Lunging Drain

Not sure if this is a bug or a new AI feature; I just witnessed a trog kill another trog using lunging drain. (received the card after I used vampire's kiss on one of the trogs)

 

I've always thought it was strange that allies are highlighted as targets whenever you play a step attack. Perhaps it's related?

 

Vamps using attacks on other A.I. has been around at least since the CM rebalance.

 

Was the attacking character/minion encumbered? If so, then this was a classical step-attack problem that was around since there are step-attack and encumber-effects. Pure move cards are affected by this to some extend also.

If the AI wants to play a step-attack card, it ranks the possible destination cells before the game triggers any attachment effects. So, for the AI it is as if there are no encumber effects at all. Then - after the AI decided that this card would be good - the game triggers all attachments including encumbers. After that the AI doesn't correct its decisions but the game just selects the highest ranked destination cell that is in range of the reduced move points. If this movement was a step-attack and next to the selected/reachable destination cell there is no enemy character, the AI will attack one of its own characters in order to not waste an action. At least that is what I guess happened.

The problem also is, that the AI will assume best case outcome to decide which card to play in the first place. So, any effects like encumber can put the AI in some disadvantage twice. First, because it didn't choose the best card, and second, because it couldn't reach the best outcome for this card either.

Similarly, I assume that the AI will never take advantage of additional move points (due to things like Quickness Aura) if the AI isn't already ranking cells that in theory shouldn't be in reach. Example: if the AI would only rank all cells within 5 cells for a Move 5 card, the additional +2 move points will not make a difference, as cells with distance 6 weren't ranked in the first place and would never to moved to. Don't know though how these are actually handled. Perhaps the AI can handle these at least.