[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#13211) RFC: redesign of aifill system

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13211 >

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Jason Dorje Short wrote:
> question is if the aifill can replace /create and /remove entirely - is
> there any purpose in having non-AI non-connected players in pregame?

Yes, there is. Say if I want to set an easy AI on my team, and two hard AI
on the other guy's team. Our gaming group often put an AI on the other
side of an unequal match up to even things out in games like this.

In scenarios this is also needed to see what players you can use. Since
not all AI players are equal then, their individual difficulty settings
(or other settings later on) may be of great importance.

> Plan 3.Integrating aifill with maxplayers leads to some blue-sky
> speculation.One idea is to go with a full emulation of the Starcraft
> pregame system.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Starcraft (and all later RTS games) got this right.

> This integrates aifill with maxplayers but it doesn't scale well: to
> create 30 AI players you have to toggle each player to AI individually
> (Starcraft had a maximum of 8 players).

So what. If you intend to set up a 30 player game, you intend to play for
quite a while, and then you can also stomach a little longer and more
tedious pregame setup.

But this does not have to be tedious. Add an option 'Set new player slots
as...' that says whether additionally created player slots are to be open
or as some given AI difficulty. Then you can set this to 'hard' and set
maxplayers to 30, and everything is set as it should.

> It would also take a bit of work since it's based on a fixed numbering
> of players, whereas the current system renumbers players at will during
> pregame.

I do not understand this part.

  - Per