Duelyst Forums

Battle Pet attack order questions

#1 
1  2  3
4  X> 5
6  7  8

Imagine a Battle Pet in X, facing right side (consider it casted by Player 1).
There are 8 squares around and I’d like to know which one will be attacked first.

We already know it’s median before diagonal.
It means if you have an enemy in 2 and one in 3, the Battle Pet will go for 2.

But what happens in theses situations ?

Horizontal choice

.  .  . 
4  X> 5
.  .  .

Will he go for 4 or 5 ?

Vertical choice

.  2  .
.  X> .
.  7  .

Will he go for 2 or 7 ?

Diagonal choice

.  .  3
.  X> .
6  .  .

Will he go for 3 or 6 ?

Multi median choice

.  2  . 
4  X> 5
.  .  .

Will he go for 2, 4 or 5 ?

Generally speaking, is there a rule like : if there is an equal choice between 2 target, the pet will pick the first going clockwise, starting in front of him. (anyone can confirm ?)

I’m not very fond of Battle Pets, to be honnest, I use really a few but … you know, optimising Zendo and simply understanding mechanics :blush:

Tried to test in Sandbox but for some reasons, doesn’t work well for me :frowning:

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F.A.Q. Construction Thread
#2

I’m pretty sure that ties are resolved randomly.

Note that a target 2 squares away linearly and a target 1 square away diagonally are considered “tied” in terms of distance.

This behavior is IMO contrary to the usual way that Duelyst handles spacing (“diagonals” only exist for attacks, in which case they are treated as equal to cardinal directions).

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#3

a little pets are kind of weird. i have had them target a general and other times in the same exact position attack a minion.

#4

Finally managed to get Sandbox working and so far, that’s the way it looks, can’t find any concistency but “median before diagonal” :frowning:

#5

That’s very good question. Hope somebody can answer it. I have another one. If you have multiple pets on the board,is there a way to know which one is gonna move/attack first, second, etc… Is it random or is there a mechanic to it? I played against starhorn pet deck the other day and got confused positioning my latern fox get the most phoenix fires.

#6

Pets act in the order they are played. If pets are summoned “simultaneously” (Nature’s Confluence, for example), they are summoned in order of bottom-left, top-left, bottom-right, top-right.

I thought I had most of the Battle Pet AI “solved,” until I ran into some Ranged Battle Pet situations which broke my preconceptions. For example, this one:

. . R . .
. . . . .
. A . . .
. . B . .
. . . . .

Here I expected my Ranged Battle Pet R always to move down 1 space to attack enemy A, but nope, it sometimes moved down 1 space to attack enemy B from range. I mean, at least when I read the “Activates at the start of your turn and moves to attack the nearest enemy.” tooltip, I’m not expecting the “nearest” to be in some variety of non-Euclidean geometry. =S

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#7

Yeah I mentioned this above. A and B are both two cardinal steps from where R moves down, so they are equal chance. I do think this is very counterintuitive and hope they change it.

And of course, ranged units shouldn’t be moving at all. I have no idea why they did that.

#8

Yeah, it’s programming logic, both squares are two moves away. It’s not as counter-intuitive when it comes to movements like this…

. . R . . .
. . . . . A
B . . . . .

…but when it comes to attacks where diagonal is a special case elsewhere in the game, having a tiebreaker is probably a good idea, especially when Ranged units still consider diagonal “touching” when selecting “nearest” movement targets.

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#9

So we can summarize that the pet prioritizes its movement in terms of tiles travelled, then prioritizes its target in terms of tile distance, where diagonals count as 2 tiles in both cases.

#10

Thank you, that’s really helpful. I don’t play any battle pets in any of my decks, but I like them. They’re like another inner focus for my panddo and fox. Same for taygete, last time gro 5/7 ran into her beside his general and killed him :blush:

#11