Was going to buy the game and then!

[Zooko]

Perhaps instead of working on AI, Illwinter could simply publish and document the format for .2h and .trn files. In fact, it would also help to render them into a more human-readable format instead of binary. Then people could write their own AIs and we could swap them the way we do mods.

Don't tell me that this would enable cheating. Cheating is already enabled, and the only way to disable is to do all consistency checks on the server. This would help the devs disable cheating by making it obvious to everyone how cheating can be done. :-)

[Oversway]

You don't need .2h files to write an AI. The game could provide an api for you to write to.

[Zooko]

It seemed to me that the easiest way for the time-pressed Illwinter devs to make the game "AI-moddable" would be to publish the specification of the .2h file. The alternative of writing an API for the AI-mods to invoke is probably much more time-consuming.

Also, as a potential AI-modder myself I would probably prefer the open .2h files over the API.

Note that this is only for strategic AI mods. For tactical AI mods so that you can configure mages to stop casting Breath of Winter and killing all of their friends, or to cast Aim on the units that actually have ranged weapons instead of on the melee units, or to cast Flying on units that DO NOT ALREADY HAVE FLYING, and so forth, then you would require a different interface.