[SUPPORT] Advanced Turn Based Tile Toolkit

[ClaimedInfinity]

One very quick way is to simply GetIndexesInRange around each enemy unit, with a range equal to its move range plus its attack range. This will get you a fairly close heuristic for very open maps, but it would quickly break down if the map has a lot of obstacles, so this is unlikely to be what you want.

A better way to approach this, if your enemy units have roughly the same move and attack ranges, is to run a single pathfinding where you input the grid indexes as each enemy unit in the Open List of the pathfinding, and run the pathfinding with a move set to the average (or slighly above average) move range + attack range. Any tile found by the pathfinding will on average be attackable by at least one enemy. This will still not give perfect information by any means, but is super quick. Generally AI does not need to be perfect for the AI to provide a challenge and feel like it is making informed decisions.

A step up from this is to do the same thing, but separately for each unit. We are still not using FindTilesInRange for every single tile each unit can move to, but instead increasing its move range equal to its range. You can even alter the last steps of the pathfinding to emulate finding tiles in sight range by creating a custom pathfinding type that uses GridBaseEdges instead of GridEdges when finding connected tiles. This should give you pretty good results if you do not have units with attack ranges that are likely to have sight range blocked, but can potentially have some issues if your levels are such that there can often be “islands” within the pathfinding range that can be attacked but not reached through movement. If this is an issue it can be improved by after running the first pathfinding equal to move range, you run a new one that takes the indexes from FindPathfindingEdge as the first grid indexes in the open list and continues movement (using the GridBaseEdges suggestion) from here.

Ok, the first two ways are simple enough but I’m not sure if I got the third right. Are you suggesting we should run Pathfinding (maybe customized) for each unit separately? I’m doing something like that now.

As to the details. In my case the average move range is 4 tiles per turn (more likely 2 tiles per turn if you want to move and attack in the same turn) and attack range is 1-2 tiles (except light ranged units but those don’t do much damage and it’s ok to leave their danger calculations distance-based as it is now). Maps are single-level and no more than 20x20 tiles. There aren’t many obstacles but a number of units can be pretty high though, at around 16 units per side, so the units can be obstacles themselves, that is why I’m thinking that GetIndexesInRange is not enough.

I had a couple of ideas to speed up the process too. First is to check for danger only the tiles that can be reached through move by a current pawn. Second is to exclude enemy units that cannot attack those tiles by any means. Third is to run pathfinding only for a limited number of pawns (let’s say 4) that are closest to the current pawn/or move target tile. It could also emulate imperfect human thinking. I think so at least.

I agree that AI doesn’t need to be perfect but I’d like to test how it’ll work at least. Currently I’m getting perfectly accurate values by running customized Pathfinding for each pawn as I described before. I just don’t know how slow It’ll be in the end. At worst I have an option of returning to default AI settings of the toolkit with a few light modifications as the units seem to behave themselves fairly good and I can even lose sometimes when the odds are even in terms of numbers.