Now I’ve tried it with No&GBA as well and it’s still the same, though I guess since the save file was originally from VBA it could still be VBA’s fault somehow. Haven’t tried it with any other emulator besides these two since I only have these two installed.
I did notice something though, the Mage has 2% crit against Francis who has only 8 luck (Avanni has 9 and Camian 7, everyone else should have 0% crit against them) so maybe that had something to do with it.
Oh and by the way, I did check with FEBuilder and the Mage’s AI2 is set to “If possible to attack in 2 turns, move towards enemy”, which perfectly lines up with the tiles that change whether the Mage attacks Agnessa or Nigel.
Whenever Francis is within movement rage x2 + attack range the Mage attacks Agnessa (who retaliates) but when he’s not it goes for Nigel instead.
Though in the end it doesn’t seem like the crit had anything to do with it, because I eventually ended up cheating with febuilder to give francis a hoplon guard for comparison. So maybe it is in fact a VBA issue after all.
Also, unrelated to this weird AI bug(?), and also a bit late… but I rewatched Shivco’s Chapter 1 Nightfall Ambush video and noticed he got all the talk conversations, which I didn’t really care about cause I don’t really read dialog… But do they have some gameplay relevancy? Maybe build supports faster? (Though I don’t think Skylar & Grismond can build support…)
EDIT: After having read this [FE7] The Official AI Documentation Thread, the “[6] Penalty: Range and attack power of opponents (080391E4)” section in particular, I see that this behavior was not a bug.
Turns out the GBA AI is a lot more complicated than I thought, and whether or not Francis would be in range to attack was in fact taken into account.