This is a little map I made called “AI meat grinder”. Nothing fancy but it is a good testing ground for the AI in terms of building an economy, managing resources, and finding different ways to play the game.
There are 4 islands. How should the AI get to them? Should it build ships? If it gets the Earth shard, should it raise a land bridge to the others? What about the precious few resources in the world. What if there are no good resources near by? How will it decide who to attack or whether it should be friendly with someone? How should it deal with NPCs? How much should they pay for them?
These are all questions that the AI has to answer and that has been the focus of a lot of my work for the past several weeks. Slowly but surely these things are getting in. I read in the comments area where people wonder if this or that will get in, usually features that are less than 6 engineering hours to implement.
The long, hard, scary time consuming feature is the AI. It’s the one feature that could delay the game beyond August 24th. If the game gets delayed, the alternative release is second week of February. Everything else in the game is relatively straight forward (for instance, winner take all vs. retreating, regardless of what we decide, the solution is less than 5 engineering hours). By contrast, having the AI intelligently colonize an island is a matter of 60 to 80 engineering hours. As soon as we decided to have more than 1 land mass in the game, things get a lot more interesting, especially since we don’t have pre-made cities or maps where we can script in what the AI does (ah that would be a nice easy “cheaty” way – have the map editor let me put in AI priority points on maps).
We are thinking of including the meat grinder with the game so that people can actually see the AI do its stuff.
