That would be even more work, only for different people. Creating an AI for a complex game like BM is no easy task, even if it is a limited AI that is guided by a player.
I firmly disagree.
First of all, I would bet you that I could bash out a halfway decent AI for monsters & undead in a week or two working at the pace I generally do on BM code (not counting testing, maybe).
Second of all, I would enjoy it a LOT. I really like AI.
Third of all, it would be pretty much an upfront investment, that could then be used whenever and for however long we wanted.
If you don't want AI, then say you don't want AI, but don't try to make it out to be more work than it is. It really wouldn't be that hard to add some simple goal-seeking to the currently totally random rogue patterns.
- An "attack region" goal, which causes the units it's assigned to to path to a specific region (using the existing routefinder code) and start smashing it up.
- A "devastate area" goal, which causes them to stay within a specific area and wreak havoc, continuing to move randomly but only within that area.
- An "expand from here" goal, which causes them to move to a region as per (1), take it over, then begin taking over surrounding regions in a breadth-first pattern.
- If we want there to be some kind of "point farming" that the actual units themselves have to do, it shouldn't be that hard to provide an option to support that, too (though I would think it would be pretty similar to #2).
Even just #1 there would make for a tremendous increase in the amount of AI the monsters & undead have, and it would be really quite simple to code, IMO.
