Yet another post regarding combat AI (Or make companions stop being useless)

[Malkior 476]

Since a few people have been asking about AI recently, I'm reminded of a problem I've had regarding combat in general with Kotor and Kotor 2. 

Regardless of whether you're controlling or not controlling a character, whenever the combat is activated, they invariably use the weakest attack possible by default (The single sword icon).

I know that some mods make it so that in the midst of combat or at least after the first round, companion AI is actually quite good at generally finding the ideal attack for a given situation. However, no matter how good a mod is, the characters always start the battle with the same default weak attack. 

At this point, I assume this is technically a bug not unlike the issue where ranged player characters rush the enemy as if they're holding a melee weapon because the combat system probably starts with the unarmed strike at the beginning and if you have no weapon, you will just stand there to get shot by ranged enemies.

Unfortunately, I don't really know the AI code that well. The only psuedo explanation I have is that this is to keep the player from getting stuck when combat is initiated at which point follow up combat functions determine which attacks to use. However, this is really freaking annoying since sometimes I like to open a round of combat with a grenade volley and my character happens to be carrying a sword; and I don't want him to be running headlong into certain death rather than just blowing it up.

So, I was wondering if the grand scripting wizards of the DS could conjure a reasonable workaround or alternative code to address this issue so I don't have to babysit my characters (Cancel the default attack, empty each additional default attack they want to use, then choose the attack I want to start with and hope they haven't already started their kamikaze run sometimes leading to them running in circles as they figure whether to ignore my command) every time I start a round of combat.

[Salk 374]

The only person that seemed to have a project to properly overhaul the KotOR AI was blinkyzero with his Enemy Enhancer but he used to appear only once a year for a short period and then hibernate again until he stopped showing up altogether.

I've myself always advocated how an AI upgrade was one of the most needed modding work to be done for KotOR (TSL has Improved AI available at least).

Unfortunately I am not so good as to tackle a task of such magnitude. The only thing I have locally done was to add a passive script to the pool of party style scripts so that the most common stupid behavior (AI-controlled party member walking straight into a mine) is eliminated.

Cheers!