Currently, most AoE attacks used by the AI, particularly by DCHB (confusion spray), BTB (swinging jaws and stun), or BWS (venom strike), are aimed on whatever that creature is attacking at the time. This means they can easily, on accident, turn around to strike a single foe behind them, and waste their ability to do very little, when they could have killed or at least damaged 10-20 ants right next to them in a group. Because of this, I think it might be valuable to improve the targeting on these abilities, as well as all future AoE attacks.
Implementation:
This could be fairly simple to implement from an outsider perspective, and its accuracy could easily be based on how much lag such an addition would generate. While I expect you'll know more programming tricks than I do, it sounds as if this could be done with a very simple search that looks at positions across 360 degrees to see which target will hit the most enemies. For example, you could use a binary search to check for enemies in the 180 degrees to either the left and right or front and back of the creature, and then use that as the new target area (although this may be worse than sequential searches given one set of 180 degrees features a spread 6 foes while the opposite 180 degrees features a clumped 5 foes).
Implementation:
This could be fairly simple to implement from an outsider perspective, and its accuracy could easily be based on how much lag such an addition would generate. While I expect you'll know more programming tricks than I do, it sounds as if this could be done with a very simple search that looks at positions across 360 degrees to see which target will hit the most enemies. For example, you could use a binary search to check for enemies in the 180 degrees to either the left and right or front and back of the creature, and then use that as the new target area (although this may be worse than sequential searches given one set of 180 degrees features a spread 6 foes while the opposite 180 degrees features a clumped 5 foes).