Declaring a variable inside an `if` statement in Java that is a different type depending on the conditional

Question

I know, I know, there's a ton of simple answers that cover most cases for how to avoid this.

In my case, I want to use user-input info to create CPU players in a game. If the user chooses easy mode, then I want to declare and instantiate an instance of the EasyPlayer class. Otherwise, I want to declare and instantiate an instance of the HardPlayer class. Either way, the specific name of the variable needs to be "cpu" and the rest of the code operates on "cpu" indiscriminately. That is, all the differences in how these operate are built into their different classes, which subclass the CpuPlayer class.

So here's the code:

// Set the opponent.
if (difficulty == 0){
    EasyPlayer cpu = new EasyPlayer(num_rounds);
}
else{
    HardPlayer cpu = new HardPlayer(num_rounds);
}

This gives me the ever-annoying cannot find symbol error. From what I can read, everyone says you cannot make declarations inside a conditional like this due to scope problems and the possibility that it never occurs.

If so, what is the right way to alternatively declare a single variable as one of either of two different classes based on user input?

Answer 1

CpuPlayer cpu;

if (difficulty == 0){
    cpu = new EasyPlayer(num_rounds);
}
else{
    cpu = new HardPlayer(num_rounds);
}