AI monster

Usually, monster capabilities belong in the low-level definition of monster classes or templates, and monster intelligence is a numerical statistic that is used for some specific purposes (for example, in skill rolls to perform feints in combat and avoid falling for the opponent's feints); it's usually implicit that this kind of intelligence applies uniformly to monsters of a similar "tier", for example humanoids that are smart enough for fencing.

If you want creatures with a wide range of intellectual ability, you don't need an explicit "intelligence tier" stat: just define a lot of possible capabilities and assign many or few to different monster races.

You list several possible specialties that you can arrange to be important in the game (languages, crafting, advanced weapon use, magic) along with functions that appear too basic to be good differentiators: eating and drinking, attacking (including biting), defending, fleeing (including running).
Some ways to attack, defend or flee might be "smarter" than the baseline, but I suggest designing the combat system in detail to understand what meaningful advanced maneuvers could be introduced.

Ok i see what you mean. It makes more sence that way thanks for the advice. Anyone else with ideas I would love to here them.

You still may have 'tiers' based on the processing that the different flavors of enemies (and friends - wouldnt it be nice if these games had more friendlies that you could take advantage of in the situations...).

You 'dumb' objects may just do the trigger/charge-at-player(singletarget)/attack-player which can be handled by fairly simple standard FSM+pathfinding+one or more random attacks (with dif animations triggered on client)
These could all be ganged together with their simple processing/data/states.
Simple 'canned' waypoint traversal routes can be used to make them less like the killer mannekins you see in too many games

More complicated objects behavior might handle multiple targets (and switch on opportunity - so have to recheck priorities frequently)
They may have more complicated maneuvering along with multiple attack/defense actions (probably with logic as to which to use when and against which target)
They may have more modes of behavior (offensive/defensive/retreat) that change the action selections and the goals.
This tier has more flexible data requiremenst and more complicated scripted logic and has to carry over/resume its states. The processing is likely a magnitude or more than the dumb objects and may have to be processed 'round robin' when decisions are decided.

Even more complicated objects coordinate with other objects on their side (signal others to set up supported tactices, etc..)
An 'overlord' object might launch or control lower level objects and may not even exist physically but be a group controller in a local scenario.
Such control may have to analyze positional strengths/influences and risk/cost of where/when to push the lesser objects it controls.

Beyond that would be AI that could match the player in timely moves/countermoves evenly in a complex game (not just the carefully choreographed limited special scripting some games have) , but thats getting into processing resources and behavior programming much too costly (as yet). Something general enough to take on the player in any situation with any resources available and even give the player a village idiots response just isnt doable.



Oh and the lowest of all (what I refer to as 'furniture' objects) are usually just reactive to actions done by higher tiered objects. Physics and transmutations (ie- set on fire) or mechanisms. Though I supposed you might have ones with more than an instantaneous reaction to being triggered and some may have to arbitrate between multiple effects being applied to them. There will probably be more of these in games as the static level map triggers cant handle objects that can be moved around or deformed/inventoried and so they have to be changed to be more independant objects.