[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Apollo and explorer (PR#1636)

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 04:59 PM 02/07/01 +0100, Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
>On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Per I Mathisen wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Reinier Post wrote:
>> > A 'swarm' command would be useful.  I often set out a shipload of Alpines
>> > onto an enemy island to 'explore'.  They will capture empty cities,
>> > while I spend my turns managing the 10% of my cities and moving the 5%
>> > of my units the timeout will allow me.  But this doesn't work if the
>> > island is already explored: the units will just stay where they are.
>> 
>> Why not just change eXplore to have this behaviour? Just treat hostile
>> empty cities as huts (what's the difference;), and go after huts even if
>> there isn't anything to explore.

Military units should terminate explore mode and go into attack mode when
they see a target. This should deal with the cities aspect as well as
unit killing unless the find_something_to_kill() algorithm is broken.

There should be no need to add screwball special cases that mix or
duplicate functionality.

I suspect the problem is that FoW limits visibility of things to head
towards, and having no local unknown tiles in the limited visibility
range completes the process of incapacitating the AI.

>The difference is that hostile empty cities may be occupied by military 
>units only.  Explorer isn't such a unit.  But we can still add this 
>behaviour, no problem.
>
>G.

Explore mode is used by all types of units, not just "Explorers".

Cheers,
RossW
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