City building strategy algorithms

Question

I'm looking for some papers on finding an infrastructure development strategy in games like Starcraft / Age of Empires. Basic facts characterising those games are:

1. continuous time (well - it could be split into 10s periods, or something like that)
2. many variables describing growth (many resources, buildings levels, etc.)
3. many variables influencing growth (technology upgrades, levels, etc.)

Most of what I could find is basically either:

1. tree search minimising time to get to a given condition (building/technology at level X)
2. tree search maximising value = each game variable*bias
3. genetic algorithms... obvious doing either of the above

Are there any better algorithms that can be tuned to look for a perfect solution of the early phase?

Answer 1

You might find some information on one or more of these books: http://www.gamedev.net/columns/books/books.asp?CategoryID=7