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Have you ever thought that the opponents in your games were too much alike? That they did the same stupid actions time and again? That they didn't plan ahead? I certainly have. Some people say those problems are built into the computer, that any single artificial intelligence program will act the same way, become just as boring over time. I happen to disagree. It's a difficult problem, a challenge for the people at Firaxis, but it's not impossible. It just takes the kind of original thinking that made civilization possible so many years ago. The same old methods just won't work!

Fortunately a new way of doing things is available today. One of those ways is modular progamming. In a modular program you have a master program that feeds information to smaller programs who each do their own thing. Using this model we could build a program that was able to run several dozen specialized artificial intelligence programs, each one with it's own specific tasks and ways of doing things.

These smaller AI's could be chained together by the larger program in any order, creating an "AI programming language of some sort. The opponents created by this method would be made up of several parts as follows:

(A) The smaller AI programs you chose to use and the order you put them in.
(B) The individual data for each smaller AI
(C) global information shared by the entire program.

Any programmer can see how this method would be able to yield many vastly different and unique opponents. Some of the possible combinations would, of course, result in extremely stupid opponents. Other combinations though would create hundreds of different personality types. The value of such a system, if done correctly, would be that every opponent would see the world differently, would react differently, and would value different things, use different strategies, and so forth.

Even the exact same information would yeild different personalities depending on the order in which the computer ran it's smaller programs.

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About the author: "I'm a longtime civilization player familiar to many from my posts on sidgames.com".

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