[Freeciv-Dev] Re: AI strategy

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 02:45:01PM +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:
> > > > > 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.
> > > > 
> > > > This isn't an requirement. At least for the time till the civbot can
> > > > compete with the server AI, the server AI has to remain in the cvs.
> > > True, however the civbot won't be able to cheat. Otherwise we have no mean
> > > to distinguish player and civbot, so players can cheat too, and that's 
> > > bad.
> > 
> > A non-cheating AI is ok. It may also be possible to set the "transfer the
> > whole map to player xyz" flag through a server command.
> It's questionable how well it will perform :-). We shouldn't remove the
> server-side AI until AI-AI diplomacy will be at least partially done, as 
> civbot
> will otherwise be even more easy for expierenced players, IMHO. The flag is 
> nice, 

> only unlimited rates are remaining issue where AI cheats IIRC.

Add another flag.

> However it should be able to survive w/o them. Anyway, should be
> civbot coded from scratch (feel even anyone here like doing that? 
> please stand up :) or copied^Winspired by current AI?

The CMA _was_ inspired by the current AI. But there was no line of
code transfered (copied).

> Another issue, what about observing AI? Tuning behaviour and
> debugging will be a lot harder w/o that.

This is one of the reason that these code parts will be available to
the human player as advisers. You can debug them easier. But I agree
that tuning any AI is hard.

> > > Anyway, if server has to do the spawning, shouldn't he also do spawning of
> > > civclient on demand, etc? I would stay consistent with the behaviour :-).
> > 
> > Yes and no. Yes this would be nice. No, since the server currently doesn't
> > know any gui. But the user will want to select "Load game", "New game" 
> > trough
> > a gui. And than the server has to have a gui.
> Hmm, well, I would rather stay with client as GUI for game control.  Too much
> complexity would be added otherwise - GUI frontends for server etc, ble.
> However, when I think about it, server should be still able to spawn civbot,
> either after use of aitoggle command or when civil war will rip someone's
> empire. Too bad, but I see no elegant solution for this. 

> So it looks civclient will spawn civserver and civserver will spawn
> civbot.

Yes. It looks so.

        Raimar

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