[Uh-Nu-Buh]

thejeff makes a lot of sense. Some basic decision trees need to be created, added to, and pruned based on the pretender chosen, then the race, then the enemy being attacked. It would be cool if there were some fundamental personalities as well: turtle, aggressor, 10-turn turtle then 10-turn aggressor, etc.

E.g. First decision: have 30 pre-made, effective pretenders to choose from. Second decision: based on the pretender, choose one of 5 appropriate races. Third decision: choose basic AI personality based on Pretender and race. Then move on from there.... This is drastic oversimplification, I know, but this is where it starts.

Just to throw this in the mix, OS/2 WARP was a fully multi-threaded operating system back in the dawn of time. A little game called Galactic Civilizations came out that took advantage of that multi-threading to think while the player did his turn. Award winning AI, not because it was so much more clever, but because it was so much better at brute forcing. Now, with the multi-core CPUs we have, the fully threaded OSes we have, and the librairies available, it should be easy(ier) to implement....

Finally, my own wish: I wish games would come out with a common API that allowed swappable AI modules. This would allow people to develop their own AI libraries for their favorite programming languages (perl, python, lisp, c++, forth, smalltalk, ruby, etc.), swap them with eachother, and compare code. I think this would produce a rennaissance in AI. Imagine what would happen if you didn't have to re-program path-finding for every new game. That one simple thing would speed up game development significantly. Imagine taking the AI module from your blackjack game and putting it into your chess game just to see how well it would do--the SYNERGY of LEVERAGING your Existing Infrastructure could REVOLUTIONIZE the future. But seriously, it would rock if we could do it. Instead of reinventing AI anew for every game you could mix and match. Probably the better AIs would have self-learning routines. I know I would have a lot of fun swapping an ai in and out of different games.... And messing around with basic routines in the AI modules would be cool.

Yes, I did some ai programming for a comercial game back in the 90's. It was tedious and frustrating, and I came up with a wishlist at that time that goes on and on and on....