Thanks for this, GABRIEL.
You've mentioned how the code is written to favour Order. How difficult,in your opinion, would "the code" be to rewrite so that it favours a more equal distribution for the Civs?
Well to be honest I probably should have chosen my wording a little more carefully
The code does not EXPLICITIELY favour order, its the way the game unfolds that tends to ensure ORDER gets favoured (See my previous posts for more info). In other words the code seems more then comprehensive enough (and probably has a little more thought put into then some players do into their ideological choices
) but due to the way IDEOLOGIES unlock (ie favours tech leaders, tech leaders tend to be SV Civs, SV Civs tend to favour an initial ORDER choice and have more friends then enemies, future civs tend to go for what their friends pick and not what those they are hostile/war with do etc. So it is an emergent problem rather then a HARD CODED one.
As to making it happen less. Yes that would be fairly easy, although any change needs to be balanced against what problems you can introduce
I would suggest boosting the priority of any policy that has not been chosen by a little more, reducing the dependence on friends/enemies (although this should still be a factor) and probably capping this number or scaling by the number of civs in the game.
I would also change the code that looks at happiness gains/losses for each policy to compare against the current AI happiness. So that Civs with large happiness reserves are less worried by happiness losses.
You don't want the AI to make a counterproductive choice, but Civs that are more dominant in the game ie top 2-3 civs should be more inclined to choose whats best for their victory condition and less affected by other factors as their civs can probably absorb the happiness or diplomatic issues that arise.
Perhaps the AI should decide if a factor is really worth considering for the current Civ, before adding that factor into the mix ie we have +90 happiness should equal I DONT CARE WHAT THE HAPPINESS PENALTIES ARE (unless I am really into GOLDEN AGES of course)
Please check out my other thread/post (I linked it above somewhere) if you want to know how the AI currently chooses things. I have broken it down into fairly simple steps for those who are not code-monkeys and provided the code for those who are. You might be able to come up with your own ideas from this.
So SHORT ANSWER = YES, and failry quickly. CAVEAT : Any change can incur unforseen consequences, the current ORDER issue is one such example, so care must be taken.