[Freeciv-Dev] Re: AI strategy

[Raahul Kumar <raahul_da_man@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 05:22:44AM -0800, Raahul Kumar wrote:
> > 
> > --- Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > 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. 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.
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 
> > There is no reason a complete client side AI could not be built. Raimar?
> 
> (uhuh double negation). I see no general problems building a complete
> client side AI. Smaller problems include cheating (how to allow it),
> extra bandwidth usage and extra complexity (spawning civbot).
> 
>       Raimar

Allowing cheating is dangerous. All of a sudden we would return to the bad old 
days of players using packet sniffers. And I am not going to implement our own
encryption standard. The extra bandwidth issue is the only really big problem.
Ideas? I've got the obvious

compression of packets
applying those patches like short_worklist(have they been reviewed yet?)
A smarter client - keeps some state info instead of all server side. This 
could be more hassle than it is worth.

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