Monster mana alternatives

[Antoine]

There is no reason why Antoine's suggestion couldn't combine well with this approach. Indeed, monsters could have a numeric 'smartness' rating instead of just a flag. Smarter monsters would do the optimal thing more often. Kavlax is very dangerous anyway; he wouldn't have to be smart.

I agree. To generalise your comment a bit more, I'd caution against going through the monster.txt and thinking "that monster sounds pretty clever, I'll give it a high smartness rating". That is likely to make some powerful casters too dangerous.

If mobs are to have varying smartness ratings then it should be for sound gameplay reasons ("yes I do want that mob to spam ability X when it needs it most") rather than just flavour.

And for initial implementation, I don't think any mob should be more than (say) 30% smart.

A.

[LostTemplar]

Most 4GAI variants still have 1_in_N casting chances, so monsters dont use ability every turn, same as in vanilla. Just choosing one ability to use is somewhat smart (monsters never try to select "most powerfull" ability, they just try to avoid using useless one)
e.g. monster uses paralyze, player resists, monster dont use it again. Actual gameplay is very similar to vanilla angband.

IMHO good thing to add would be individual chances for every spell.

[Antoine]

Did anything come of this line of development?

A.

[takkaria]

Did anything come of this line of development?

A.

Nothing's been coded in V yet. In fact, V development has more or less come to a stop again, after the competition.