Introducing the AI builder

The next public release of “Phase 2” will include a new feature, the AI builder.

Managing your regions (constructing and upgrading buildings) becomes more and more tedious the longer a game has been going on, and once you own dozens of regions later on in the game that you’ll have to manage, this task gets very repetitive and takes up a lot of your time. And since monotony can do a lot of damage to the gameplay I decided to add the option to let the AI do the construction and or upgrades for your regions. And since most of that code was already in place (for the AI controlled nations), getting this feature into the game didn’t take to long.

So starting with the next public release (sorry, no ETA yet) you’ll be able to set up an AI builder for each of your regions with the following options :

  1. **Disabled**

The default state. The AI builder won’t interact with that region and it’s up to the player to construct and upgrade buildings. 2. Constructing buildings The AI builder will construct new buildings on free building spots. Once all buildings spots are occupied he’ll switch to passive mode and keep an eye on pollution and happiness in the region. If one of thess crucial factors reaches a dangerous low the AI builder will try to change the building layout of the region to e.g. counter high pollution levels. 3. Upgrade buildings Upon ending a turn the AI builder will check if any of the buildings in it’s region can be upgraded to a better (newer) version. If that’s the case he’ll start constructing upgrades. 4. Construct and upgrade The AI builder will first fill up all available buildings spots with suitable buildings (with priority towards economic power) and then start to uprade existing buildings.

This new feature will hopefully take out a lot of the repetitiveness in the later parts of the game, making it more fun to play. But note that the AI isn’t perfect and that it’s using predefined upgrade paths for the different building types, so if you need the best region layouts possible you’ll still have to do it on your own.

And one thing I’m still not sure about is wether I should implement some kind of penalty when the AI builder is active in a region. Maybe there’ll be a penalty on economic power, having the region output less funds per turn if the AI builder is enabled or something similar. And I’m also not sure yet on wether the AI builder will be available from the getgo or wether it’ll be implemented as a technology that you’ll have to research first before you can active it. What do you think?