: Ehh, I think the Infection form AI is rather boring and nondescript. This
: will kill any chances of making Crawlers have personality. I also think
: they should keep their guns, although having a strictly melee no-gun base
: class to fill their ranks on lower difficulties would be a good idea.

The whole idea is that the Crawlers would encourage you to stay on the move. That you could very drastically mitigate their threat by maneuvering. Upper difficulties should be more difficult, but they shouldn't go out of their way to encourage cover-shooting. If you can't even be physically close to the crawler pack without being pelted, you have an extremely strong incentive to try to avoid intense maneuvering combat... and then we HAVE to drop the aggression to make the game tolerable, and we're right back to encouraging simplistic cover shooting where you ping off crawlers then Knights.

I agree that having the AI be exactly infection-form-ish could be problematic for their character. In this model, they should have the vibe of a pissed-off dog... but it would be neat if damaging them as they leap past could send them snarling and, visibly wounded, circling the outer edges of the pack before trying to get at you from a different angle. (What if they also lost climbing ability and limped when wounded? Would you feel bad for the angry dog at the bottom of the pit which keeps smashing into the wall to try and get to you? Wowzers.)

And it might also be really neat if there could be occasions where a command from a knight could send them all suddenly streaming away from you and circle-repositioning as a group in sync. One moment you're in a hectic fight with your shotgun, the next the enemies suddenly cut fire, the next you still have a small group of knights pelting you in front while a massive pack of crawlers are coming at you from 90 degrees. Back up or running forward full speed can dodge the crawlers, but as you do it at full speed you will be heading parallel to and not avoiding many of the Knight's shots. Complex choices, but responsive and giving the player enough time to think out a response. A few simple versions of this behaviour (which could be kept feeling very natural just by allowing for some randomness in some parameters) probably wouldn't be *too* hard to program, either.