Will the AI code be public knowledge then?

What I want to see is a turbocharged version of the sins dev exe at all possible. The key features of that are the console and the real-time reloading of game assets. I want that and even more importantly, (and this may just be a pipe dream but it would be the best tweaking interface ever), the ability to select a square and be able to open any entity on it in a nice text editor, so for example if you see something has 10 times the damage it should be doing, just pop open its file and fix the relevant value, or why I want this especially in elemental, the ability to open the files for each component, so you know which files could contain the error and don't have to wonder which item in a set a character or unit has, just have it open to the appropriate files, so you can know that the problem you see is contained to the files you have open. The only other thing it'd need that sins developer mode doesn't have is the ability to make new items and have them appear in the session you're in so you never need to turn the engine off for all but the most advanced coding tasks. But in all honesty, the sins dev exe with the ability to load files that were made while the engine was running would be plenty for me, the rest would just be awesome time saving features, but still great to have.

I love the dream though, that'd be totally sweet to see.

Yeah, what Wintersong said. There's usually license notes that prevent you from making a profit off mod work. So EA could do that, provided they don't sell it. (They recently added that restriction to World of Warcraft addons when pay ones started appearing.)

Pretty standard practice to not allow paid for mods of a game.

ok cool then.

When can I try this game????  LOL

Gawds above, below, and sideways, I surely hope not. Modding is interesting and all, but having the AI code out in public would inevitably lead to a bunch of tedious best-strat nonsense that could swiftly drain the life from the game for those of us who could care less about multiplayer and don't even think of 'winning' very often when we're off in the singleplayer sandbox.

How? I don't get how an open and evolving AI would interfere with sandbox games you don't really care about winning. If you don't want to use another AI, then don't download the mod...

It's a good point you make Luckmann. Let me be a little bit clearer.

Stardock have a limited amount of resources available for development of any release. The comments made on here by the developers suggest a good game has been developed, with a powerful engine.

However, they also suggest a lack of the diversity that made MoM and the AoW series successful. So what I am really saying is that when EWOM is released we will say 'great engine' now add more 'stuff'. I want more races and I * definitely * want more unicorns. I would be willing to pay for a couple of heavy 'content' expansions, featuring little engine upgrades but lots of model assets / new creatures and races / new spells.

There will be diversity, just that not in the race department.

I don't know that much about this stuff, but from Civ IV I had understood that as you moved stuff from C++ to Python, the game's performance would get slower and slower, since Python compiles at runtime.  I wasn't clear on whether that meant the game would just take longer to load, or the game itself would actually run slower when you are playing it (or both).  Hopefully, it won't be a big issue.

This is awesome! Although now I have to learn Python

Playing the game a lot leads to the same thing, because you learn what the AI does as you play against it. If you're not interested in it, you don't have to go around reading peoples how to beat the AI guides.

I certainly didn't need to see the AoW 2 AI's code to be able to write up a guide on exactly how to beat it every time.

I don't know that much about this stuff, but from Civ IV I had understood that as you moved stuff from C++ to Python, the game's performance would get slower and slower, since Python compiles at runtime.  I wasn't clear on whether that meant the game would just take longer to load, or the game itself would actually run slower when you are playing it (or both).  Hopefully, it won't be a big issue

That's both true and not true. Python is interpreted, but you can precompile into .pyc files (compiled python). It's still interpretted byte code since Python uses a VM regardless, but it skips the step of compilng from python code to byte code.

It does make it a bit trickier for modders as they'd have to learn how to compile the python code, but Stardock could make that fairly easy with scripts or a "precompile" button or something in their dev tools.

However, they also suggest a lack of the diversity that made MoM and the AoW series successful. So what I am really saying is that when EWOM is released we will say 'great engine' now add more 'stuff'. I want more races and I * definitely * want more unicorns. I would be willing to pay for a couple of heavy 'content' expansions, featuring little engine upgrades but lots of model assets / new creatures and races / new spells.

If I recall, meaningful post release updates is one of the gamer's rights Stardock supports, so I'd certainly expect something along those lines. I'd imagine full on add-on packs that cost $ would be even cooler. If they get a good vetting system in for user content, that'll help too. 

As the Civ4 Fall From Heaven mod shows, there are some incredibly talented folks out there willing to do cool work with a good engine.

Pretty sure that what happened there was that they opened a new vm for each call to a python function and bounced between the two a lot. Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure somebody who would know posted that on these forums, I just forget who and where.

Well, I guess I should have said something like "lots more" of the kind of zero-sum maximizer crap that I find tedious in both playing and reading about this game genre that I love. I've never deliberately gone about reading that sort of stuff for GC2, but I've still been able to develop a strong distaste for score-driven playstyles and discussion about that sort of playstyle.

In other words, the main reason I balk strongly at having the core AI coding as part of the general public discussion is that things are bad enough already in GC2-land for players like me and I don't want to see it get worse for Elemental. If you want a game like chess, play chess. If you want a computer-based game that can keep you reliably surprised after years of doing 'the same thing,' then buy into a franchise like GC2 where the core code is private but the devs will discuss their product in detail with random rubes like you or me.

I still don't understand this. If you don't want to listen to people discuss how to beat the AI, then don't click on the page. More of something you completely ignore and don't have to even have to see coudn't possibly affect you're gaming experiance.

Just think about 'spoiler' reviews and you should get some sympathy for what I'm trying to type about. I don't presume that the Elemental boards will somehow be free of posts from zero-sum 'win' lovers. I'm just fairly certain that making the core AI code public would do nothing for me except increase the number of posts I wish I hadn't read. I play to play, and people who play to win mostly seem to value things that I find to be no fun, or worse, anti-fun.

I see what you mean now! Don't worry: although moddable AI will increase the number of posts, but the proliferation of alternate AIs will make most of them worthless.

I don;t think he is worried about modded AI: I think he is worried that if the CANON AI is available, a small but annoying minority will use that acces to design strats FOR THE CANON game. Ultimate strats will be designed, not thru trial and error of playing the game, but by reverse engineering the AI code to determine optimal play.

Which, I agree, that is not only not fun, that is anti fun. I hope the only way to develop strats is by playing, and I hope there is such an ungodly amount of variation from game to game that a strat that might work well in one game might utterly fail in another.

I was going to hold off on bringing this up because I have little experiance (none, actually) in AI programming (perhaps someone with more technical know-how could correct/corraborate my theory), but it seems like it would actually be rather difficult to reverse-engineer a winning strategy just from studying the code. It's not like you'll see "IF: Playermana=400 THEN: executeSubModule: Roll_Over_And_Die071"(apologies for my aweful syntax..... still can't actually program).

Everyone has thier own definition of fun. Your definition is trial and error to come up with a good, but not perfect, way to win the game. Other people's idea of fun is to create the most perfect, optimized at every step, strategy to win. One is not better then the other(how one likes to play a game is an opinion, of course) and if they want to support both, I think they should.

Yeah, in fact I think they should provide a script that will play the perfect game and give it to everyone.

That is what I call fun!

Brad would consider creating that script fun.