my AI attempts always seem to fail no matter what i try. i need some ideas on how to format them and intergrate them in to my Final Fantasy Spin Off. If at first you dont succede f**k the world and smoke some weed

You PROBABLY don''t need very sophisticated AI for a final fantasy spinoff... what have you tried?

Here''s an idea:

Less weed and more books!

sorry, just joking around. I couldn''t resist it was such an obvious comment.

MadMage, have you tried the most simple approach? Let the computer decide randomly with equal chance between all his options? When that works you have the input of the AI worked out and can move to the next step and put consideration between different choices.

for something thats like a final fantasy spin off i suggest something that keeps track of the following possibilities for each monster: 1. physical attack 2. magical attack 3. defend (if you want) 4. special attacks 5. run (if you want) then for each monster determine the approximate probability that you wish each action to have say for like a small weak monster you could have it so that
physical - 90%
magic - 0%
defend - 10%
run - 0%
special - 0%
and for like a super hard crazy monster
physical - 30%
magic - 30%
defend 5%
run - 0%
special - 35%
then when the action is to be determined use a random variable to find which action will be taken (make it like a random number between 1 and 100, and for example for that weak monster if the number is between 1 and 91 then theyll do a physical attack) that way you can weigh the actions taken by each individual type of monster based on something you specify, cause lets face it an imp isnt gonna use magic, but some kind of evil mage is gonna use matgic most of the time. i know its not exactly fancy or anything but the theory behind it makes it appear as if the monster performs actions based mostly on the type of monster that it is (though it IS random, but thats only so they dont always do the same predictable pattern, the randomness just adds the slight variability that would be present in a real life situation)