[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#11005) Question about Freeciv 2.0.0 (maybe)

["Ed Earl Ross" <edearl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=11005 >

Jason Short wrote:

><URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=11005 >
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>Ed Earl Ross wrote:
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>>><URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=11005 >
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>>>Ed Earl Ross wrote:
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>>>>I'd call this behavior an AI kludge. It is important to human players 
>>>>who play against AI, because it gives AI an advantage, and thereby 
>>>>changes the dynamics of humans playing AI between 1.14.x and 2.0.x. If 
>>>>it is too much of an advantage, it may make AI players too powerful.
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>>>So to balance AI players being able to cheat we should allow human 
>>>players to cheat as well?  That hardly seems logical.
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>>Clearly, if AI super-human game "knowledge" makes the AI player better 
>>than any human, something must be done to let humans play and sometimes 
>>win against AI. I didn't specify a solution; though, the better solution 
>>is to improve the AI code so it can follow the same rules as humans. 
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>First of all, the AI cheating doesn't make it super-human.  Compared to 
>a good player the AI is terrible.
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>Secondly, letting the human cheat is not the answer.   Instead the AIs 
>cheating should be restricted.  (Side note: there may be different 
>degrees of cheating possible.  For instance rather than being shown the 
>whole map you may only be shown a few tiles beyond where you could 
>normally see.)  The different degrees of AI difficulty are supposed to 
>have different handicaps that distinguish them, but this all needs some 
>work.  Even fixing the AI to not cheat wouldn't be too easy, I think.
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>Thirdly, the AI programmers are always trying to improve the AI.  Any 
>help you can give them would be appreciated.  One easy thing you could 
>do would be to download patches and test or compare them.  Or you could 
>keep careful track of the AIs playing and when they do something 
>obviously stupid, make a savegame and report it.
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We apparently agree that neither humans nor AI should cheat. However, it 
is also necessary to be practical.

Adjusting visibility to undiscovered tiles for various difficulty levels 
isn't very realistic. On the other hand, one might realistically say 
that hills and mountains are visible from a greater distance than plains 
and swamp, and make it possible to see the tops of mountains when a 
city, fortification or unit is just one square beyond visibility. 
Similarly, it is realistic for a city, fortification or unit on top of a 
mountain to have a bit more visibility than those on plains or swamp.

Finding something stupid with Freeciv will be difficult--too many bright 
folks have worked on it. On the other hand, nothing man made is perfect.





>jason
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