But then you have another problem. If you get near ANY weapons, they'll get picked up, and dropping them wouldn't work.

Yeah, just use a timer.
( Credit to TLB's Reject, and Geti's Zombies '09 )
♥♥♥♥. Made a mistake. Fixed!

no actually, its about digging for gold. you're a mining corporation, fighting over the gold with other mining corporations. its about digging for gold, or at least about acquiring gold. you get paid gold for finding artifacts. you dig up gold as your main source of income (i know none of us do, but try starting with no funds, a brainbot and a heavy digger on an empty map. besides being totally different from the usual "buy guy, run around with guy killing everyone until he dies, buy another guy, and so on until out of money, ctrl+R", you realise that you need to dig to get money, and though the mechanic needs some polishing, its still what the game is about. you get gold, you get some guys and guns with the gold, you kill the enemy so they dont prevent you from getting more gold and/or steal your gold. really, the enemy should be mining as well, but i suppose thats coming anyway, eventually.
beh, i've gone off on a tangent.
point is, the official story is about digging for gold.

I find myself somewhat liking the mining stuff,
but sometimes just get bored and want a proper gold dig AI.

Right now, the gold digging is bit bland. Get strongest digger, go for the biggest load of gold.
If the enemies even attempted to try and get into the mines, but no.

Even more awesome would be collapsing and whatnot, but I think that's a bit off the scope.

Explosive gas pockets positioned near artifacts or dense gold should spice mining up a bit.

I doubt having to order twenty miners because of gas pockets would be fun, but yes, having harmful (NOT deadly) gas pockets would make mining a less mindless task.

i like the underground artifact thing. and i have a couple extra ideas which ill just throw in.

the artifact could be a cool robot, with a gun. that either decides it likes you or blasts away at you. or a hefty rock, that makes black holes. or just a nice jewel that someone wants to buy.

possibly add some different resources to cc that look similar but are different colours, like crystal(which take longer to dig) or radioactives(that start damaging you when you get too close), that can be worth more dependant on what faction you are or on the mission.(or tradestar could have a mini marketplace thingy that has fluctuating prices for the different resources.

digging for gold can be fun in multiplayer matches where you can go hunting for diggers and cripple your opponents economy economy.

the tutorial needs to show people how to use the different forms of ai such as the wonderful go-to ai, which is the only really useful one other than sentry.

the problem is that the above is two years old.

As has already been said in this thread, Data wants the AI to be Lua-based. Lua was just added last build, though, so what do you expect?

Actually, I'll tell you what to expect: a reasonably good gold digging AI in B24.

I don't get the point of this thread. People KNOW there's going to be a gold digging AI; there's already a button for it. People DON'T KNOW what the final game play is going to be like. More than half of the information which is required to make a proper judgment "of the dig-for-gold concept" does not publicly exist. How can this topic be discussed?

Well, gold dig AI used to not be broken.
Also, prom likes artifacts and things, so i expect them as part of the meta-game. free unlocks! wooooo