How to Fix Utility AI Never Choosing a Rare but Important Action

A utility AI that never heals even at low health, or never retreats, has a consideration curve that stays too flat. Shaping it to spike at the critical moment fixes the neglected action. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Shape the curve to spike

For a heal action, use a curve that is near zero at high health and rises steeply as health drops, so it decisively outscores attacking when it genuinely matters.

2. Watch multiplicative scoring

If you multiply several considerations, a single near-zero factor crushes the score; keep the critical consideration high and avoid stacking factors that always pull it toward zero.

3. Inspect scores live

Log or visualize each action's final score per tick to confirm the rare action actually peaks above competitors at the intended moment, then tune the curve accordingly.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.