[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.
> 
> The AI has only one function in life, and that is to make single player games
> exciting. The only way to do that is military conquest, the AI expands fine
> as is.
It doesn't. We are talking about complex system of mechanisms, and military 
conquest
is not just build-as-much-attacking-units-as-you-can-and-sent-them-to-the-enemy.
You must be able to build _a lot_ of _powerful_ units. I.e. a lot of production
and a lot of money and a lot of science. Higher number of cities. Hmm?

And diplomacy can make the fun too. Actually many people is complaining than
just a military conquest is far from fun, they want to make peace with
neighbours (at least), or even ally with them or resist to coordinated attack
of allied enemies etc.

I want to see it attacking my islands agressively trying to expand
there, spawning all the world with its cities producing another cities, growing
and flooding me with attacking units ;-).

>        Curently, when I am attacking an AI opponent, they rarely attack the
> bases (the cities I took from the AI). They just build/buy a lot of defensive
> units, when for less than half the cost in offensive units, they could wipe
> out my foothold.
Obviously, that needs to be fixed, but I think it should build more settlers
too.  Let's try to make a compromise between settlers and attacking units when
we will be doing that, however we must go issue-by-issue and solve them in
sequence.

> There is a use for reserve settlers, but 1/3 is far too many settler units.
> Settler units after a certain no have less and less utility. Once everything
> is railroad and irrigated you need far fewer settlers.
Naturally.

> > Summary: this is all is very nice, but very long-term idea.
> 
> Yes. I'm just suggesting that you be open to ideas other than server side ai.
> As an aside, this client side ai would fix two big bugs with freeciv. No more
> peeking under the warmap, and no more ai gets to move first twice.
I already did, I said I agree with that. In fact, I thought about that from the
very start of my looking at AI code.

-- 

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis

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