Wishlist: Battle AI hooks

[Gandalf Parker]

Kudos to WraithLord. This is one of the few times that Ive seen a suggestion like this where the person ACTUALLY seems to have a grasp on what the AI does before making their suggestion. The AI does go thru an extensive thinking process which anyone can look at (in a debug log). Instead of just a general desire to make the AI "smarter" (which when pressed tends toward a huge amount of IF statements for every possible nation/enemy/strategy) WaithLord has laid out a small fix which might actually be easy to do

One note though before anyone gets their hopes too high....
Even if such a change were made, it would most likely come in the form of an added "suggestion" from the pretender. Its not likely to go in as an absolute that you can count on. Probably something more like an added plus or minus to the priority list. Im not sure that an absolute would be considered appropriate for this game by the devs. They dont seem to regret the quirky AI.

If you want an absolute, then your best bet is to look toward some of the mods that remove the spell from consideration or make it more expensive. But I do think this change would be a good one

[WraithLord]

Thanks GP! I like your "treat it as suggestion" idea. It can work out great

Oh & I neglected to mention that some sort of consistent, generic API would be required for bridging between the game and the hook. For example dictionaries and maps are trivial in python so the hook (python code) can expect some kind of Context structure passed to it that contains all the dictionaries, maps and lists that form the basis for the spell AI code thinking process. I imagine IW already has such infrastructure in place (in C code).

Last, I have programmed such hooks (from both ends) for big commercial apps and they were always one of the customer's favorite features. If planned correctly, with foresight of future needs, they make the product that much more flexible and long lived.