[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#15249) Aggressive AI Could Fight Itself to Obsolence

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=15249 >

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Benedict Adamson wrote:
> Benedict Adamson wrote:
> ...
> > Now, consider an aggressive (that is, on a war-footing) AI Democracy
> > which, because of careful previous budgeting or city improvements, does
> > not NEED any taxes or luxuries. The tax rate would be computed as 0% and
> > science as 100%, but then the code fragment above would swap them
> > around. The next turn, the AI would have even more cash in hand, and
> > thus even less reason to have a positive tax rate... but the fragment
> > would still set the tax rate to 100% and science to 0%.
> ...
>
> A related problem is that the tax rate does not depend on the amount of
> cash in hand. If the AI has plenty of cash, it can select a lower tax
> rate. There should be negative feedback between the cash in hand and the
> tax rate, so the amount of spare cash does not grow without limit.

I agree in theory, but is this a problem in practice? As far as I can
remember, the AI spends gold like a drunken sailor whenever it has any.

Although if you have a neat way of solving this in the code, I am
definitely interested.

  - Per