LarsInCharge said:
In Samurai Warriors 4 (the most recent "Warriors" installment) enemy soldiers are somewhat more aggressive on normal, and will punish you if you aren't focused. Officers will use the tricks available to you (utilizing Special skills, air recovery and counter, spirit dash, etc) against you, and the AI has greatly improved over the years. If you're good at games like Devil May Cry it still isn't terribly challenging, but you can't just mash square across a battlefield and expect to win.
The enemy AI in Empires mode could use some work, but they will pull tricky stuff occasionally. Like when I captured part of Lu Bu's territory and captured Diao Chan, she betrayed me in the very next battle allowing Lu Bu to take the territory back and demoralizing my forces so that even killing peons became a chore.
Man, I might have to go find myself a copy of SW4 to play then!
I think being right below DMC is probably about the right threshold of difficulty here for most of the people who would play a Musou game.
To go into more details here (if you'll indulge me), what I mean by AI and personality can be exemplified in Streets of Rage 2. In Streets of Rage 2, all of the enemies have different kinds of movement AI, based on their personalities, which in conjunction with their personal movesets, creates a very full personality picture on how they fight. i.e. Galsia, the basic thug type, on hardest difficulty, will always dance around you until you're in a recovery frame and jump in for a jab and will always try to flank. The Donovan's (shirtless guy with shades) will circle as well, and in that respect is much like Galsia, but he also has an uppercut that he'll ALWAYS use if you jump. This means you can bait him into using his uppercut (which has horrible recovery), and then attack while he's recovering from the attack. He also will try to pick up pipes on the ground when he sees it, as he can utilize that.
I would like to see more of THAT in a Musou game. I know that some of that is already there. The fact that you have basic troops, officers, archers, gate captains, and so on already necessitates to it. But because of the way they do placement in this game (i.e. gate captains only show up at gates, archers always show up in groups, etc), combined with enemies having fairly similar AIs (except say, Archer vs. Infantry) means that you have a pretty high amount of predictability for how you would tackle the encounters.
If I run into an infantry group in area 1, and another infantry group at area 2, the exact composition (i.e. one group has a sergeant vs. having a corporal in the ranks too) might be different but in 99% of the cases, it doesn't alter how I tackle them in the least bit.
The key problem, I think, goes back to difference in scale instead of difference in kind, not just in enemy type, but also how they fundamentally function. An archer, no matter how to dissect them, is there to provide distraction and stuns. An infantry, no matter how to dissect it, will always be about sticking a couple blows to sap health and crowd. It would be great though, if there are base enemy types who basically is JUST there to stun the players out of a musou, for example, or place debuffs on the area to counter the player's buff effects, or enemies that prefer knock downs, or enemies that use obscenely long pole arms to stay out of player range and add as support, etc.
Of course, doing things this way has the drawback of taking emphasis away from the officer's themselves, which is what the Musou games are really about anyway... soo.... err....
