Imagine a case where an attractor ups the value of a cell in the map and then a detractor knocks it right back down to its original value. In one sense, that s what you d like to happen because the tile is both good and bad, but you also lose the fact that it s good and bad because it looks like any other tile that hasn t been attracted or detracted at all. Sometimes this is okay, but there are times when it s not. There are a variety of ways to work around this, but the best is to keep the number of influences during any one influence mapping operation down to a fairly low number. CP AIs would really like to have that ability as well.
Areas are the way to do it.
When a map is fully processed into areas, the CP AI can assign units to a given area for logical lookup later as part of a location-based knowledge base. The CP AI can also track how valuable an area is based on the number of resources in it or how many other areas it is connected to. In addition to mimicking human map analysis, areas are excellent at abstracting large areas of the map into easily usable chunks. Areas can be difficult to keep updated in a game with dynamic terrain. But, with intelligent notifications and good code to split and merge areas, this problem can be mitigated quite a bit.