This week I planned to work on writing the paper, but changed course entirely on Wednesday.
I decided I’d postponed trying to fix the terrible performance for long enough, and thoroughly examined it. So fare, I've been using Unreal Blueprints and a FSM. I attempted to implement a C++ FSM in Unreal, but that didn't help performance at all.
Next week I will spend 2 days trying to fix the performance issues. Monday I will start from scratch once more, and implement the AIs using Unreal C++ Behavior Trees, and if that performs poorly as well, I'll spend Tuesday trying to implement the AIs in Unity.
If both prove fruitless, so be it, it’s time to move on, and focus on making something presentable.