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Originally Posted by MitchU
Fair enough, and thanks for finding that comment. Maybe its something that can be done for OOTP26? Meantime, I'm going to enjoy the game all season and not sweat it.
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ok, I am a programmer. I wrote a strategy game and I wrote the AI for it.
AI programming is very challenging because a complex strategy game like OOTP will have an almost infinite number of edge cases to write AI around beyond the standard "here is how you play the game". In other words, no matter how much time they spend on it, players will always say, "hey this part of the game has a bad AI please fix it."
Plus you can't really properly write an AI until your feature set is stable. For a game like OOTP that has to meet hard deadlines every Spring for a release, this means a lot of proper AI development would have to wait until after the game is released.
Developing AI requires a lot of playing expertise and you might be surprised to learn that developers are generally not the most competent at playing their own games. And once you have a basic AI, it costs a lot of money (i.e. developer time) to make it better and it doesn't generate extra revenue to justify the cost.
And then when you add new features, you have to write more AI on top of it and fix any existing AI that was broken by the new feature.
And to kick it all off, most strategy gamers don't really want an AI that is too good. Most just want to steamroll and an AI that can outplay players is bad business.
I spent 6 years with an open alpha and beta and wrote a functional AI that could play the entire game somewhat competently. I thought it was fine but all of the experienced gamers thought it sucked because ultimately they were just a lot better at playing the game that me. So I did something that OOTP can never do... I just opened the source and let the modding community change the AI... multiple gamers with thousands and thousands of gameplay and testing I could never spare, and I had the luxury to move to move other projects (obvsly something the OOTP devs can't do)
TL;DR. Good AI is hard, it delays releases, it can drive away players, and it is not profitable. This is why all good AIs in strategy games are from player mods after the fact.
The best thing you can hope for is that someday the OOTP devs find a way to open up the AI to modding. I don't know what their code looks like so that might be an impossible task for them.