Hi Folks I thought you might get a chuckle out of something that I saw in my current playthrough. I am running a CG party through "Vanilla" with the level cap set to 20, just to see how high I can go. So far (Temple Level 2) I am almost exactly where I was with Co8 5.6 (once you factor out the "Big 3" fight, the Assassin, "Retribution", and the Brothel quests. At any rate, I was having the usual rumble with the Bugbears in the Northeast corner of Level 2, when one of them started to attack a Spiritual Weapon that my cleric had cast, and tripped. "That's odd" I thought. "The Wizard's Grease spell expired 2 rounds ago. What's going on ??" I clicked on the Die-roll box and started to chuckle. The bugbear was tripped by (are you ready for this ??) . . . . The Spiritual Weapon !! The Bugbear had tripped to trip the Spiritual Weapon and got tripped instead !
Thats funny. I had one where one of Hedrack's fabulous-tumbling-tripping-freak-brothers ran straight through my lines and tried to trip Spugnoir. He musta rolled a 1, because he lost the opposed check, and down went the bugbear. Spugnoir had no idea what to do next :shrug:
I had the same happen. Spiritual Weapon almost feels like cheating though - the dumb Bugbears attack that rather than anything else.
Wonder what makes them go crazy after the spiritual weapons. Is it just spiritual weapons or summons in general?
My Druid's Animal Companion always seems to get hit first too. I'm guessing that something in the AI goes for these first. Good tactics against a Wizard's Familiar, but lousy against the rest.
The AI is indeed broken to attack Spiritual Weapons before all else, and it can be considered an exploit in certain situations.
I think the AI want to take spellcasters down first and considers summons as spellcasters too, thus attacks them first.
Does the AI go after the weakest party member? SW surely has less HPs than the rest of the party, same with most early summons and animal companions.
I prefer to think that the bugbears had a meeting and said "go for the sws before everything else" rather than consider things like AI.
From the limited AI testing I've done, I think this can be changed, at least to some extent. AI commands like 'target closest', 'target ranged' seem to work as intended, and they've shown no preference for summons. Can you point out monsters that attack summons over all else? i.e. ones that go to ridiculous lengths to do so. e.g. ignoring nearby targets and going after distant summons. Please mention the proto, or if possible, the strategy type or index.
Hi Folks This is turning into an interesting discussion. I don't know if I have a "squirrelly' install on my Vista Laptop, but in my current runthrough ( Vanilla through TFE - X ) I've noticed a few things that I don't remember seeing in Co8 5.5 or 5.6 . For example, I don't recall seeing a single "Charging Crossbowman" (either human or skeletal). I have also seen a fair number of bugbears ( about 30 - 50% ) ignoring Spiritual Weapons to concentrate on PCs and NPCs. I will admit that Animal Followers do seem to be a prime target for the badguys , with Meleny serving as "runner-up target of choice". When I finish my runthrough, I will post a "Vanilla vs Co8" thread listing what I like or noticed about each varient. The Royal Canadian
