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Can someone explain how the Witch AI works?


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Nobody knows. It's a mystery for the ages.

I'm actually being half serious. They seem to only target people at the very edge of your little death ball, but even then they don't always do it, even when they can kill someone if they gang up on a specific character. 

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I'm my experience, they rarely gang up on people, prefer to target people outside of the main group, teleport about half the time, and only if they can't attack normally. Furthermore, they target your weaker units, but never someone they can one-shot. They also like targeting your archers/healers (at least in my case, which worked out for me as they had no problem at all dealing with them).  It's a little weird and very RNG-based, at least that's what I've experienced.

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I've had units killed by witches this way. They don't seem to pick particular targets (and I've also seen witches essentially suicide this way), but they can just happen to pick the same low-RES unit twice. It looks at first that they find random targets before warping, but I've also seen cases where they don't actually reach player units after warping.

I've also seen witches warp to two spaces in front, and then walk to my side's frontier units. It's weird. Just have your units prepared enough for them to not die after one witch battle, and leave the rest to the RNG.

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They seem to move in unpredictable patterns for me and are usually stupid enough to attack folks who can attack back...

I had a blast on the Fear Mountain map, since the Witches all arbitrarily decided to suicide into my Mage Ring wielding lolinuke Delthea...

Edited by DragonFlames
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7 hours ago, Thane said:

Nobody knows. It's a mystery for the ages.

I'm actually being half serious. They seem to only target people at the very edge of your little death ball, but even then they don't always do it, even when they can kill someone if they gang up on a specific character. 


He's not kidding. Sometime, a unit is literally at one hit from death, but it's very rare that a witch actually finish it, it happened to me one time. Most of the time, they warp and attack someone else. Or even more funny, they warp near you, and don't do anything.

Visibly, losing your soul also mean losing half of your brain :p.

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I believe they were implemented with this "act random/suicide/attack enemies on edge" strategy on purpose because that's the way they worked in FE2. I'm not sure if FE2 had poor programming/limited AI capability/was intentionally set up this way, but it appears to be a continuity thing.

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Witches are strange, they're both consistent and yet inconsistent all at the same time. From what I can tell, for the most part they work something like 

1. Attack in Range -> 2. Try to Warp -> 3. If no, move max range -> 4. If yes, attack outskirts (random target?) -> 5. If Warped, don't gang up

Their attack patterns don't really deviate from that ever, from what I've played. I've consistently found that they tend to attack whoever is in the rear of your group on maps that are more spread out, and found that they would usually even attack the same unit under identical circumstances. . .but not always. There's probably more to it than that, but there's enough to suggest that they can be manipulated somewhat.

Now as for whether or not they feel like warping is a different story entirely. I have no clue what determines that, if anything at all. Some maps, they always do (for me), while others not so much (Fear Mountain in particular).

EDIT: They don't Warp -> gang up, but they can Warp -> ORKO, so if a Unit can be killed by a single Witch/a single Witch + non-Witch, it's probably best to leave them out, or at least keep them topped off. 

Edited by Deltre
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I have no idea either, but if I were to hazard a guess, they seem to work on their own separate RNG system which will have them behave like normal units most of the time and only sometimes teleport to attack your units, probably to avoid furstrating situations where 7 or so witches gang up on one unit and kill them in a single turn.  The only thing I've found consistent is that they never use their teleportation to go to a healing tile.  Teleporting for Witches cost no HP and I have had Witches on one HP who simply refused to teleport to a healing tile (in fact one of them use teleported closer to my units even though she had one HP and could not attack) which is bizarre since every other enemy is programmed to do so.  I would really like someone to interview the people behind Shadows of Valentia and get clarification on this.

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My best guess is that they have some sort of algorithm that generates multiple Warp spots relative to your army's position, then randomly pick one of said locations. I have no actual clue though, maybe someone will break the game down and analyze this.

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The Witch AI is weird. In one map I had Zeke on the edge of my team and one or two witches teleported then attacked, but died in one hit from Gradivus. The next few turns I tried keeping Zeke on the edge of my team to bait and kill the witches, but no witches teleported to him. 

So, the Witches are unpredictable.... 

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I notice the spot they warp too is always their maximum attack range away. This really limits their ability to gang up on your guys since there are very few spaces on the map for their target that fit that immediate requirement, especially with terrain like forest tiles in the equation. As for when they decide to warp, no idea. You can turnwheel and it seems that alone is enough to reroll their odds of warping. Just like rerolling whether or not a cantor summons on the next enemy phase.

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