Tanking

My original thought on how the battle strategy and monster AI should work is quite similar to WOW were you have a threat value and threat range; basically each monster will have a priority list with each player in it and simply attack the one who has built highest threat, action would cause threat to rise depending on distance and action. For example a damage spell like firebolt does X damage and raises the threat by X times f(distance), where f is function that reasonably decreases with distance. However since damage dealers would reasonably do much more damage than tanks they would easily steal the position as target, to counter this the tank uses skills which does additional threat even though damage is low, and other skills that only exist for threat building and/or forcing the user to be the target of the target for some time, so called taunts, another way to counter the higher threat from damage dealers is to let them have skills with reduced threat or have skills that reduces the threat value of enemies, single or all. Finally to make it a bit more difficult each action should affect all enemies within a distance, forcing the tank to divide his attention to several targets or have several tanks, this will require the tank to have skills that build threat very quickly and/or skills that can build threat on several enemies at the same time. Outside the threat distance enemies will not raise their threat value, and as long as their threat level is below zero they will not attack anyone.

The new idea that Kei introduced to me yesterday is more dependent on the positioning of characters; basically the monster will chose a target based on some value, perhaps can use something similar to a threat value, but as the enemy moves and attacks it will do so with the first target it can find along the way, e.g. if you place your tank between the enemy and the target the enemy will automatically attack the tank. There will have to be a form of calculation where the targeting system decides on a path from the unit to preferred target, and then basically simulating a walk over that path and picking out the first target available as the real target, this could also include positions neighboring the path.

I guess I could use a combination of the two, basically making it more difficult for the tank to hold a high threat level but allowing positioning to matter, so that even if a tank loses the main target position he will still take the damage as long as he is standing between the enemy and the preferred target, giving the tank a chance to build up threat again.