I read the strategy.txt and goal.txt documentation and all I got...

[joe77]

I wanted to make an observation which will likely sound like I'm stating something obvious but its kinda the "big conclution" I gathered from re-reading the documentation last night...The written Ai from what I can gleam is like a bloody house of cards that humped a target range. What I mean is it gets exstrodinarly(sp?) complex the farther the formula gets from its first definer...its starts with the leader of the civilization and his attitude toward the world..his or her personality is written to give more priority points to the way of behaving..called strategys..that he or she was known for historically. But thats not all...those ways of behaving have a whole list of sub-strategys and goals and goalelements..and then thoe goal elements have priority point weights to make them less or more likley and then the goal elements are goals that have other priority points that take into account the evironment. Thats not very eloquent but what I'm getting it is that we are not here trying to change a set of root commands that say "take unit here. group it. kill stuff". The unit movements and some is not all of the behavior of a AI leader are totaly based on what little square out there gives them the biggest warm fuzzy feeling inside...then they send a unit to it because its THE warm fuzzy feeling square..and if you have a city there then it may have executed a GOAL_SEIGE movement in order to get its unit to the square...the problem with this elaborate form of the game "Darts" is that while cities can be lit up like chrismas trees to make them more valuble locations to "place" units the whole..the ai as it is now doesnt think of all of those warm fuzzy squares as square that have relation to eachother and need to be dealt with together in a certain type of order..its brand of forward offensive seems to be "oh look here this is nice I'll sit here..but ooo! look over there I think I'll sit there instead"

There are a bunch of other variables that work along in the strategys with the goal elements..like the FEAR factors which also can not be ignored..in fact there are so many different diplomatci and strategical variable I would be surprised to find many repeated actions. Unless of course you raise the priority points of certian actions so high that all the other options pale in there ability to show warm fuzzyness..which might be why Blues had some units get stuck moving back and forth over two or three spaces...the execute orders priority to go to those square being so dominate that it continually overrid the following orders that said what to do when you got there..

I could babble on and on and I may just be talking out my hole..and I'm not gunna even consider SLIC's application here..thats way above my head..I think we might need to start thinking this through the gates of new persective...perhaps start at the top and make all the AI leaders Military/Scientific default personalitys. Then make sure the computer builds a ton of units by raising its alloted support percentage and making it so it doesnt build ai-unusable units like aircraft carrers. I'm going to continue to tinker with the GOAL_SIEGE GOALATTACK etc max eval and exec setting..I'm pretty happy with the powerbonus boast...blah blah this stuff has already been covered...anyhoo thats my take on things