One of my favorite shows on TV is Avatar, the last airbender (not to be confused with the recent movie).  One of my long term goals with the AI is to be able to have the AI in tactical battles be able to give the kinds of battles back and forth with  players (as well as eventually in MP as well) that I see on that show.  Of course, such an AI will take probably years to reach that level but we have the luxury of doing that sort of thing (like with GalCiv before it).

The engine team will eventually need to create more systems to do some of the things it would require (i.e. particle effects won’t be enough) but it should be cool.

For today, I’m going through the a lot of the values (weapons, defenses, city improvements) and relooking at their balance. I’m finding it way too easy to just “rush” nearby enemies because the values grow so much, so fast.

Another thing I’m looking to do in the next few weeks is to start porting my C++ APIs to Python. Not only will this make it much easier to do tweaks without recompling but other players can see what I’m doing directly and make suggestions or even try their own hand on it.

Update

[More dev journals to come this week but I'll be locking comments, people can discuss different pieces in the forums].