I’m an AI guy. And that means I’m often a lonely guy. Like right now here at 2am. That’s because when I’m in the zone on AI coding, I just can’t take interruptions. Unfortunately, during the day, that’s largely unavoidable since I run a software company whose primary business isn’t making computer games.
But AI is my passion. I just wish I had more time to dedicate it.
I won’t kid you. There’s a reason why AI in these fantasy games are usually terrible (or cheat like mad). It’s hard. Really hard to get them to intelligently use magic.
You humans don’t help. Sometimes, my AI advocacy hat gets in the way of my game designer hat. This was somewhat notorious in the old Galactic Civilizations builds years ago because I’d intentionally make things “harder” for the human to give the AI a leg up.
It snuck into Elemental too but these bloody public betas with so many people now scrutinizing that I can’t get away with my AI cheese.
Case in point: Learning spells. The way it worked in Beta 2 was wonderful for the AI but awful for humans. If you had enough spell points, you would open up the spell book, find a spell, and “learn it”. The AI, of course, is endlessly vigilant and would check, every turn, to see if he had enough spell points to learn a spell. Humans, by contrast, are lazy. Wonderfully lazy. So they’d let their spell points max out and be wasted.
Sadly, humans complained and so in Beta 3 you can queue up the spells you want to learn and as long as the spell doesn’t require more spell points (aka Arcane Knowledge) that you are capable of storing, you can put it into your queue.
(this is the part where people on various external forums condemn me for being a weasel). But weaseling is what separates us from the animals. Well, except the weasel.
Magical pain for the computer AI
So here’s my Sovereign raising land. I can create a land bridge (or make an instant beach). Getting the AI to do this intelligently? Very hard.
Here’s me raising land to make a pass through the mountains.
Of course, it being hard is what makes it worth it. 
NPC Fun
Another fun thing is having the NPCs starting to get more aggressive.
