Is There A Way?

[Grinch]

I'm actually trying to play this game after quitting three times. A problem I'm having is that NPCs only use their basic attacks unless I babysit them by continuous pausing to give commands. Mages won't cast spells. All others won't use special attacks such as knockdown, blind etc. Is there a way to get NPCs to do that without babysitting them? With the IE games you could write and use scripts to give the AI commands. Am I just missing something or is the way I'm doing it the only way possible?

[Nakia]

What difficulty are playing on?

[Psychevore]

What difficulty are playing on?

No idea why you're asking, cause I doubt it matters.

 

Anyway, OP:

Companions have no AI. You have to instruct them. If you think that sucks then... well.. yeah, but this game ain't for you

[Grinch]

What difficulty are playing on?

Right now Normal - Trial of Iron mode. Does difficulty make a difference?

[Grinch]

 

What difficulty are playing on?

No idea why you're asking, cause I doubt it matters.

 

Anyway, OP:

Companions have no AI. You have to instruct them. If you think that sucks then... well.. yeah, but this game ain't for you

 

Thanks.

[CybAnt1]

There may be a way to give your party members AI, but if so, it's either going to come by mod or by patch. At the moment, you can't do it. 

[vril]

If you don't want to instruct your companions to do anything, you're going to need to play on Easy and forget about Trial of Iron.

[Grinch]

If you don't want to instruct your companions to do anything, you're going to need to play on Easy and forget about Trial of Iron.

Is there AI on Easy but not on Normal? I don't understand. All I want to do is not have to babysit the NPC's and be able to count on them to use their abilities. Like I said, I could use scripts in the IE games and even make custom AI scripts. Why don't the NPC's have any AI? Is there a specific reason?

[Volourn]

PE is 6 headed monster style. You control every aspect of the characters except their feels 9though you can control those too by choosing correct dialogue he). They don't think for themselves at all. All they do is autoattack so, yeah, either learn to 'babysit' them or don't play.

[ShadySands]

The suggestions to play on easy doesn't add AI but it generally eliminates the need for it since you can win the vast majority of encounters without micromanaging your party.

 

As for the reason for there being no party AI scripts, probably time and money.

[Jimmysdabestcop]

Yes no Party AI and no Scripts. Having no scripts honestly really sucks.

 

But if you change up your party composition and play on normal you wont to manage too much. Make your PC a fighter and bring Eder. That will make it even easier. Maybe even create a ranged rogue adventurer. They can all basically auto attack and dont really need to use their abilities. Then you can just manage your 2-3 casters.

 

That is about all you can do.

 

Also Tip. Dont bring a ranger. Or then you will have to micro manage their pet as well!!

[luzarius]

OP wants an AI tactics system that he can program to cover basic encounters, but he'll pause when needed for new scenarios.

 

Neo went through the same thing, occasionaly identifying upgrades to the matrix.

 

C++, too much work.

 

C#, no problem.

[abaris]

Given the game design, I'm rather glad they're not using their abilities, since that would mean empty spell magazines after each and every trash encounter.

[JONNIN]

You can build very LOW micromanagement parties but you will always need to do it somewhat.    On normal, such a party could beat most of the trash fights just by hitting group up / attack buttons and let them go to it.   Here and there you might pause to use a per encounter ability or a heal, and boss fights**  will require a lot of micromanagement to cast the correct spells and coordinate, but you can certainly go from constant pausing to almost none for about 90% of the combats.

 

** boss fights is a loose term that  includes the occasionally stupidly large pulls where you can get 15 or more enemy coming at you.

 

Idea for a point and shoot group would be  moongod pally X2 frontline damage sponges,  monk X 2 frontline killers, priest, cipher.   Priest and cipher play ranged dps until a spell is needed, which is rare.   You might stop here and there to burn off a monk wound for attack speed.  You might stop here and there to debuff the group with the cipher to assist the melee (the level 2 spell that roots and causes paralysis will carry you thru most of the game, and charm anything that gets on the casters, those 2 will carry you all the way thru normal mode play).   Its probably wise to stop now and again to position the team, for example split into pally/monk teams rather than all 6 bang on the same victim.   Not quite point and click combat but you should only be pausing right when combat starts and maybe 2 or 3 times total in the rest of the fight, not too bad.   With this concept, because you are not micromanaging them, you would be wise to armor up the monks and casters.  I recommend full plate with +crush enchant.

Edited May 7, 2015 by JONNIN

[Crucis]

Yes no Party AI and no Scripts. Having no scripts honestly really sucks.

 

But if you change up your party composition and play on normal you wont to manage too much. Make your PC a fighter and bring Eder. That will make it even easier. Maybe even create a ranged rogue adventurer. They can all basically auto attack and dont really need to use their abilities. Then you can just manage your 2-3 casters.

