[freeciv-ai] Re: (PR#2644) AI needs 5400 years to get Republic

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think Anthony has suggested the right approach to this in his
summary, though the solution tends to go somewhat against his
usual views on detailed planning.

The idea is that production of certain elements like barracks 
should *not* be a standalone calculation but have a certain
feedback weight that depends on how many have already been
built and the current Civ size. There is a flavour of this in
*minimum* thresholds used in advdomestic.c in the corecleanups
if you want practical examples.

The idea applies generally to a lot of elements and the trick
is perhaps to decide whether you want *specific* barracks and
every other type of improvement/unit/wonder thresholds, or one
can assign a standard vector of weightings to each element 
that boosts a cummulative vector of military/economic/social/...
(or whatever vector elements one decides on) weights. The 
feedback is then to use this vector to decrease the want by
some sort of dot product for strengths, and similarly increase 
wants for weaknesses.

If different "personalities" have different max/min thresholds
for their core vectors, then some will produce lots of military 
units, military buildings, economic or social elements over 
others. But  everyone will eventually produce some of everything
unless the threshold is zero (very bad), and stop producing one
type in favour of another when they hit an upper threshold - at
least until some parameter like civ size increases and lowers the
threshold again.

The key elements are a (fixed) max/min threshold and a cumulative
weight that reflects the (civ-wide) level of some component.

It should also be the case that individual want calculations take
into account the strengths of the particular city, and the city
production be tuned by the wants of a particular personality as 
well. Thus a food rich city (usually means lots of trade with
road building) should be tuned for growth, libraries and markets,
or settler/worker production, i.e. the elements that are most
population dependent. Shield rich cities should become factories
for military or non-military units, wonders and defensive strong
points. And in choosing production and worker tasks, a city should
have a feedback from the personality desires for vector components.
A Ghandhi would value population growth (food and social improvements),
while a Bismark would go for production, science and military
elements (in that ranking) over growth.

The combination of the two will insure that cities that are best
suited for certain production elements, or most in need will be
the ones to exceed the thresholds, while others will be held back
in over supply scenarios, and instead turn to some of the other
opportunities. This will cause a more balanced overall growth, 
but a much more varied (and hence interesting) mix of individual
elements.

And think of what happens if a few cities supplying a major part
of a Civ's weight in a given area should fall. The Civ will in
effect undergo a major shift in the remaining city priorities and
this could trigger some interesting spin-off effects that in fact
might kick it out of a deadend stasis. One might even trigger
government change and a possible ruling personality reset.

Cheers,
RossW
=====

At 07:03 AM 02/12/31 -0800, Gregory Berkolaiko via RT wrote:
>Quoting "ue80@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 04:11:37AM -0600, Anthony J. Stuckey wrote:
>> > On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 10:35:02AM -0800, ue80@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
via RT
>> wrote:
>> > > New game with actual cvs:
>> > > 
>> > > 100% tax 21 baracks + 16 courthouses, no libraries. 30 cities.
>> > > 28 settlers.
>> > > 
>> > > Known technologies 1000 AD: 
>> > > Alphabet, Code of Laws, Literacy, Map Making, Writing.
>> > 
>> >    Please attach a savegame, or describe the map/cityfounding style which
>> > drives this.  21 Barracks is insane, and we need to find a way to
>> > suppress
>> > this.  For 30 cities, 5-10 barracks should suffice unless we are in a
>> > major
>> > archipelago situation.
>
>Currently AI builds barracks before building any offensive units.
>This is proven to be better than not building barracks at all.
>So the solution should be about:
>* estimating how many offensive units a given city will build
>* redirecting military spending via few selected cities
>
>This is strategic planning, something that AI lacks altogether.  Should
you have
>any ideas on how to implement it _simply_ please open the discussion.
>
>G.
>
>
>