What is wrong with the AI?

[Gandalf Parker]

RanDom is way cool. Its a take-off on my chaos maps for Dom2. I would randomly fill a map with structures like stray castles, and strange armies with equipment. I re-randomized them daily for new playing experiences. They went over well but the way I did it was too random. The armies might be made up of low units, summons, even pretenders. Sometimes water units on land and land units in water.

I suggested at the time, something called Semi-Random. Designed provinces that could be randomly placed. Such as
Terrain: forest
poptype: Deer Tribal
commander: deer shaman
units: deer tribe warriors
units: deer tribe archers
commander: centaur hierophant
equipment: black bow
units: centaur archers
magic site: that one that allows recruiting centaurs

That would be one file. Many such files could be placed by having the program look for proper terrains. Put mountain provinces in mountains, small town things in farmland, waste, swamp, etc etc. Since then, RanDom now also recognizes island, lake, volcano(lonely mountain), penninsula. And it allows sub-randoms so that you can have your designed province have some slight variety in it. Such as I could list Black Bow, Longbow of Accuracy, Bow of War as randoms for the centaur leader..

Just wandering thru the magic sites gives you plenty of reason to design provinces. So that you fight the mages that a site will allow recruiting, or create a dragons cave, or a lost village of the undead with sites to get undead. I think that everyone should donate a few provinces to the project. Lots of them would be great. Then processing a map thru it would give you a really fun map to play on that isnt quite as insane as my old program used to create.