All right, I think everybody can agree here that GalCivII's AI engine is one the best around the video game industry. It's.. political, it thinks, and can sometime out-strategize you. Even if you have the edge more than often on tactical level, they can beat you soundly merely with general strategies.

However, it is not perfect. I am sure that AI development is extremely time- and energy-consuming for Stardock, and even if they have the best around, sometime it does something really stupid. Now, I was thinking of how good the AI could become if Stardock tapped into the most powerful creative pool: Modders and amateur creators.

If Stardock (in their future game) were to publish a sort of AI-development software (or even the codes, or.. I don't really know. The thing that allows you to program an AI and put in as a player in GalCiv2) for it's next game, in addition to it's own home-developped AI, fans around the internet could try to outdo each other in creating the best AI to compete (without making them cheat, off course). They could created purely-scripted AI that always do the same thing, or they could try to create AI that reacts to it's environnement. The point is, so many good things have been created out of fan/mod communities for games such as Oblivion, Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, I am sure the AI level could skyrocket.

Now, let's borrow Spore's trading of fan-made items. Rather than having to manually download every AI script, if Stardock allowed a random "AI selecter" when you create a game, and assign a different AI to every opponents you want to face, that would be very interesting. At the end of the game, you could rate the AI's effectiveness and deviciousness, and some players who don't feel like fighting clumsy prototypes may filter out AIs with poor rating.

I am well aware that AI programming is way more complicated than your usual mod-creation, but I am sure that idea has a lot of potential.

Anyway, PEACH that idea