[Freeciv-Dev] Re: more ai levels

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 07:23:09PM -0200, Lalo Martins wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 01:42:05PM -0600, Tony Stuckey wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 02:49:45PM -0200, Lalo Martins wrote:
> > > 
> > > In short, what happens is that we don't know what more to do to
> > > make easy easy :-) Everyone is invited to read the AI code and
> > > submit patches for a ``veryeasy'' AI.
> > 
> >     Sure we do.  Limit the AI to one city, and have it establish trade
> > routes with the human players.  Maybe even re-introduce the bug that AI
> > Settlers were improving territory within human city boundaries.
> 
> But with only one city, it would be too easy to beat (there is
> only one city to conquer). The settler bug sounds interesting.
> 
> Perhaps we should identify how a bad player plays, and try to
> emulate that? I volunteer as a guinea pig for that :-)

My guess would be that we should slow down the rate the AI expands.

Make a more 'conservative' AI, that prefers to build improvements rather
than always settlers, and sometimes builds roads and irrigation rather than
new cities.

On of the flaws (IMO) in the whole freeciv game mechanic is how
phenomenonally powerful it is to have many, many cities.  Enough that if you
expand circa 20% faster than everyone else, you will surely win... but
anyhow, the AI is fairly good at expanding fast (not as good as a human
player, and it is very bad at expanding over sea).

Incidentally, once I'd figured out how to beat the easy AI (expand ASAP), I
didn't actually find the hard AI that much harder -- I just used the same
strat...  It's my hope that barbarians will help to alleviate this (if
they're common enough that you'll certainly meet them, you can't afford to
leave your cities undefended, which I currently do if there are no enemies
around).

Jules

-- 
Jules Bean                          |        Any sufficiently advanced 
jules@{debian.org,jellybean.co.uk}  |  technology is indistinguishable
jmlb2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx              |               from a perl script