[HoneyBadger]

I think atleast we ought to be able to have the computer coming up with good Pretender designs. It should be fairly easy to do this without the use of any true AI at all. Just come up with several designs for each and every pretender available per nation. Preferrably, these designs would be influenced by the forum community, because inevitably, it takes a village to come up with truly dangerous strategies. Based on the design the computer randomly chose, the AI could then be influenced to follow one of several basic strategies, such as from building a lot of sacreds to not building any sacreds at all, depending on the bless effect and the specific nation the computer was playing. It would require a significant effort on the part of the programmers, but not much computer time at all, and if done right, should certainly improve the AI. By the way, has anyone noticed whether or not the AI in the game makes better decisions (or seems to) on higher difficulty levels? I'm still learning the finer points of the game, so I mostly stay on Normal setting.