[Buttons840]

> heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in

I've come to see one aspect of game design as "shaping randomness into more interesting and artistic forms". Just a plain rand() call is sort of interesting, you never know exactly what you're going to get, but with some art and careful shaping it can be made much more interesting.

[atoav]

Also consider that random will give you random. A lot of things can be better if they follow different distributions (e.g. gaussian or a bounded random walk)