a simple, way to make the ai much stronger vs scs

[Awund]

Originally Posted by NTJedi

My suggestion to Illwinter: Allow the AI code to be made available to the community or beta testers which can examine/test/improve the code for AI opponents. I'm sure Gandalf will be more than happy to help.... banning pretenders from the arena death match should be easy since those units have the pretender flag.

An improved AI might even be possible without any help from Illwinter. I'm currently trying to decode the .2h and .trn file formats. I can read most of the data in the .2h files already without needing the official client. If I succeed in also reading .trn files it should be possible to create an AI as an external program that generates a .2h file given any .trn file.
Using such an AI would require the player to set up a multiplayer game and mark also the AI companies as "human", but instead of doing the turns them self let them be played by the AI program.
Don't count on any results too soon though. Decoding the .2h files was doable, decoding the format of the .trn files will be notable harder. After that is done the massive effort of actually writing a reasonable AI will start.

On this note: if anyone knows the algorithm for computing the checksum at the end of the .2h/.trn files I'd be very grateful.