[freeciv-ai] Re: player's view on ai

[Per Inge Mathisen <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Christian Knoke wrote:
> Another 1 human vs n AI game comes to an end - and the pattern is as always:
> AI make alliances, but at a certain point they start to fight each other
> (not me - I'm too strong), fight, fight - with no avail. Since 3000 years
> french ai fights an alliance of phillipine, scots, and americans, and has
> not yet mangaged to conquer a *single* city. Ok, it has lost 1 city. *One*.

The AI attack code sucks. That is well known ;)

> AI fight at each other when they are equally strong. I don't.
>
> Maybe AI should only attack if/when:
>
> 1) it has a military signifant plus of technologies
>
> 2) has it's units updated to that tech level
>
> If 1 or 2 is not true, it should only attack if there is no possibility to
> develop by means of expansion, infrastructure, or research.

Perhaps good ideas, but need fleshing out more.

What if the AI never develops superior technology? It would never attack?
That would be boring. It may be more fun to be continually bothered by the
AI - more challenge throughout the game, instead of all being squeezed
into one huge attack.

What if another player is expanding faster? Harassing him with a few fast
units might be a way to stall him. The AI does that a lot against me and
I find it quite annoying ;) But this is mostly when we start on the same
continent.

Finding out how well we can expand is not easy the way the code is written
now.

What I can do is to make the AI not declare war while it is still
expanding. However, this will only make it very easy to derail the AI by
declaring war on it to make it slow its expansion.

  - Per