Utility: Single Player Improvement

[Fantomen]

My approach wouldn't be to try and actually make the AI "smarter" in a general sense, rather use the current AI as base but teach it to handle typical situations from more accurate parameters. Then try to reduce the variables of AI play to make it limit itself to those typical situations as often as possible. Something like this:

Remove the randomly made AI pretenders. Instead premake three gods for each nation, one for each difficulty level. Preset battle scripts for these gods. The AI nations would always use these gods, but these gods and their scripts would be accessible for modding via a set of new mod commands (#AIpretender, etc).

Have preset reseach targets for each AI nation, also moddable. Example: thau 4, ench 3, const 6, thau 6, evoc 2... and so on. The AI would always research in the order preset for it's nation, and the order would be determined by the player/community to find the most optimal pattern for how the AI uses mages.

Make a recruits priority list for each nation, moddable. For example prioritize mages over other commanders and national troops before indies and so on.

Have two moddable spell priority lists for each nation, one for rituals and one for battle. The battle list could also be used for human controlled nations, allowing each player to preset spell priorities for his own mages before the game starts, which is used whenever mages can't use their battle scripts.

For human controlled nations this list should be accessible on a per game basis, to allow different spell strategies for different games, which would also improve MP.

Alternately make a reasonably effective script for each mage in the game, and have the AI default to that.

If the AI cannot be taught to bless it's sacreds, make all AI sacreds always blessed.

If the AI cannot be taught to build forts, make them appear automatically following a preset pattern for time and placement.

Preset a number of good thug builds, with preset battle scripts similar to the pretenders. Make a priorities list for each nation for building them, and make the AI try and achieve this builds as close as possible. If the AI cannot be taught to plan it's forging, make items appear in their lab automatically following a preset time schedule, and multiplied by number of forts.

I don't play SP anymore, but improved AI could make it fun again perhaps, and make it a little less painful to set nations AI in MP.

Options such as these could allow players/the community to design a playstyle for each AI nation. And over time we could reach a decently challenging AI

This is all theory of course, since illwinter sharing the secrets of the code seems unlikely. But I don't really understand what Gandalf mean by "used for evil" from a community perspective. I can imagine ****nel considering a movement towards decreased control over the client evil, but the community would benefit. The theoretic risk is cheating of course, but if the code was only shared with a single trusted person prepared to put the workload in to build this kind of utility, would there really be a big risk?