[Freeciv-Dev] Re: flying AI (PR#1162)

[Raahul Kumar <raahul_da_man@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- "Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> At 01:51 AM 01/12/29 -0800, Raahul Kumar wrote:
> >
> >--- Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> Dear diary, on Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 07:40:18AM CET, I got a letter,
> >> where Raahul Kumar <raahul_da_man@xxxxxxxxx> told me, that...
> >> > Some additional titbits for you. Hope this makes the function clearer.
> >> > I strongly suspect you want me to explain the 
> >> > 
> >> > else b0 = ((b * a - f * d) * SHIELD_WEIGHTING / (a + d)) - 
> >> > 1412 c * (unhap ? SHIELD_WEIGHTING + 2 * TRADE_WEIGHTING :
> >> SHIELD_WEIGHTING);
> 
> >Desire, is this like want? I assume the 0-100 stuff all applies here, I just
> >wish I knew exactly how all these weights interact to decide what gets
> built.
> 
> *_WEIGHTING values are things like food/shields/trade = 18/14/12 that give
> a relative bias to some resources over others. Trade is always the lowest,
> and generally food is more important than shields (if you grow you can get
> more shields, but choosing shields in preference leads to stagnation).
> 
> This is complicated by the fact that food is not a static WEIGHTING, but 
> amortized so it decreases in importance as the size of the food box grows
> (which is another reason to boost it initially, and probably a bad thing 
> to have done anyway). Thus, if you look carefully, the food formulas are
> always optimized a little bit differently with cryptic comments to drive
> you crazy if you don't understand this basic point.
> 

This is all stuff that should go to README.AI.  I'm not quite clear as to what
alternative there is to boosting the food weights early on. Are you suggesting
a feedback loop where as the city grows in size, more food than the minimum
needed to keep the city from starving grows less and less important?

My interpretation of your comment is that the more food we have, and the closer
we come to adding another population point(a full foodbox), the less important
food becomes. The trade weighting is perhaps too low. I think it's probably
necessary to weigh trade higher for cities that have lots of trade, and
trade routes, with an increase for each marketplace/bank/stock exchange that
gets built. This probably explains why the AI is so damn bad at science.

The amortizing of food: explain that a bit more. I do not know how that works.



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