Switching is broken

[Kenneth]

I understand the reasons behind recent AI changes, but the AI behavior is far from being the intended one. While it is perfectly normal (and desirable, even) for enemies to switch out their pokemon, many times they do that in the wrong place/situation. Even important fights like against rivals (cane in beryl cemetery), are "bugged". What i mean:

 

a You spam one certain move, from a pokemon of a certain type (let's use Graveler as an example and its Bulldoze). Enemy switches out on you, but throws a pokemon weak against the move you 've just kept spamming, of poor typing against your own pokemon in general, or both. Before somebody rushes to argue that cane uses A-marowak and poison types that all have weakness to ground, this behavior has been noticed in various other fights as well overall, against trainers with a healthy variety of types/species also. They just HAVE to throw in your face something that your spammed move is supereffective, or something.

 

b Switches aren't always constant and they are never fluid, similar to how human opponent would react. Some fights switch only once, at a very predictable point at that, giving you the chance to correctly "predict" it and order your mon to use another move, or spread status freely deep into the opponent's team. Fastest way to cripple crappy npc AI or cheese a fight.

 

Add the switching issue to the "PP preservation", a.k.a. your enemy uses its weakest move once your health drops at orange and the game is... Too easy, now? With clunky AI? What happened here? And that's not even all... Enemy trainers are now too shy to spam recovery items, only one of the important fights up to the point i am now (shade) threw recovery items at all and even then, not even the good stuff like they used to, in earlier episodes (ex 16).

 

Is this the final state of the AI that we are going to get stuck with, or there is still room for tweaking/improvement? If the answer to that is "it's final", then at least, please add a trully hard mode. The game today is... Too easy. Everything that changed, unfortunately worked towards that end.

[Mimikyu]

The essentials Coding for AI has always been a problem to my understanding, I remember seeing a lot of Dev posts in the past with problems involving AI

[Aphelli]

IIRC they did a lot of work so it's really not the Essentials AI anymore, so much that it's a massive chunk of code, with at least thousands of lines. This kind of length and complexity makes it very easy for tiny mistakes to have dispoportionately large impacts, completely straying from the intended behavior (or worse, weird combinations of correct and subtly wrong code to produce something that looks like a mostly correct output). That's really hard to debug. 

 

And it's not even in the "oh, what a nice puzzle" way, more in the "omg, how do I untangle this 1000-string knot?" way. Another analogy would perhaps be: imagine a 20,000-tile mosaic (so any two tiles have the same shape) showing a blue sky. You know how it's supposed to look like in the end, but how do you know that you put every tile at the right spot?

[Amethyst]

I recognize that this is technically a different issue than the previous thread, but you basically just made a thread that reads almost exactly like this like three days ago. Like, bro, are you okay?

Specifically I am referring to the amount of vitriol in both these and many of your other posts

 

Yes, there are still bugs in the AI. Yes, we are obviously still working on it. At no point have we ever said that it is done. 

 

But all of your posts about this display an attitude of entitlement and bad faith on the matter. For instance, you're saying the game is too easy while new players are still frequently ostracized by the difficulty of the first two gyms as is, and the way you write these questions seems to be with the assumption that we've made it easier on purpose or don't care. Personally I don't even agree that it is easier now than in 16. Trainers used items more before, but they used them in such a way that they would just get KO'd immediately after doing so, throwing what was otherwise a free sweep. 

 

This-- this coming into the general section and making what is effectively a vaguepost about how the AI is bad without providing any details as to the situations you're noticing-- is not only unhelpful, but the way you go about it is supremely rude. I would like to say, instead, please make threads in the bug reporting section including the very specific details of situations you've seen and why they're a problem... and you can technically still do that-- I'd prefer that to this. But truthfully even with as many details as possible it's almost impossible to diagnose AI issues when debuglogs aren't on, which means we have to wait until the next testing segment-- which is also fine because we are already aware of some bugs that still need to be fixed in how it assumes minimum damage rolls, and other cases. We can't have those testing sessions all the time, though.

So instead I have to ask you to be patient. 

Please be patient.

Please consider showing more respect not just to us on Reborn but also the devs of other fangames-- I've seen that this is not an issue isolated to us. 

Frankly, please consider showing respect to other human beings altogether-- like man it's not against the rules explicitly, but what is that avatar? Insensitive, at the least

I don't want to publicly roast you or anything-- a sentiment which I feel is not mutual-- but I am extensively disappointed that you continue to conduct yourself in this way

Please chill. 

[Kenneth]

Apologies, i mean no disrespect. On the contrary, i love this project, it is my favorite happy-time spender (by now, i 've spent even more time playing than i did in generation 2, my favorite ever) and i have gone through it a multitude of times, without ever being bored. It's just that previous versions AI was functioning less... Buggy? Errory? More kinda "properly", or something vaguely along those lines? Sorry, i know you 're doing your best and you 're not even being paid for that, as well as the long, long hours of workload and i am VERY grateful for all of your efforts and collective endeavors. And the engine change was no small task, either. It's just i want the best for this game and at the same time, i remember it functioning a bit more "properly" in earlier versions; that's all. Please forgive the admittedly seemingly bad manners but i assure you, the intentions behind them are good. Big and long time fan, here!

[Tapu Fufu]

Yeah I feel like Pokemon Reborn is so much easier this episode just because enemies switch when you lower their stats, even if the stat changes doesn't affect much. I've been saved from certain loss by random switches more times than I can count. The game's still great, winning's just not as satisfying.