[thejeff]

The "if the code is well-designed" part was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. As I said, code is rarely well-designed if designed at all and I knew enough of Dominions history wo assume it wasn't. Had forgotten the Atari beginnings, though.

Still, I suspect that kind of logic wouldn't increase thinking time significantly if implemented well. Especially since that's already a tiny part of the lag between turns. Impossible to know without looking into the code, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by "write it all out." It's not going to be implemented, not is it moddable, so I'm not sure what the point is in coming up with a complete detailed list. Nor am I qualified. I haven't even played most nations.

All I was saying, is that a few common sense rules could prevent the AI from making broken pretender design choices. Some of which, on further reflection, it probably already does. I think the races are biased towards their preferred temperatures, at the very least.

The rules need not be complete to be useful. Rules that prevented a particular bad design would still be an improvement, even if other problems were still possible.

I am curious what problems you have with my examples? I was going for obvious and non-controversial.



Hmmm. catgod reads pretender files, right? Does that mean we know enough to write them? That would let us play with tweaking random pretender design. Couldn't get the AI bonuses though.