Silly me, overestimating peoples creativity, let me take you by the hand and guide you through some easy solutions to the problem:
You could leave the cavemen with the Warrior base ID, letting the AI think it's the same unit it's controlling if it's a replacement for the warrior anyway.
I assume there is a single AI for all melee units, just add the caveman base ID to the list of units using that AI, done.
Worst case scenario you could even just copy paste the warrior AI and attach it to the caveman.
I kinda figured these options where so obvious I didn't have to list them, I'll try not to make that mistake when talking to you anymore as the LOL indicates to me you failed to spend any time actually thinking about it.
Silly me, and I thought a simple example would help you see the core of the problem. I wasnt even talking about controlling the unit since the AI wouldn't know to build one. (Even in heavily scripted AIs such as in SC, unit movement is often based on a more dynamic algorithm such as threat mapping.)
Of course since this is a silly simple example it would be fairly trivial to fix. The point however is that it would need to be fixed at all. For a scripted AI that goes for every single change. Since the modders do not have access to the AI (yet) this would have precluded pretty much every mod from being made. And even when the full DLL code is available it would impose a huge barrier to modding for the less code savvy.
And this is just one of the flaws of a scripted AI. The other is the inability to deal with on foreseen in game situations, which given the versatility of civ are fairly common.
Now, please wrap your O So creative mind around the fact the a more dynamically programmed AI that determines its next move by evaluating all possible moves based on the current game state, is perfectly possible to program. And although requires a bit more investment to get right, it will work better than any scripted AI when properly tuned.
The only thing which is not very easy to do is to easily adjust the level of play of the AI. (And judging from
this prerelease interview, the devs were actually think about deploying a system to adjust actual level of play for the AIs. I am not sure what happend to that. But of course, a system like they describe will only allow the AI's ability to be scaled down, it will never be better than its best.
Yes I said Civ was a simulation game, you said that couldn't be so as it's a 4X game, as I think I explained last post, the terms are not mutually exclusive.
I did say it couldn't be. I said it was a 4X game first and foremost. That is not to say that immersion is not important, it is. But, emulation of human history should follow as an emergent result of the game rules, not by the AIs playing by a different set of rules to roleplay for the human. (Remember that the OP was complaining about the AI playing by different rules. That sword cuts both ways.
You said the dev teams problem that caused this was their ambition, which is usually a good trait, if they where truly ambitious they would have pushed back the release date to truly create an excellent game, like any good studio does, do you think Activision forced Blizzard to set a release date for SC2? Or Bethesda forced Black Isle to rush out New Vegas?
Yes, I can only dream of the day that Blizzard (or any other studio with an its finished when its finished policy) buys the civilization franchise. But for now we are stuck with firaxis.
Not sure where you got from that the scripts can't be dynamically ordered and I'm not sure what you consider "what it needs" but scripting can immensely improve the AI, again, not to the extent of being a granmaster, but enough to make it a somewhat competent adversary, which is miles beyond the toddler unit spam we get now.
No, it could not (immensely improve the AI). It might superficially improve it a bit, but not even that much. In fact, it would probably be fairly bad, because the devs clearly had fairly little time to gain enough gameplay experience to build a decent scripted AI before release.
