Love them or not, AI players are an essential part of maintaining the gameplay experience of games where player versus player is a core part of the experience.
AIs players help to ensure that, no matter what time a player is logging in and what server they are using, they will always be able to kind of enjoy the experience.
In Super Animal World the AIs do a fairly decent job of passing the five second test – and most interactions won’t really last longer than that when you’re trying to get a one-up on the opposition.
However as you gain more experience as a player, the AI players will become more apparent and even obvious.
It may even be the case that, at first, AI players will seem like relative pushovers. They hesitate. They miss shots. They won’t exert as much pressure as a player would. Not while operating alone, anyway.
But the AI is deliberately pulling its punches so as to ease the experience of newer players trying to come to grips with the game (which, to be clear, is a very good thing – an unprepared player may already face a bit of a shock while playing their first matches with more experienced players).
Over the course of a player’s first 100 levels or so the difficulty level of AI players ramps up to more normal levels. Normal individual AIs pose a little more of a threat, but it is when they are encountered in groups that they are at their most dangerous.
Here I shall drop a few hints to help with handling AIs better (work in progress).