[Freeciv-Dev] Re: AI strategy

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I suspect that having a reserve force of attacking units rather than settlers
> would work well too. The AI builds far too many defensive units. 
I don't think so. AI will be still overmilitaristic, expansionistic is better
IMHO. I prefer settlers more than attack units, as they can generally increase
food (irrigation), production (mines) and trade (roads), and all this at once
(building of new city). Attack units can't. They can only conquer foreign
cities, with much more effort put in than just building settler and deploying
new city around.

> > 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 :-).
> 
> You might want to check out Raimar's CMA patches as well. I happen to think a
> server side AI is a pretty bad idea. Client side means people can write
> competing AI's.
CMA is civclient-side. It's good, but I think only as advisor, I'm not sure if
bunch of CMAs put together and under AI leadership would work well, however I
only glanced at the code yet, now I'm pretty busy with cleaning of current AI
code. Also CMA is expected to work on player-side, as it contains some generic
GUI code etc. That's nice as player's helper, but not as separate AI, because
what will you do with this GUI? Nevertheless I agree that putting AI into
separate client (kinda 'civbot') would be very good idea. But we have to do
following:

1, Remove all AI hooks from server code. Way still too much of them. Settlers
code is an example, but many others randomly around all the code.

2, Make AI _MUCH_ more smart. Diplomacy may be one step. Reason? As AI will be
moved into separate client, it won't be allowed to cheat anymore. And without
cheating current AI is almost lost against a little more expierenced players.

3, We need some generic interface for civserver in civclient (for running and
control of civserver on request etc), so we will be able to add code for running
desired number of civbots there. Forcing inexpierenced user of windoze (typical
gamer) to launch and configure those by hand is suicide.

Summary: this is all is very nice, but very long-term idea.

-- 

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis

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