Hey guys,

So that you know where we are.  At this stage, the underlying AI plumbing is complete.  That is, the AI knows how to play the game completely. It just plays it rather poorly.

So for the next month, I'm spending all my time on the strategy portion.  This is, as you can imagine, non-trivial especially since we want different players to play differently.  

Not all strategies are equal.  Some AI players will most definitely lose many of the games because their strategy isn't viable against certain styles of play.  I'm really struggling with trying to make sure these different strategies remain viable, particularly diplomatic and cultural strategies.  

Today's big job was getting the AI to design better ships and doing so without cheating. In fact, the whole "without cheating" is an obvious major disadvantage we have from other games.  To be sure, we WILL allow players to crank up the difficulty beyond normal in which case the AI gets some documented bonuses (basically money) but the goal here is to have a non-cheating AI that will challenge most players.

Another area I'm struggling with A LOT is having the AI intelligently choose what ships to build and when.  There is no hard and fast rule on that since it changes based on the map in question and what planets the AI is aware of.  In the OS/2 version of GalCiv, the AI just knew where everything was.  Now, it has to guess and scout which is a lot harder. It means the AI will send ships in the right direction (or wrong direction) as a guess.  

What techs to get is working pretty well.  That was a lot of work to get it to focus but it is working now as designed (on my machine, not on yours, it totally sucks on your version still).  However, where I"m currently stuck is getting the AI to intelligently pick a good combination of ships.  I haven't figured out the bug but something is causing it to crank out the exact same war ship no matter what. It's very annoying and it's in your build too.  I am hopeful I can get this fixed during the weekend.

That's all for now.  More to come.