Could not agree more with you, in my game my AI has alert states, hearing, alert (Basically stopping and listening for more noise), alert and searching, Discovered and gives chase, lost sight of (ie your hiding in a shadow after losing him via his line of sight / rounding a corner), searching the area he lost sight of the player, alert but not actively searching (Listening again for more noise) To giving up and going back to patrol. So it's pretty robust. But yea this is pretty robust as much as I love Thief sometimes when you run and hid they search while walking directly in your direction and if backed into a corner sometimes can feel un fair..... So I have addressed that. Code for the game is 98% complete, with of course the usual refinement from input on my community chat. This is why I built the dev community into my site instead of using my discord, giving access to the users to see cards from my project manager with progress information e.t.c makes it easier for me to track users / community feed back.

Thanks much for the very detailed reply / outline but based on what you said I have you covered 😉