Is this normal spell-casting ai behavior ?

[Boron]

I fought as Pythium against Pangenea . Pangenea had a medusa + 100 living statues .
I had the idea to script my theurgs to quickness , false horror x4 , cast spells .
The plan was just to generate a "meat shield" with a few false horrors in the hope that the theurgs cast after this combat spells occasionally too .

My theurgs only casted a few buffs after the 5 spells and then continued with false horrors + phantom warriors only .
Is this normal behaviour ?
They could have casted at least mind burn too which would have helped a lot agains the living statues .

[Chazar]

I also have the impression that the AI prefers to choose among the 5 selected spells. So I usually script my seraphs to "Quickness","False Horror","False Horror","False Horror" and then either "Orb Lightning" or "Frozen Heart".

I guess that having a spell scripted shifts the weights for AI spell choosing a bit. At least according to my experience - and I really like it that way. In fact I would prefer it if one could only encourage the AI to cast certain spells instead of specifying a specific order...

[Wauthan]

AI seem to prefer summoning spellls over dealing damage when the battle is far away from them. Great legions of souless and skellingtons shambling about the rear ranks tends to be evidence of this.

To remedy this you need to get your spellcaster closer to the enemy by scripting in a few attack commands. It's risky but it makes the spellcaster more useful since many good spells have a fairly limited range. The spell Haste is a good way to get the whole lot of spellcasters running to the frontline with just one attack command. Flight is a little bit too risky without serious protective spells and equipment.

[Boron]

Yeah i have the same impression that the spellcasting Ai loves to spam troops .

Since the theurgs are so fragile i thought it would be a good idea to place them rearmost cause i thought pan has a few longbows too or similiar .

Still i feel a bit cheated that my about 25 theurgs did cast no single mind burn in a 50 turn battle ... .
Everyone buffed with body etheral , astral shield etc. after the 5 scripted spells but then continued to spam the horrors + phantom warriors .

So if i want to place a mage far behind and casting mainly artillery spells if the mage has either death or air i can forget this after the first 5 scripts anyways i fear

[Kristoffer O]

Mindburn probably doesn't work on mindless units such as living statues. If it does it should be fixed so that is doesn't.

[Arralen]

Even better so: If the only available target for mindburn is the one and only enemy commander
And with range=100 he shouldn't have been out of range, right?

[Boron]

Arralen said:
Even better so: If the only available target for mindburn is the one and only enemy commander
And with range=100 he shouldn't have been out of range, right?

Yeah there were 3 enemy commanders . But against none mind burn was ever used .