[stcredzero]

Or we need a better way to reward players.

So what we want to do is tie the monster's success to the player's success.

One thing I've played with is to let Players take "contracts" to build security drone warships. The players will get paid a small royalty, plus a sizeable bonus for combat success.

To keep players from trying to rig the system in their favor too easily, the AI scripting language can be processed by the genetic algorithm. The players will still be able to exploit the system by nefarious means, but they will have to create bots that are tough on the surface, and hope that not too many others will discover and also exploit their backdoors. (I would love it if players started doing this!)

[saulrh]

That's pretty neat! Reminds me a little bit of the old terrarium game that microsoft used to demonstrate .NET, or maybe of a version of spore that doesn't suck, or even a little bit of the nature of open-source: build something, send it out into the world, see it grow and develop from where you started it.

Genius nefarious builds could definitely be flavored as a reward, and I agree that that's one of the big draws of this system: if you manage to build something that's good enough to survive and spread but still flawed in a way that you can exploit, kudos to you! Reward: you get to break into anything that's guarded by your creations. :P Just good luck building something that you can exploit that not enough other people can for it to not succeed.

(I think I'd love to check this game out when it's further along, BTW. Do you have a news list I could throw an email address at?)