Red Harvest,

I was born an optimist, but as old as I am now, I'm a realist. Building software is all about money in the gaming world. There are, no doubt, plenty of devs on the team who wanted to build it better than they did. But they were a year late. Intolerable by todays standards for delivery. There comes a time when the project manager and lead programmer go in a room, have a screaming match, and the release date is firmed.

I would absolutely love to see military genius in the AI of games I play. But it's never happened. Real military genius revolves around perfect timing and positional analysis of battlefield events, and these do relate to why chess programming is harder than it looks. A real commander evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the units opposing him, not just numbers. Effective tactics like sacrificing some cheap units to kill the other side rely on sharp assessment of all the variables of battle. I believe the chief problem is that no military experts on ancient warfare were directly involved in the product development (at least from a tactics standpoint). One day, a game developer will get smart, and realize that the added expense of playtesting with real experts will pay off in spades with the finished product. Until such time, we will have rudimentary computer opponents.