[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Client AI development

[Cameron Morland <cjmorlan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

La 2001-04-20, Daniel Sjölie skribis:

> It would be nice to be able to give direct additional input to the
> behaviour of units... Like specifying that a specific settler should
> build roads when automated...

Yes, also they should build the _right_ roads. Currently autosettler just
improves the land near cities, but doesn't seem to build roads between
cities. I was thinking a "road-to" function would be good for human
players. Less so for AIs, because they wouldn't explicitly want to join
particular cities. For them I would suggest monitoring where units move
and building roads on the most heavily used paths. This is also anologous
to how ants find the most efficient path; each ant wanders randomly, with
a probability of following the scent trail left by a previous and. If
getting to and from a destination (such as a food source) is quick, more
ants will follow along that path, reinforcing it.

> I agree that building functions like these and make them available to
> the human player is a good way to go... Makes it a LOT easier to
> actually finish something... :) I also think that it will be easier to
> use these functions in a "higher" AI later when one can look at how they
> are used in a tested interface to a human player...

This way we can have a continuum between fully human control and fully
computer control. It does mean that one can expect to do reasonably well
against any AI if one uses the maximum computer functionality.

Really the current AI deals very well with several things. It should be
possible to get most of the code to work from the client side; the only
difference is that the AI will not know the entire map. This may modify
some parts drastically. We'll have to see.

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