Programmed Enemy Action List

I know I've heard of something similar before but I'm not sure where.

I think it may have been the D&D adventure games. It was a simplified version.
- If there is an adjacent hero, stab for 1d6.
- If there is a hero with three steps, charge for 2d6.
- Otherwise, move 3 steps towards the closest hero.

I keep thinking Gears of war had a simple version of it too. But I don't remember for sure.

While I don't have links to the games or instructions there are a few playthroughs on youtube.

"BlackBeltGaming" because he's done multiple runs of Gears of War and a few of the D&D Adventure Games.

"WatchItPlayed" did a single playthrough of one D&D game... Wraith of Ashardalon I think.

Fields of Fire has an enemy action table sort of like that, but also with some randomness thrown in to make the enemies a bit less predictable.

I think in the final game you need to make the text a lot shorter because there are just too many words to get through to find the important parts. The extra chrome from the non-functional words might be fun the first two times, but after that (until you memorize all the tables) they will just be distracting. Try to distill each enemy type actions into a tiny table. Or maybe just highlight the important words in each description.

RyanRay,
I'm actually doing the same thing with my game too...
You may want to look into Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon with how they handle it.
I also thought for my game to have it so that combat rounds are divided into A and B ones, and the enemies do different things on each round corresponding to which one it is. For more advanced enemies, they could have a random table you roll you roll on with a d6 to see what they do.
And bosses could have round A, B, and C as well so they have more strong of an AI.

With regard to the table, you could have it so it's something like:
d6 roll for a Hollow soldier:
1: they do nothing
2-4: weak attack
5-6: strong attack

You could even have it so that a player could have a stat, attribute, action, or ability that allows them to roll 2d6 and choose one of the results for the enemy to do .

Keeping things simple will make your game too predictable. Players will use this predictability to their advantage.

Best would be to know several solutions to the problem that a player could make.

Then let a dice decide what solution is used by the AI.
But every option should be a valid solution!

Read the rules for the game "Serpent's Tongue" , the solo rules in that game have enemies that have complex AI in it. It may be too complex for your game or you may like it. You can certainly take inspiration from it either way. It uses a system where the enemy acts differently depending on the state the players are in etc and also uses a bag that you draw colored counters from that determines what they do. So you can predict what they might do depending on what the bag currently consists of with the remaining counters

When I had the game it took about 15 minutes to half an hour. But keep in mind that a battle against a single enemy in the game represents an entire "encounter" (game) within the system.
Glad I could help!

Let me know of any ideas you come up with, I'm doing something similar too (you can see what the game's about in my other posts). In short, you adventure around a board and encounter enemies and fight them as in turn based console rpgs.
I think have the enemy have an AI table based upon d6 roll is good and perhaps different round actions/ai would be good as well. Having a bag draw for more advanced AI like in Serpent's Tongue would be something neat to implement as well.

How was that? I don't know about the CYOA series in particular, but for gamebooks in general you were just given the stats of an enemy and rolled dice until the battle was over.

Two exceptions:
- In the Way of The Tiger and Virtual Reality series the battles were played out as part of the sections of the book, so you were given options what type of attack to do, then you go to a new section and learn how well that worked, then pick a new action etc. I'm sure a few other books did that as well, but it isn't very applicable to boardgames I think.

- Blood Sword (about to be reprinted) had the small tactical maps that you played mini-boardgames on to resolve battles. Those books actually did have a simple enemy action system, but (iirc) very predictable enemies that would always just follow some simple rule like move towards closest player character and attack or something like that.

Ambush! deserves a mention in this thread (because I mention it in almost every thread anyway :) ). In Ambush! at the start of each rould you roll a d10 to get the Enemy Action Number (or whatever it was called) and then you (normally) use that number to look up on each enemy card what action they will take. There are photos on bgg showing examples of what the cards look like (eg http://boardgamegeek.com/image/112249/ambush?size=large). As is seen the cards actually have a small table and it is not only the action number ("DIE" column on the cards) that is used to decide what that enemy will do, you also pick a column based on what condition (from 1 to 6) the game is currently in (or one of the letters used if that enemy has been put in a special reacion). The result of that small table is just a three-digit number, because you have a paragraph booklet (like a gamebook/CYOA) that you then use to actually learn what the enemy does. Some instructions can be quite complex, redirect you to other paragraphs, have you roll more dice etc, so it can take a lot of time, but it is a very powerful system.