reload a couple times.

It's entirely possible I have not noticed an interruption as stopping even within 5-10 seconds and  scrolling back through the log to see is crazy confused and blows me away every time to realize how much stuff is handled in that brief moment - 

 

Good point about using the X key when resetting - also good point on limiting caster AI to auto attack - will they not cast any spells on their own that way and just use whatever weapons they have in hand ?(or will they switch weapons on their own based on circumstances under auto attack?)

[thelee]

1 hour ago, wanderon said:

Good point about using the X key when resetting - also good point on limiting caster AI to auto attack - will they not cast any spells on their own that way and just use whatever weapons they have in hand ?(or will they switch weapons on their own based on circumstances under auto attack?)

yep. they won't even switch weapons. even then I sometimes don't even have AI enabled - mostly for casters with extremely slow ranged weapons equipped, so I'm not worried that they'll be stuck in recovery if I need a super important spell cast right then (like healing).