a pet peve of mine in srpg's

[Gen Eric Gui]

overkilled by a certain and sometimes insane amount and tends to be a fairly complicated process.

?

Overkiling is easy.  If you need a high number, you either abuse the enemy's weakness or combo it.  There's very little reason for not capturing everything on the map unless you'er trying to meet the secret bosses or you're -just- starting out your first game.

[erwos]

Plenty of non-RPG strategy games with good AI that don't play like a puzzle game. If we want to focus on squad-level, fairly-close-to-SRPG games, JA2 and X-Com have good AI and don't play like puzzle games. If you want a realistic example and all, I mean.

I don't know if I'd agree that X-Com had particularly good AI. Most of X-Com's challenge came from the insane hide-and-seek-style gameplay - the randomly generated maps tended to be a little too crowded, IMHO. JA2, OTOH, I'd agree with.

[MeshGearFox]

Most of X-Com's challenge came from the insane hide-and-seek-style gameplay

Yes, and the enemy AI is very geared towards that and quite good at it. They know how to pop out of hiding, cap a guy, and get cover again, or hide out in a house/crashed ship and ambush you. They don't TEND to seek you out, but that'd put them at a disadvantage.

Also, JA2 has a fundamental difference from XCom in that dudes, good or bad, aren't nearly as fragile as in XCom.

The randomly generated maps tended to be a little too crowded

I don't know if I'd agree with this in regards to UFO Defense. Most of the maps there were fairly open. TFTD though, definitely. Cruise ships, for instance. Also sunken ships replacing houses on, say, the farm maps. sunken ships were far less navigable.

[Aeolus]

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[Alisha]

Super Robot Taisen: OG2 has good AI, but that also has a lot to do with how ludicrously powerful most enemy mechs/pilots are, since just slamming headfirst into your army usually results in a win for them.  The first one has more balanced enemy units, but the AI is also far more stupid.


So I mean, it's a process of give and take.  You're never going to find a game where the enemy has both good units and good AI, because the game would be nothing more than completely frustrating and in many cases, completely impossible to win without cheating/massive, massive amounts of grinding.  And that's just bad game design, in the end.

the thing about super robot wars is that the AI chooses targets different than most srpg AI's. this is partly due to spirit commands wich makes reals almost untoucable by grunts. so i noticed starting with W the AI started attacking units it actually had a good chance to hit such as voltron. the exception to this is boss type units that spam strike every turn then wipe 3 of your reals at once with a chain attack. freakin Gaulin =P

[Der Jermeister]

A pet peeve of my own in strategy RPGs is the potential to piss away an eternity on a losing battle with no progress retained, and having to repeat that crap over and over. Those kinds of games seriously need continue systems of some sort.

[Boomerang Flash Z]

I hate it when I plan out multiple strategies for a certain boss fight and I keep losing, despite how close I get.  The amount of times I replayed certain battles in order to just get one item is insane.  Man, it's frustrating at times, but I know I'll do it again...

Don't know if anyone has played or fought Ragu O' Ragula in Wild Arms XF, but dang!  That fight was extremely difficult.  I had to look up a strategy on Gamefaqs in order to figure out how to win.  I never had to do that before for that game series.  Blasphemy! :)