[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#3663) [PATCH] The AI gets tech too quickly at the easy level

[sam+civ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> I object to the word "cheating".  AI does cheat in many aspects but it 
> doesn't bend rules to get techs quicker.  Well, apart from setting Science 
> to 100% from time to time, but on average it levels out ;)

Yes, the word "cheating" is the wrong word.  Apologies.

I think the problem is that the AI knows exactly what to do to get tech
really fast and FreeCiv beginners do not know how to do this.  I agree
that letting the player cheat by penalizing the AI's tech advancment
is not the most elegant idea.  That said, I am used to the proprietary
games (mainly SMAC [1]).  To me SMAC was a fun game while FreeCiv was
a frustrating game until I applied this patch; FreeCiv then became a
fun game.

If this were to be a reasonable patch, it would probably consist of making
it so AIs with low skill levels get tech more slowly.  I think experienced
players will feel cheated if the AI gets this unfair tech advantage at
high skill levels; one reviewer of SMAC complained that the SMAC AI did
this.  I also think beginners and occassional players like myself like
being able to win, even if it is by cheating; if I want something
challenging, I can always work on one of my open source projects.  
A video game, for me, is something that I want to be pretty mindless 
and easy to relax with.

Another way to implement this is to have a "techhandicap" variable which
can be set; this variable is a multiplier which determines how much more 
tech costs for the AI.  I would have this default to 3 or 4 for "easy" and 
"1" (normal FreeCiv) for the other difficulty levels.

The Usenet article complaining about FreeCiv getting tech too quickly
is here:

        http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9sf8730cns%40enews2.newsguy.com

The article is from November of 2001.

Some relevent portions:

        Gamers tend to think that the AI is "cheating" whenever they
        are being outplayed by the computer, but in the case of FreeCiv,
        it really looks pretty blatant sometimes (absurdly huge armies,
        very high tech without much apparent investment in educational
        infrastructure, etc.)

        [...]

        FreeCiv is cool  FreeCiv is free.  You can fix the bugs
        yourself if you know how to program.  It has a few user
        interface tweaks that are improvements on Civ2.  But it's
        much less fun as a single-player game than Civ 

I want to make FreeCiv more fun for newbies.  I hope others here share
this goal.

Take care,

- Sam

[1] Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri