[Freeciv-Dev] AI strategy

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > But since the military advisor usually panics under danger threats and
> > > demands the best military possibility drowning out the rest, the game
> > > tends to follow a pretty standard track.
> > > 
> >
> > Yes, I noticed this. What happens if you fix priority so that military
> > units don't always have higher priority than anything else? My initial
> > tries ended up with the ai always building improvs and wonders, too much
> > so. The current ai also tends to flip flop. I've often noticed the ai
> > changing wonder prod from city to city. 
> 
> I "upped" the danger factor to discourage running away and leaving a city
> undefended. This had the interesting effect of significantly reducing the
> number of units running around, triggering danger reflexes to build more
> units that usually went out and suicided so had to be replaced. The effect is
> far more building improvements rather than military wastage. Gregory
> commented that the civs were now overly peaceful and boring, though the game
> often finished in the 1700s with a successful space race.
I often end around 1400s with spacerace with current hard AI even (well,
autogames ;-).

> Adding some rules to try and maintain a minimal settler force (i.e.  1/3 of
> the total city count), resulted in a much more expansionist Civ especially in
> the later game when Settlers aren't particularly highly weighted in
> comparison. The result was a lot of Settler killing atrocities, increase in
> bodyguards, and return to more militaristic play as expanding civs and
> wandering units started interacting again.  Having a settler force also meant
> that the pollution problem in the later game got fixed before it got out of
> hand. Also there were a lot more railroads, and vicious battles as resources
> could be concentrated and expended much more efficiently, as well as larger
> more developed cities.
I think we should go this way. I didn't like just converting the AI into
"civilized perfecionist" as Gregory named it, but if you fix it in the same
time by forcing large number of settlers active, thus converting the AI back,
only with its force now spent usefully, it would be great to follow you :-).

In fact, I've been actually a lot inspired by your patch (which I found
browsing the archive carelessly and suddenly staring at your mail describing it
in astonishment) during cleanup too, as it helped me to make some things more
clear. Really good work! Just too bad it wasn't bunch of small patches instead.

> Changing weights is *not* a simple cause and effect, but a much more subtle
> change to a mildly constrained chaos engine.
> 
> And note that the current AI is really very flexible. It often needs subtle
> control of things spiralling into undesirable behaviour, rather than radical
> restructuring to offer completely different play style.  This is better than
> balancing in some respects, as a balanced system is often translated by
> programmers into too predictable.
I agree. We don't need rewrite, just cleanup, fixing some pathological issues
and adding some very needed features like diplomacy. And by the time make the
AI strategy possibly somewhat more long-term.

-- 

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis

UN*X programmer, UN*X administrator, hobbies = IPv6, IRC, FreeCiv hacking
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