: You make a good point about the AI's. One of the earliest wishes on this page and the AI developers page was to pull out of the code as many rules as possible and put them into a parameters file that the AI's could read. If that was done first, (first have them in both places, unchanged); then addressing some of the other wishes wouldn't break the AIs.
How did the AI developers feel about this wish? If we make the rules more flexible, it becomes harder to make an AI that can play all the possible permutations of the game well.
For example, if we make it possible to change the base technology cost, the AIs will need to make the right balance between military development and technology development for the given tech cost; the mosre expensive tech becomes, the more important a good military is compared to good tech (lots of settlers to maximize trade, libraries, etc.). Also, when tech gets expensive, a navy becomes more important.
If we made it possible to change the tech tree, AIs would have to develop more complicated heuristics deciding which technology to research. If we made it possible to change the military benefits of some technologies, not the AIs will have to look at the tech tree, and make a cost/benefit decision for developing certain techs, etc.
Making a game like this is a tug-of-war between the people who want mods, and the people who want a good AI. The more elastic and flexible a game becomes, the more variety it has, but the harder it is for a good AI to be made.
One option for AI makers would be to have their AI refuse to play a game that deviates too much from the “standard game”.
I haven’t even started with the work needed to make parsers to parse files describing the game parameters; this is, in my experience, about one or two weeks of programming work (make a generalized state machine processor; make a state machine to parse the text files; etc.).
Posted 17-Jan-10 20:07 by samiam