Ai and choices

Well back at home after house sitting. Got a lot of programing done over there, the basics of the combat tester engine are pretty much complete. You can hit a guy, aim better, and guard. The very very basics are here and it works out which leads to some problems if I want to get to my goal of having something
interesting in game play.

So I have the basic mechanics down, you choose dice to assign to differnt aspect in the combat round and the system calculates everything and then goes to the next round until someone falls down. This is working but not quite what I want it yet. After some brain storming I decided to try some of the basic ideas that are common in some pen and paper games.

I'm unsure if D&D started the whole idea but I know it best from D&D 3.5. A little feat called power attack. Effectivly power attack reduces our chance to hit for some extra minor damage. I'm unsure if from there other X attacks spawned but in mutant and masterminds 2nd edition a few more were made allows if your to sacrifice damage pottental for the chance to hit.

Why this matters for my system? Because as it stands it doesn't work. The main problem is that I'm flatly using how much attack beats defense as damage. So a -2 on one side and a +2 on the toher just reduces the average damage overall, and how many times it actually does damage. Using something more drastic such as *2 on one side and /2 on the other leading to the more accurate but less damageing attack somehow able to deal more damage than normal attacks and other such crazy things. So the most basic ideas in the hit them till they fall down to try and increase the complexity of this system sort of fails so I will have to think harder on this.

Now for the other part of combat, the enemies side the AI. AI is decently hard. For me I don't have to worry about a lot of things, position, movement actions, and all the sorts for things that make games annoying to program. For me I have it easy as I just have to choose what ability it can do so I have a few routes to go. I can go through a gauntlet of variable comparison and spit out an action. I could do what no RPG has ever done and do breadth or depth first searches taking into account what the players and random number generator into acount and make one of the hardest RPG games out there by virtue of that. Though I could also do what I usualy end up doing and go with my "randumb" model of RPG enemies for the mooks at least, where it just randomly picks from the list of abilities and goes with it.Not the most imaginative but I have little work with applied AI and would rather have it work or use some scripts to act though it is something I could work on.

Until later I'll be working a bit more on trying to make this system interesting as is.