[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Client AI development

["Baumans" <baumans@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cameron Morland" <cjmorlan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Daniel Sjölie" <deepone@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "freeciv development list" <freeciv-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 3:54 AM
Subject: [Freeciv-Dev] Re: Client AI development


>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.

Of course, if you have mountains (for example) in the middle of two
high-traffic
points that have lots of traffic between them, it probably wouldn't generate
the
optimal roads.  Traffic would go around the mountains, because they would be
slower to go through, but you should road through the mountains, because
units
on roads aren't affected by the underlying terrain. It would be good to also
find
points that have the highest traffic, and road them together in a straight
line (or
as close as it could get). There would be a pretty high probability that at
least
some traffic would want to get from one point to another.