fft: war of the lions, minimal spoilers
Picking up my old iOS copy and, it actually got better with age.
Back when I ran this on its original build, I meticulously moved all of my units. Spent literal days grinding and micromanaging my party.
Now? I’ve learned how the AI works, and I’m building a party to see how far I can take autoplay.
Under manual control, everyone was a healer with Raise. Under AI control, everyone is instead a DPS, with the ability to end encounters in under three rounds.
fft: war of the lions, minimal spoilers
The AI sees _way_ more creative solutions to damage and crowd control than I do, but it can easily get caught in loops with the wrong strategy (ie, units hiding in a corner healing themselves forever).
There are also a few skills the AI will _always_ go for (ie, how it considers skills involving the charm status) that I had to prevent units from learning entirely.
Building around that has been an interesting challenge.
fft: war of the lions, minimal spoilers
tl;dr: I’ve learned to greatly appreciate robot wars as a genre of videogame.
fft: war of the lions, minimal spoilers
Most interesting is how it selects from the pool of available buffs and debuffs.
The War of the Lions build of the AI seems to consider the balance of opposing units when selecting spells that mitigate physical and magical damage. It’ll also selectively go for Haste, Slow, and Immobilize if that outcompetes KOing a unit outright. Which all is way more nuanced than I ever expected the AI to be when I first played it.