[Taqwus]

*shrug*

And as for pre-game scripting, that mostly works when the situation tends to be fairly predictable.

For instance, RTSes generally have far more limited possibilities. "Tech trees" or their equivalents tend to be small, unit choices can be constrained by lack of resources or even artificial limits (e.g. "you're not allowed to build that building this level"), and so forth. In addition, many of the popular ones such as the *craft series start the player with a very, very small force and the AI with a significant base already built up -- and having a pre-built base limits what the AI needs to consider. Then, it may have scenario-specific instructions, e.g. in a "survive for XX minutes" scenario the AI may be told to attack in waves of certain sizes or at a given time.

Taken to the extreme, a strategy game gets turned into a puzzle game; the AI isn't so much factor as the decisions that the level designer made before the game was ever started.

Dominions is far, far more varied. The number of units is huge; combinations of units can get pretty strange courtesy of the independents and the charming/enslaving spells; and the magical spells and items can significantly alter things. Even if one had decent strategic scripts written beforehand, tactics and events may quickly render them meaningless... because you can't prepare optimally for everything. One might face an early war with cheap units; one might have to deal with hordes of mindless undead; one might face assassination, or magical assaults, or disease warfare. Perhaps an enemy has a heavily-decked out combat leader; perhaps he has a rainbow mage. Maybe he's going for weak hordes, maybe stronger elite units. Perhaps he's bringing bows, or perhaps he's invoking storms again to limit bows. Maybe an army's planning to siege you out; maybe that castle the AI wants to siege has vast numbers of ghouls in it so sieging isn't too practical. A human player brings out the Ark and blinds half your army; how does that change things? Or he's got an immortal commander casting Summon Lammashastas, or summoning other nasties and then magically leaving the battle?

Is it the mage that's the threat, or would it be easier to take out the communicants? Or is one of the mage's constructs or some tough combatant a bigger threat? Send units to fight the toughie with the damage shield and wraith sword, or merely try to hold him off and send the bulk against the rest of the enemy? Heck, even deciding whether to burn gems can be tricky, when you're attacking an enemy province without a lab so you might be caught short in a counterattack.

You've got fliers, and the enemy has a strong flier. Try to ground everyone? How to decide? Ditto for bowmen, et al. Super combatant versus super? Are those militia advancing numerous enough to merit attention, or no? The enemy's using mindless units; fight them, or find a way to kill the leaders?

It's an enormously complicated game, and it doesn't have the advantage of drastically constraining the problem space. In addition, hand-eye coordination doesn't matter, so the game can't rely on old stand-byes like insanely good speed-of-light reflexes ala AI Paladins in WC2 healing each other constantly during battle. And learning approaches will be hard, too; even saying something like "learn from what just happened" is difficult, because it needs to grok "why". And that why may be pretty subtle, or go back a considerable number of turns, or involve a diverse set of factors ranging from research to greater gem supply to even dumb luck -- e.g. getting lucky and killing an enemy supercombatant when it botches its MR check, or simply getting outlandish results from open-ended dice. Factor in hidden information and the large number of players involved, and it's a bit surprising that it can do much at all. There's so much stuff that can happen that planning can't be easy, nor would learning.