[MaxWilson]

The thing about the statistical stuff is that 1.) it can depend on the opponent, and 2.) it can extract knowledge that the developers don't have. To wit, in some playing circles with a very aggressive set of players, taking death-3 might be a no-brainer, whereas if most players are defensive and borders are static growth becomes more desirable. Moreover, if the opponent begins to adjust to your strategy a learning AI can re-adjust its style (between games) when it starts to become ineffective. The approach of hardcoding "good combinations" is how most AI seems to be done, and it works well until you figure out the weak points. Dom3 has a good, strong AI, until you figure out the things it can't handle (SCs). At that point you either exploit those things or stay away from them, but a human player would lose a game or two and then, if you kept on using SCs, shift its strategy to deal with them at the expense of a weaker anti-magic defense or something. (E.g. build more mages and fewer huge armies, construct some Rods of the Phoenix and sprinkle them around.) A learning AI would need to have the right tools in its learning toolbox--in its simplest form it has a number of hardwired strategies and selects among them based on what is working--but without the ability to learn from your opponent's behavior you *cannot* prevent your AI from getting exploited eventually. There's no guarantee that any given learning AI would be able to deal with any given player tactic, which is why it would be good to have an API, so you can add more tools to the learning toolbox when needed.

-Max