Updated April 3rd So far the project has progressed almost to the completion of the engine, along with AI of low intelligence. The program spans 30 files, stretches 9500 lines, and is designed with easy addition of more and more AI's in mind. The engine, however, is not the focus, and so I will leave details to this page except where it is important to the discussion of the AI's. One area where the engine is important is "housekeeping" type chores that the AI's have to perform every race-turn that is played. These include tallying of territory, growth of population, calculation of trade, and various other tasks. These tasks have been grouped into general functions to be called by all AI's, without change. All AI's, then, can automatically earn money, record their statistics into the records, and so on, without any real effort on the part of the programmer. At this time, there are two AI's in this game, one (the first) is named Fungi and the other (similar) is named Spot. Spot has recently become a better AI than Fungi, as planned, and will receive a number of additional improvements before I move on to another, as of yet unnamed, AI. Fungi can be summed up as follows: Fungi takes its income, and uses it to research technologies, build ships, build shipyards and build bases, each of which it chooses from many options with varying levels of intelligence. It explores unexplored territory so as to increase its wealth. It is able to decide if another empire is a threat based upon examination of its exploratory performance (looking for a decrease), and the nearness of all other empires as well as their military strengths. It keeps an internal state so that each turn's determination of who's a threat is influenced by the previous turn and so that usually it takes more than one bad turn to push an empire to war. Fungi also respects or does not respect the territory of other empires based upon the current diplomatic situation with that empire. For more in-depth information about Fungi, read this page. Spot's page jsut got under development, available here. Considerable information can also be found in the news postings on the main page, as well as the screenshots page linked off of it.