I would be interested, but short of time and maybe somewhat unable, too.
Actually, I didn't expect DOM3 to have scriptable AI. Would mean they have to throw away the engine and re-code
everything from ground up. Would take at least 10 years IMHO.
As for players doing AIs own their own: There are games where players code the AI. FreeCiv, obviously, but did you check out Civ Evolution (
http://www.c-evo.org/)? It's done by one lonely guy, and there are several external AIs, made by players obviously, available. And they do quite a good job (both)
What about an external AI? We would just need the file formats for that, to be able to read them in ... .
That would be not quite 100% of what Cherry envisions, though? If I understood right, you wanted to fiddle with the "MM AI", so battle setup, sitesearching etc could be handed over to the AI in most cases.
Have no idea how that could be done - unless one writes a "turn pre-/postprocessor", which loads the turn file, writes the first 'standing' orders into the orders file, starts DOM3 to have the player have a look at the turn, and then maybe does some processing afterwards, too.
Could even be scripted in Tcl I think, but would be a monumental task. And would need a 5 Ghz CPU to run. .. or wouldn't it? Hmmm .. if done multi-threaded, it could run on 2 CPUs at once (or DOM3 on one and the app on the other), and everyone will have 2 cores when DOM3 finally arrives I'm sure
Maybe even make it a "parallel processor", which peeks into the files folder now and then and reacts to changes to player makes. O.c. DOM3 would need some possibility to re-load the turn and the order file...
Oh, dreaming again...
A.
Re: Dominions III Artificial Intelligence
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