 

That is about all you can do.

 

Also Tip. Dont bring a ranger. Or then you will have to micro manage their pet as well!!

 

Managing a ranger's AC isn't THAT much work.

[Sven_]

 

Yes no Party AI and no Scripts. Having no scripts honestly really sucks.

 

But if you change up your party composition and play on normal you wont to manage too much. Make your PC a fighter and bring Eder. That will make it even easier. Maybe even create a ranged rogue adventurer. They can all basically auto attack and dont really need to use their abilities. Then you can just manage your 2-3 casters.

 

That is about all you can do.

 

Also Tip. Dont bring a ranger. Or then you will have to micro manage their pet as well!!

 

Managing a ranger's AC isn't THAT much work.

 

 

 

Plus I found it immensely useful in my playthrough (it's fast and unlike regular party members is only caught against the fastest enemies in the game, hence great for scouting and luring enemies into traps, be it some you set up yourself or just luring a camp of bandits to meet&greet the group of trolls next to theirs). :D

 

 

I wasn't aware how differently people played these games until I recently saw someone declaring PoE borderline unplayable for missing party AI and scripts. Some people apparently used them regularly, whilst others (like me) micromanaged every single character all the time. I came to the latter approach in two ways: I'm a bit of a control freak and wouldn't trust an AI to cast the correct spells and position itself correctly (though in retrospect, I'd gladly had accepeted an intelligent AI for casters that would auto-buff the party rather than going through the click fests required every single time -- BG2 was a bit over the top in that regards). But also because I've grown up on micro-management characters from early party RPGs.

 

But there's also an influence that in retrospective is easily overlooked. The IE games have become as much of a synonym for the last Golden Age in strictly PC RPGs that you can easily forgot about their initial roots. I think it's easy to miss that connection nowadays, but there's a reason why compared to early Ultima and similar, top down games that are very fiddly to play today, the Infinity Engine games are quite easy to pick up. Sure, the interface takes too much screen space, and the path finding even outside of combat can be a pain in the ass, and depending on the screen resolution of unmodded games, you won't see further than two meters left and right. Plus inventory management is missing some auto sorting of stuff, though in fairness, it's nowhere near as convulted as in some "modern" games such as Skyrim, which out of the box are made with controllers in mind even on their PC ports, thus come with huge font sizes and have you slog through your inventory and abilities one item at a time. Anyway the IE started out as a prototype for a real-time strategy game (Battleground Infinity). Here's Feargus Urquhart talking about how it clicked for him and the marketing at Interplay when they saw that kind of combat mechanics and they knew they had this freshyl aquired D&D license in their portfolio (that's how Baldur's Gate was born):

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Q0E6bQ_i0

(it's from minute 12 onwards).

 

RTS games are a lot about second to second micromanagement, I think anybody who has played Warcraft 3 can testify to that. It's much more intense in that regard, as in particular early-game losing but a minor unit or two in multi-player can lose you a game. Pulling units out of combat to heal them, casting spells on specific units, it's all done in real-time (without actually pause) and positioning is also important as well. As it's this intense, you need controls that are very refined, naturally. And the basics have always been here too, I think really the template for RTS controls are the most intuitive you got in terms of PC gaming for mouse and keyboards (right next to WASD+mouse for first person action games plus point&click for adventure games). Which likely is one of the reasons why during the mid to late 1990s every publisher had a Command&Conquer or Warcraft clone cooking. All you need to do is pointing on a character (or draw a box around a group of characters), which makes them selected. And by the time BG arrived, those systems were intelligent enough to recognize the action you wanted them to perform by simply left-clicking (like moving somewhere or if the mouse was hovered over an NPC talking to him or if it was an enemy attacking him).

 

Unlike Dune 2, which is a pain in the ass to play nowadays, you don't need to select "attack", "move to", or anything to get them perform their tasks. Point your fingers on your character of choice, add another left-click -- it doesn't get any more intuitive with a mouse to this day. That's why the current Starcraft game and similar at their core play and control exactly like Warcraft 3 -- and Warcraft 3 came out in 2002, the year Icewind Dale 2 was released, the last of the IE games. On top of the core still being intuitive to control on PCs despite their age, I think the IE games at their combat core have always had a lot in common with these kind of games. It was build into their line-age from the way the game initially was set-up (see the video above). Yet I can see and sympathize with anyone who played these games differently; despite micro-managing units being a huge part of any of those games, and having auto-functions for that taking a lot of this away. It doesn't appear likely that such AI scripts will be included until the expansions though, if posts on this forum are to be believed.

Edited May 7, 2015 by Sven_