The description I found in ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_fantasy_tactics ) mention multiturn involvement, what sounds like the need to sometimes concentrate fire to kill opposing units and area effect attacks. Definitely coordinating mutiple units movement and firing for best effect AND to deny the same to your enemy -- alot of combinatorics and including the unknowns of what your opponent does (exploding the possibilities further).

Methods of partial reevaluation would likely have a big payoff.

Lua I would assume allows you to write C/C++ functional code which for a planner and pathfinding would likely be needed to speed up the AI for this level of complexity. SInce its not a realtime game the time the user spends on input could be used to reevaluate the game situation.

Good point.

hey guys, i just wanted to give an update on how it's coming along:

[video][/video]

essentially it's a state machine for each player, and it subdivides long ai processing by spacing out alot of the checks over several frames. it's pretty decent for my needs, and puts up a nice fight. it also required a lot of involment from the action's scripts themselves to maintain what they are about to hit, and what tile's they could potentially hit(to avoid walking onto another tile that might be targeted.)

it also showed alot of bugs that i couldn't find myself due to lack of speed for input's(such as the sliding death at the end.), it's kindof interesting to see that it brings out alot of bugs in how the game handles things when the ai is unrestricted at how fast it can process and do things.

one suggestion by wodinoneeye is the coordination. doing this in real time means alot of spacing the algorithm across multiple steps. and keeping track of alot more data to weight in the need for multiple units striking the same unit. currently, the ai works on 1 unit at a time, and evaluates all the opponent's, it then takes each opponent, and checks to see what the least relative cost action it can perform(also looks up if combining movement/attack would cost less than an attack that could potentially hit the target from it's current position.)

it's not perfect, but fits my needs for now.