Question about Ultimate A.I update

Hi this is my second post. Thanks for help on the first one everyone...

Ok so Now i've started making my own mod, My map is looking fairly good (i wanna expand it, but i can wait a few mkore weeks for that) I really want to make the A.I as intelligent as possible. and as far as I know ULTIMATE A.1 1.3 is the only way to do that. Thing is I can only understand that you can run a mod including only those files. but some mods have loads of different mods within them. So what I am asking is how can i combine two or more mods together, say for instance Lands to conquer (which already has ultimate a.i 0.8) along with ultimate a.i 1.3???? i would then like to add the new modified skins for the factions all into the same mod, but i'm really unsure if i can do this.

The short answer is that you can combine any number of different mods painlessly, provided they do not make changes in any of the same files. You just drop their modded files into the same mod/data folder, and your new mod is the sum of the multiple ones. There's nothing magical about a mod folder: the game will read all files in it, regardless of where they come from, or how. If they do change some of the same files, though, then this becomes more difficult. Thus, the long answer below.

In your particular case, Ultimate AI probably only changes a few different files that contain the AI triggers. It's likely that Lusted added few if any further changes to those files. I think his work is mostly in other areas, which may be the reason he included ultimate AI in the first place: it's helpful, and he didn't want to mess with it himself (or it was good enough he didn't feel he needed to). In any case the files are not interlocked in any way, so if you copy the Ultimate AI files into the mod/data folder of an existing LTC install (overwriting the ones in LTC w/ the new ones), you should end up with LTC + the new version of ultimate AI. You'd be missing any additional changes Lusted has done to the Ultimate AI files, but as I said those are likely to be few if any.

Modified graphics on the other hand are easily mixed with anything that doesn't also alter the graphics. Just set them up in the appropriate data subfolder and you should be good to go (note that IIRC some graphical changes require use of the main data folder not the mod one to work correctly, so you may have to set your mod up in the main data folder and use io.file_first, or else run the mod in 2 parts some from each location, using the normal mod startup with io.file_first added onto the command line to use the graphical changes. I'm sketchy on details here, I just remember some things only work in the base mod folder, and I think graphical changes are among them).

Happy modding.