[Evil Dave]

Saber Cherry said:

The Johans and Ostermans of the world are already doing their part in improving Dominions’ graphics, interface, balance, variety, mechanics, and who knows what else. However, they are primarily a 3-ish person, part-time team – trying to make the best strategy game ever. A lot of the coding problems are (probably) NP-hard, like ideal unit-mix recruitment, battle spell selection and order, site-searching order, and battle target-selection.

I think it's worse than NP-hard. It's either AI-hard (you can't program it because you can't specify the problem well enough, a common problem in Artificial Intelligence) or "NI-hard" -- you can't program it because even natural intelligences (people) can't think of algorithms to solve it. NI-hard problems make for good games, for some reason.

I agree, tho, that heuristics, approximations, and pre-computed answers (look-up tables) will help a lot. They're used heavily in industry, and they solve a lot of practical problems that are formally NP-hard. I work on stuff like that.

In my opinion: many of the issues with exploits, balance, and micromanagement are really symptoms of AI and related algorithms, and will not improve significantly with any amount of effort into UI design, data balancing, or even game-mechanic changes.

I think this is another case where I think it's worse than you think. I think there's a mismatch between the options the player wants for tactical combat and the tools the game provides for them.

There was a game called Deadlock that did much better. The details aren't that important, 'cept that that it was a strategy game where the tactical combat took place on the "province" maps, so in addition to attacking enemy units, troops could attack province buildings directly. Units were ordered around by simple pop-up menus, with choices like "(Attack|Protect) (Kind of unit|kind of building) until unit casualies = X%." That worked really well, because players really wanted to attack or defend buildings, but enemy units got in the way.

In Dom2, tho, what we really want to is give orders like "skirmishers harass enemy national heavy troops until lightly damaged, and then break off" or "high-path mages cast big buffs on friendly SCs, then blast enemy SCs until killed", but neither the UI nor the AI is geared toward this.

As such – and bearing in mind that I do not speak for Illwinter, or with any authority, for that matter – would anyone in the forums be willing and able to engage in code-modding, if Illwinter was so benevolent as to make it a possibility?

Ooo! Me! Me!me!me! I can't talk much about my paying work, but you can get an idea what I do and enjoy by looking up early MechMania contests (programming game AIs over a long weekend). You'll note that the first few contests were dominated by a small number of teams from the same schools. I was on one of them. We stopped dominating only 'cause the organizers politely asked us to stay away.

Would anyone else utilize deep code-modding capabilities if they were available? Bear in mind that answering “Yes” when you mean “Maybe” or "Yes I want other people to do this, but I won't" might possibly divert Illwinter’s attention away from more important matters.

Oh, yeah! If nothing else, it would make it much easier to test strategy and tatics w/o having to hack the save files to get the "right" scenario set up.