Shandalar - Program Bugs

I can confirm suicide attacks happening with other small creatures (while having nothing in the hand, or even the deck, to pump them with). Now that I think about it - the creatures were Mystic Penitent and Mystic Visionary but without threshold, so it might have thought they had flying.

Also - i saw this happen when the AI thinks it's dead on the next turn, it tends to misplay certain fogs in this situation, too (Kami of False Hope sacrifices outside of combat on the opponents turn and such).

I forgot to mention that AI in most cases had both tokens and non-token 1/1 vanilla creatures but suicidally attacked only with Goblin Balloon Brigade and I was without creatures to block fliers that is why assume AI thought it had flying or something similar.

I had the same suicidal attacks AI behaviour with Manta Riders which also has gain flying.

Same with Dross Hopper.

[Korath]

I don't need a list.

#903 closely related.

Just noting that this can cause suicide attacks from any creature if the AI has a way to give it flying, as in the case of Caller of Gales.

[Korath]

commit 162a3f42b9843c6d7abaa9cc3c9afd2b16a883cc
Author: Korath <dgk@Dirge.none>
Date: Sat Feb 20 19:45:03 2016 -0500

[AS] work around #826 - EVENT_CHECK_ABILITIES can't add evasion to AI creatures

Or at least, it can't add flying or landwalk abilities. It can still add
protection from colors or artifacts, since those are used, among other things,
to tell the AI that damage to a creature will be prevented. (Not terribly
effectively - see #903.)

This is frustrating on a number of levels, not least of which is that most of
the exhibited behavior is correct. The AI is perfectly correct to attack with
Goblin Balloon Brigade when it has a Mountain open to activate it, and delay
activation until after attacking. But even if evasion abilties are only
stripped out of EVENT_CHECK_ABILITIES's results during PHASE_BEFORE_BLOCKING
and later, and even though EVENT_CHECK_ABILITIES is redispatched in time for it
to get the new result without the artificially-added KEYWORD_FLYING, the AI
still doesn't activate - apparently the AI only considers potential blocks
while it's still declaring attackers.

Just as bad, the AI doesn't seem to properly consider when an evasion ability
like KEYWORD_FLYING or KEYWORD_REACH is artificially added with
EVENT_CHECK_ABILITIES to the player's potential blocker, so it'll happily
attack with a Scryb Sprites into the human's Goblin Balloon Brigade enchanted
with Lance.

In any case, the original game only used this functionality to indicate
potential first strike on Emerald Dragonfly and Rainbow Knights, and even then
only when the human player controlled the card in question, so mostly-crippling
it in this manner leaves us no worse off than we were before.