[Pocus]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
It is a little more complicated than that, for example making the strategic AI counter a player devised combo or supercombatant strategy is almost impossible since there are so many potentionally devastating combos and spells etc that are very powerful in special circumstances. Making an AI that adapts its strategy the way a human does in a game as complex as this is all but undoable, not only would the AI have to 'understand' the implications of the way spells items units interact but also 'understand' when a particular combo or spell etc was likely to appear etc, there is just to many factors to take into account. So making more than incremental improvements in the AIs ability to counter spell combos and supercombatants is very difficult.

true, but you should aim for proven recipes. Some games adapt their forces to the threat, but they generally does this after the threat appears, and not preemptively. For example, it is surely awfully complex to determine in advance if a player is heading toward having foul vapor / poison ward combos, or if he has the potential to field trampling gifted gargoyles with charcoal shields.

But a thing which is very doable is to tag each loss of the AI units with the origin of the loss. That is, the AI should store that it has losts so far 852 units to poison*, and 145 to trampling damages. These numbers can then be tweaked with a 'time distance', that is if the AI loose some 20 turns ago 150 units to poison, it should be less important than loosing these units just the Last turn. Having done that, you can sort the biggest threat, and have the AI focus on alleviating the problem. Solutions to poison can be to give a high priority to druid recruitments, a big incentive to search poison ward, a higher probability of having nature gems on nature mages, etc.
There is not that much differing sources of damages, perhaps 20 maximum. The biggest work is to have the AI tweak his priorities according to the threat represented by these 20 sources.

* : you can have a kill coming for several sources by the way, the system ought to be refined.

Thats just a remark on top of my head, but if you want to engage into serious ai programming, sites like gameai.com or ai-depot.com are must read. You would invest 50 hours of reading in doing so, but it is well worth the effort.

We all have the tendency to reinvent the wheel...