There are two things that I think would greatly benefit the game, both the community as well as the AI players that appear in games.
Build Tracking
Each game, as the game progresses, data is saved to be sent to Impulse/Stardock. This already happens, and consists of basic information like who won, what favor they got, how long the game was. I suggest we expand this in two ways:
- Track what skills each character picks up, and at what levels
- Track what items/citadel upgrades each character buys, how much gold they had in their inventory when they bought it, and what game time they got it at.
Right here, we can aggregate data as a community to see the relative value of skills. For instance, how often do people get spit at first level? How often do they not get it at all? How many people buy monks within the first minute, and what is their win percentage? These are all cool things that the community, and whoever might want to rebalance the game, would like to know.
Learning AI
Scarey words right? Well, not really. AI is a very difficult thing, due to the number of decisions an AI could be making at any given time. However, there are a FEW that are very easy to inject, such as specific item/skill/upgrade combo's.
What I propose, is that each month, a simple AI pack be either collated into a table at the main servers, or a small update be released for the AI. This pack would simply have the updates stats for the most rudimentary of Build information, and would 'weigh' the choices made by the AI so that it would attempt to buy skills/items/upgrades just like players due.
A little pseudo-randomness to make the AI not complete copy cats all the time, and you have a pretty good way to keep the AI up to date with the rest of the players in the game, so they know what basic strategies to use.
The important part here, is to keep it light. We can spend an infinite amount of time dictating how and when AI's use skills, or we can at least give them the skills that work for everyone else.
These two things together will add a lot longer life to the game, as it will allow more high-brow discussion of the game, and support balance modding, as well as allow for AI's to try and keep up with the rest of the game, as the game and its strategies move around and become more complicated.
