Sure ill try to whip something up next week.
Btw do you have any plans for different versions of brutal AI for different units?
Sectoids having different AI from Reapers or Mutons for example?
I dont know if thats even possible, just asking out of curiosity.
Btw its seriously astonishing how you made this within a month of learning about openxcom
Thats some real talent
While different units don't have different AI, the AI will treat different units differently. Granted their differences warrant a noticable difference in potential play-style.
I can tell what the differences are:
The "standard"-behaviour is for aliens that can move by walking and that have a ranged-attack. Since there's no noticable difference between a sectoid and a muton here, they basically behave the same.
Then there's the melee-case. This is obviously used by aliens that only have melee attacks but also by Cyberdisks and aliens that at some point primed their grenade before having an opportunity to throw it. Once they have thrown it, they will go back to the standard-behaviour. Melee units are more reckless and try to get in your face instead of hiding. The reason is that they need to be decisive in order to achieve something. Cyberdisks obviously will still use their ranged-attack whenever they have the opportunity. The difference in behaviour is when they can't.
Flying units, while using the standard-behaviour for the most part, are very well aware of the utility of being able to fly, especially that this means they can not become target of grenades and attack from unusual angles. So they behave noticably different.
Aliens with a blaster-launcher also have a different behaviour. Unlike the standard-aliens they will generally not try to get too close. I think their behaviour is the most likely to have more room for improvement. But since they are bot rare and devastating it's hard to experiment with them in normal settings. I'd have to make a mod or so to see how they act in isolation. A potential way to improve them is to probably treat them more like mind-controlled units in the sense that they rather blow themselves up with the enemy instead of doing nothing. Doing nothing while cornered as a blaster-user usually means you'll die anyways or worse get captured and interrogated. So they probably should be more trigger-happy.
Well, thanks again for the compliment. I've picked up the hobby of writing AI for games in 2014 or so. I'd say the practice and experience gained in that time helped a lot in getting more confident and skilled in doing so for new games. I've usually done it for 4x-games. So compared to those X-Com is a project of smaller scope. But then again it's tactical layer has a lot more depth than that of games where you fight on a 2-dimensional 9x9 grid. In small-scale tactical-scenarios it's much easier to simulate the outcome of different actions. In X-Com-battlescape that would be way too computation-heavy so I had to find some work-arounds to do things that I otherwise would want to simulate. AI work is also very 80:20-rule heavy. Usually you can do a lot of significant improvement in very little time but then there's a lot of diminishing returns in the time-invested:observable-difference-ratio.
The effort for 2.0 in hindsight feels barely worth it.
What people call "talent" usually comes down to someone having become passionate about what they are doing. Being passionate about something is what leads to intrinsic motivation and with intrinsic motivation everyone can grow beyond themselves.