Is this supposed to happen? If you pass the AI json files through a human readable formatter such as http://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/ and then try to use the formatted version the AI is borked. I passed every json file in media\pa\ai through this parser and afterwards the AI will build 2-3 factories, 2 fabbers (which only build MEX thereafter) and then it amasses a Bolo/Bumblebee army in its base which it never uses. If I restore the files to their pre-formatted state then everything works. Shouldn't they work even with formatting? Certainly makes it very hard to mod them. Is it simply to do with the way that formatting tool works? Note that I copy them using the copy button.
Herp derp, crying wolf too early. Used the reformat script from this thread and everything works fine. So either I did something wrong, or it's the online reformatter. Either way, not a game bug.
Maybe there is just some general bug that randomly happens sometimes and Quitch just had bad luck when he tried to reason why his AI is screwing up?
It's important to understand many JSON formatters work by taking the .json file, running it through a JSON interpreter into a different data format, and then printing it back out to JSON. This might seem benign, but depending on the implementation any numbers in the .json file might be altered slightly (1.0 might change to 0.9999997, etc.), and even the order of some things might be changed. Either of those could break something. http://jsonlint.com seems to be very good about not altering the array order or the number precision.