Trainers know what item you have

[Haliaeetus 1]

I wouldnt know where to post this as i dont know if this is a bug or if its supposed to happen. The thing is in game rivals know exactly what item you hold, and they also know if you are not holding one. I tested this in a mono psychic run, on the battle vs Cain in Radomus Castle i used Malamar to beat the muk with superpower, alternating Metronome with no item. Every time i had no item he spammed gunk shot but when i used the metronome he knocked off every time. Then i remembered the battle vs Serra. I struggeled with Frosslass (obviously) so i bought a Kasib berry for my Gothitelle so i could tank a shadowball an mirror coat it. Result: She predicted the berry and ice beamed every time, but she shadow balled all my other psychics.

 

Again idk if this is known or what but i thought i should share it!

[Wolfox 2093]

I have a feeling this is intentional. Just like a Dreyano ROM hack, you gotta treat boss battles in Reborn like a WiFi battle. Your opponents have items and they know what you do.

[FairFamily 197]

I'm not sure if it is intentional. In my fight vs Amaria she used a hydro pump vs my storm drain gastrodon just once.

[keltena 18]

1 hour ago, Wolfox said:

I have a feeling this is intentional. Just like a Dreyano ROM hack, you gotta treat boss battles in Reborn like a WiFi battle. Your opponents have items and they know what you do.

... That sounds like a strange reason for it to be intentional, since that doesn't make it like a WiFi battle at all. A WiFi opponent doesn't know if you have an item, or what that item is; they're just guessing based on what they think is most likely. If the Cain example above was supposed to operate like a human opponent, he'd either always start with Knock Off (banking on the assumption that you probably have an item) or never use it (by the opposite assumption), because he has no way of knowing for sure whether you have it. Same with the Serra situation—a human opponent would either use Shadow Ball, or take a guess that you're using a Kasib Berry and go for Ice Beam instead, but she's not gonna know if she's right until she sees proof. If the AI is making decisions based on information that's not visible to an opponent, it's just cheating.

 

And I mean... I guess you could argue there's some logic to giving the AI the ability to flat-out cheat, as a way of compensating for the fact that an AI will otherwise never be capable of operating on the level of a human? But honestly that sounds like a terrible idea to me. First and foremost because the player has no way of knowing or expecting that the AI can do this, which means they may (like the OP) make logical strategies based on the pokemon and AI behavior they've observed, only for those strategies to turn out completely useless because the AI can flat-out read your mind. (I mean, seriously—if the AI can tell when you have a type berry, then type berries are all but entirely pointless in single-player, because the only situations where they'll ever get used are when switching into an attack or against AoE attacks in doubles.) And even if letting the AI read minds did help improve game balance, I think something like that would be way too much of a frustration factor for the player to be worth it anyway. If I ran into situations like the OP described, I wouldn't feel like it was a way of making the game a better challenge for me; I would just feel like the game was actively punishing me for trying to do something smart or creative with items and artificially cutting down the number of viable strategies, and I'd feel cheated that the AI gets to break any pretense of verisimilitude just to do that.

[Haliaeetus 1]

11 minutes ago, keltena said:

That sounds like a strange reason for it to be intentional, since that doesn't make it like a WiFi battle at all. A WiFi opponent doesn't know if you have an item, or what that item is; they're just guessing based on what they think is most likely.

My man! My point exactly

 

11 minutes ago, keltena said:

I mean, seriously—if the AI can tell when you have a type berry, then type berries are all but entirely pointless in single-player,

 

[Wolfox 2093]

you actually do know if your opponent holds an item... when you can see their team that either do or don't have a little orange capsule with their sprites. that capsule indicates that they're holding an item

[keltena 18]

Ah, okay, I actually wasn't aware of that part of the WiFi interface. Then yeah, if you say the trainers are supposed to act like WiFi opponents, I guess that would make the Cain example make sense. (Not the Serra example, though; knowing an opponent has an item doesn't tell you what the item is.)

 

I still think it's a bad choice to let in-game trainers know if you have an item, even if they only know that you have one and don't know what item it it. Even if WiFi battles let you see that information, single-player battles don't, and "it works that way in WiFi" is pretty flimsy logic for why your opponent magically has information you can't; it isn't a WiFi battle, so why would anyone expect it to work like one? (And as this conversation demonstrates, someone playing the single-player campaign won't necessarily even know that's a thing in WiFi battles anyway.)

[Haliaeetus 1]

21 minutes ago, Wolfox said:

you actually do know if your opponent holds an item... when you can see their team that either do or don't have a little orange capsule with their sprites. that capsule indicates that they're holding an item

Still, i dont think this is premeditated. I doubt that the idea is for the AI to work like in a Wifi Battle as there is no team preview and you cant tell if they have items or not. So if you cant see their team why should they see yours? I think they are supposed to react based on information, which is fine. (Cain switched his Muk out into Meowstic several times after he saw Superpower). I understand that maybe its complicated to set the AI to quote on quote "scout" for the item amd start of with knock off(Muk example), but thats exactly why i posted this, to see if it was known and would stay that way or if they are willing to change it.

[Gentleman Jaggi 99]

I think this behaviour actually stems from how the AI tries to gauge the damage it will deal with each move. It's not that your opponent is reacting to your item specifically, only to how that item influences the damage they'll be able to inflict on your Pokémon. i.e. Knock Off deals more damage against a Pokémon that's holding an item while the Kasib Berry reduces Shadow Ball's damage, so the AI calculates Ice Beam as being the stronger move of the two. Same deal with opponents ignoring Zoroark's Illusion even though they shouldn't.

At least that's how it seems from what I experienced so far while fiddling around with Items during my Monotypes.

[Haliaeetus 1]

Thats probably it when you think about it. Type berries are pretty damn pointless then 

[Gentleman Jaggi 99]

34 minutes ago, Haliaeetus said:

Type berries are pretty damn pointless then 

They're still not useless at all. If the super effective move you're trying to protect against is still judged as the most damaging option by the AI that damage reduction will save you.

Besides, the AI doesn't seem to do 100% choices from what I've seen. There've been plenty of times where, despite no change in situation whatsoever, the opponent suddenly went for a different move after a long string of always choosing the same. There's even the rare oddball occasions where the opponent will decide to use their weakest move that still manages to damage you.

Best guess I've got is that the AI assigns a % chance based on the damage it expects the attack to deal; the higher the damage the higher the % value. 0% pretty much necessitates immunity (Field effects can mess with this) while 100% requires very big gaps in power, either because of BP or Type matchup (super effective vs not very effective).

Of course I don't actually know anything about how the AI is coded, but this is what I've put together from experience.