[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#14763) Advanced govt patch

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

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=14763 >

On Fri, 3 Feb 2006, Benedict Adamson wrote:
> I've been mulling that over, and I'm not too keen on such 'better'
> fields.
...
> The current AI in fact handles that rather well at the moment, I think,
> switching to Communism, or advancing to Republic via Monarchy if it is
> useful to do so.

The current AI has 'better' fields. I added them a while ago to improve
speed.

> But what if more than one kind of government can express the AI's
> personality? How is the AI to choose between them?

By random? :)

The question does not arise in my patch, since the government does not
_express_ the AI's personality, it _is_ the AI's personality. So a
Authoritarian personality would dislike a Totalitarian personality as much
as a Democratic personality even though we might seen the two first as
sharing more traits.

> I think retaining the current AI government selection code in some form
> is a good idea. But how to do so without being crippled by the
> combinatorial explosion? I think I have an answer.
[answer snipped]

It might work, but it is very complicated. If it is sliced into smaller
operations (for example by one government for one city at a time) it could
be done while the human player moves as Jason suggested. However I think I
would prefer a simpler approach, if we are to keep the current way, which
would be to find a set of representative cities, and only calculate these.

One issue for a piecemeal approach is that it might take some turns before
a government goal is available. In this time, we would be researching
techs and settling cities without a government goal in mind. This is a bit
tricky in the existing code, but it does work with some hand-waving and
black magic (that may not be very mod-friendly, though).

  - Per