[freeciv-ai] Re: RFC: Behaviour constants.

[Mike Kaufman <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 10:34:15PM +0000, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> > How can we improve AI without going too deep?
> >
> > This is a legitimate question, and an answer to it is given by various
> > constants and factors and multipliers that the AI code is peppered with.
> > Examples are: what is considered to be a small nation (number of cities)
> > -- used to encourage settler building; what is the default danger for
> > capital; what is food/shield weighting etc.
> >
> > Some of these numbers are defines, some are just plain numbers.What I
> > propose is to collect them all in some .h file included in all AI files,
> > so they can be tweaked in a systematic way.Then tweak them and run
> > pitfights, lots of them.There ar, of course difficulties like "constant
> > is constant for all nations", but they are solvable.
> 
> I think this is the wrong answer. We can tune the AI a lot to a bunch of
> constants, but the moment we change the rules or use a modpack, these
> constants will be way off. Better teach the AI to utilize the rules
> better. Better attack code, better ferry code, better settler code and
> better production code is much more of an improvement in the long run than
> even a 50% improvement in pitfight stats due to tuning of constants.

I think that you miss the point. even with great code, there will need to
be various parameters that tell the ai when to utilize the exploring code
for example: how much unknown territory within x distance from my cities
will it take to trigger me to go exploring?

-mike