Hi!
Yeah, I wasn't seriously trying to insult anybody.
It was a silly goof on my part to capitalize it, but it's also silly that anybody would post just to criticize that; so I made a third silly post just to get passed it.
Anyway --
Well, you know, it's obviously pretty tough to create an AI that can constantly adapt to the player's choices in a way that the player can't exploit. I don't even think that a system like that would be ideal..
The point of my post was to say that, if you had a Space Empires game where the enemy races took predictable but varied routes in terms of military research and tactics, it wouldn't really matter if you could predict and exploit one or even several, because you would always be faced with a radically different opponent somewhere out there. So it would present a lot of challenge without necessarily adding a lot of labor to the process of programming AI's -- you would just have some research techs, ship blueprints and tactical formations flagged at a higher priority for some races than for others. So you would have one race that may never really develop much in the way of shields before it's maxed-out fighter carriers and fighter techs and miniaturized weapons, and this race would go all-out with fighters, so that if you've not got point-defense ships OR super-high-class shields, you're not going to be very successful against them.
At the same time, you would also be facing an enemy with great morale and strength who focus on land combat and ship-boarding, developing those techs and building those kinds of units/ships before they worry about space-based weaponry.
And also another enemy who builds-up defense research as quickly as possible, cramming as many mines, satellites and stations around their warp-points and colonies as they can manage.
And so on, and so on. And being faced with all of these radically different opponents at the same time would compel the player to really try to only take on the enemies that he's prepared to fight against. Even if you can exploit the particular tendencies of a handful of opponents, it really wouldn't be possible to develop yourself in a way that could account for ALL of your opponents' traits. Just breaking down the general AI's building/research schemes into race-specific schemes would add new gameplay dimensions to almost every aspect of the game - for one, diplomacy, which is kind of a weak spot in single player SE despite there being tons of options. Now it would really matter that you're able to placate specific races - what if their tech is particularly well-suited to besting your own, because you've been developing to confront a more immediate threat?
I don't really think randomness needs to enter into it for the kinds of things that I'm talking about to work. Only variety.