[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Barbarians

[Ross Wetmore <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think part of the practical problem is whether you have one barbarian
player type (for name, icons, behaviour weights, etc), or 10 barbarian
players (fresh one for each spawning), or 80 barbarbarian players since
in reality each unit should pretty much function on its own, scattering
to cover the maximum amount of territory and pick off the most stragglers
and weakly defended targets they can. But then individual barbarian
players do not want to attack each other or form alliances either.

There really should be almost no coordination between barbarian units,
with the possible exception of a leader and one bodyguard. And this
means a lot of the AI code that coordinates attacks, does statistical
evaluations of health/cost/worth, etc is just not pertinent. A barbarian
should cover as much territory as possible, and attack almost anything
it runs into regardless of the odds until it runs out of hit points or gas.

Thus, much of the AI code is useless, a lot of the rest needs to be
tailored specifically for barbarism, rather than (collective) sanity,
and only a minimal thread running through it all is likely common code.

The key question to resolve is whether to include barbarian behaviours,
or lack of, as optional elements in the range of any player's personality,
and have the options checked as one resolve each player's activities, or
one optimizes the checks out and has a high level split into a barb and
non-barb activity path.

The latter, of course means that many elements will need to be duplicated
and the divergence over time of the two relatively independent branches may
become a problem (i.e. a coder didn't bother to update the barb path so
they start losing out on new abilities like teleport unit handler code or
something). But there is no reason why a normal player shouldn't be able to
drop a bunch of suicide units off in another's back field, and turn them
loose to do as much automated damage as possible, i.e. to go into auto-barb
mode, like auto-settlers.

There are tradeoffs plus and minus either way :-)

Cheers,
RossW
=====

Christian Knoke wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 11:34:29AM +0000, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> > On Sat, 18 Oct 2003, Christian Knoke wrote:
> > > I still wonder how a barbarian would act if it where a 'real' AI player.
> > It would wait for reinforcements or travel over half the map to reinforce
> > other barbs, and run out of fuel long before they saw any action.
> So if any barbs gang would be its own individuality?
>
> Christian