Editing Artificial Intelligence (section)

==={{DQ5}}===
The A.I. is essentially the same as in ''Dragon Quest IV'', with the addition of three improvements. Firstly players are now able to directly command party members as in the [[Erdrick Trilogy]] via the Follow Orders tactic, a direct response to the criticism the previous game received. Note that [[List of recruitable monsters in Dragon Quest V|recruited monsters]] need a wisdom stat of 20 or higher before they will obey the player.

Secondly the learning A.I. is now guaranteed to have a total understanding of a monster's resistances by the third turn of battle, eliminating random chance completely. Boss battles also have been given special priority in that characters are fully aware of their attributes from the start, forgoing the possibility of wasting turns with bad decisions during what would have been the learning phase.

The third change actually applies to the battle system as a whole, which is attack spell resistance becoming damage reduction. This gives the A.I. a much firmer grasp on which attack methods are the best choice of action in a given situation as now the only way for a monster to avoid taking any spell damage is if it is immune to that spell's element.

A.I. decision making was also accelerated on the 16-bit hardware by starting calculations on the command menu instead of when it becomes the A.I. character's turn. The entirety of the process is performed as the command menu fades for the battle scene to play out, successfully masking the processing time from the player.

Two shortcomings of the game's A.I. are that disposable items are now put to use freely in any tactic, meaning that there is the possibility of [[medicinal herb]]s or [[rockbomb shard]]s being wasted on small fry battles instead of being saved for bosses, and that it will never use the Defend command even if a character is in dire condition.

====PS2 remake====
Developer [[Arte Piazza]] built off of Heartbeat's foundation in the PSX version of ''Dragon Quest IV'', but overemphasized the deliberately irrational behavior to the point that the A.I. is frankly unreliable. Too much priority is given to healing even with the "Show No Mercy" tactic, with monsters that know [[Omniheal]] abusing the recovery spell even if their HP has only been cut by 10% and wasting valuable MP. There is also considerable difficulty in understanding the random width of damaging spells and skills: for example if an enemy has 50 HP and an A.I. monster has the [[Fire Breath]] (40~60) and the [[Inferno]] (65~85) skills it will default to using the weaker breath attack and potentially leave the enemy alive. This is because the program improperly calculates the odds of the dealing the necessary 50 points of damage against the chance of dealing less, and does not consider using the stronger skill at all despite that being a guaranteed knock out.

====DS remake====
The dumbness of the PS2 version has been rectified, but the A.I. is still less efficient than the original 16-bit version. For example characters who have a raw attack power beyond a certain threshold will not use attack spells even when facing large groups. The behavior of recruited monsters with less than 20 wisdom points is also less than satisfactory, often performing sub-optimal moves or flat out wasting their turn as seen with the adolescent [[Sabre]] in the first generation.