Cross-posted from a very
obscure location, I really do need to add this to the wiki at some point.
Regarding the AI Progress, that's the most general ecompassing term I could come up with (and it's far too late to rename something so fundamental now, at any rate). Some people have referred to it as the AI "rageometer," which I found amusing. But, the AI Progress is a measure, really, of the following combined factors:
- How annoyed it is at you (rageometer).
- How big a threat it thinks you are (being frightened by things such as golems or warheads).
- How ready it is to do anything about that (how much of its production potential is devoted to thwarting you).
Given those sort of interrelating factors, I went with a somewhat-generic-but-descriptive name of AI Progress in order to try to encompass all three. I perhaps could have split out those sorts of things into multiple meters (AI Rage, AI Intimidatedness, AI Preparedness, or something), but I think that would have been prohibitively complex in practice.
So, in that sense, it's not anger, but rather the AI seeing you as more of a threat to itself. Let me give another animal example, as I like to do. Suppose you have a cat, and it has claws, but never attacks you. Your estimation of that cat as a threat is very low. But, let's suppose that cat then does something threatening, like arching its back or swatting at you -- even if it does not hurt you in any way, you still think of it as being more of a danger. In many ways, this is why the Golems, even when dying are considered a threat by the AI -- okay,
that golem is dead, but these human build golems now, evidently. So, logically, if I killed the one are they going to try something else that I don't know about directly?
The other case, regarding the captive human settlements, again works best as a pet analogy. Let's suppose you have a dog that you keep in the house, and he is known for trying to escape out the door when you open it. That makes you take steps to try to contain him, and thus puts you more on guard with the dog not because of danger to yourself, but because you want to keep him contained and he is trying to thwart that. With the captive human settlements and rebel colonies, those were assumedly captive for a reason, and so if the AI then is losing control of them, that is cause for concern to it. The dog is escaping, or got out and then got itself killed. The AI has a lot of captive human settlements, and an uprising or an escape in one (especially if one is annihilated) might logically spawn rebellions or trouble in the others. Hence, the AI's level of concern again rises -- just what are those pesky humans up to, and what might they do next?
I definitely need to add this to the wiki, I will do that momentarily.