[tinkthank]

Great ideas!

Some thoughts:

The AI seems to have problems in these fields:

Strategic Planning:
- The AI builds odd pretenders with no real "plan" to do anything with magic paths, e.g. an earth mother with 7 fire who then does nothing but cast fire shield. AI Pretenders get bizarare paths and often don't really know what to do with magic paths once they have them, either.
Since I bet good ideas are very hard to program, an oversimplified solution could be: Cap number of paths spent on new 40+-costing paths at 1, cap path investment at 4, give priority to dominion increase; give priority to positive scales. Might not be too interesting, but more effective.
- The AI often doesn't know which spells will be good for it to cast later: Maybe give a few "goals" to the themes (e.g.: flaming arrows for machaka, then summon XYZ, then magma eruption, etc.). To avoid over-predictability, three or four "schemes" would have to be developed per nation theme.
- The AI often doesn't know what items to forge; I have seen AI Astral-Earth Molochs playing for Caelum with crystal matrixes running about with no communication slaves in sight.
I think there is no easy answer to this, but perhaps one could make a "library" of helpful items matched to the possible Users (e.g. a fire3-earth-2 death-1 Black Sorc might want a PQR, while a fire-2-death-2-earth-2 might want a XYZ). This is probably very time consuming.

Tactical Management:
- The AI often doesn't know which spells could be good to script in battle. See point above for possible solution.
- The AI will often send out either overkill mobs of troops or too few into a battle. I don't know how the AI currently gauges its opponent's strength -- but there could be some kind of "army matchup algorithm" which attempts to reduce suicide attacks and/or shooting flies with cannons.

Strategic Implementation:
- Fort building and Troop building have been covered.
- The AI often seems to shuffle its troops about randomly, as if it had a multiple personality: I want to go *here*, no, I want to go *there*; I don't know what can help here.
- The AI's troops starve too often. Causes include death scales and lack of forts, but also, this doesn't seem to be something the computer checks for. Have it do so and try to remedy this by producing appropriate supply items.