[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#16812) CMA: Max food broken

["Jason Dorje Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=16812 >

Kevin Benton wrote:
> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=16812 >
> 
> As the end-game approaches, and cities increase to a point where they're
> greater than size 15, it's common for the CMA to get confused and weigh
> things other than food more highly than food.  It looks like it has
> something to do with the decision to put a worker to work in tiles, or
> as a specialist.  I've seen frequently that the CMA preferrs in certain
> cases to put workers into a specialist role rather than supplying food
> to the city as needed.

Depending on your weighting, it is possible for even a very low 
weighting for science to dominate a high food weighting.  With many 
buildings and effects you can get a high science bonus (like +1000% or 
something, I forget what the max is), and each specialist produces 3 
base science.  With a weighting of 2, that is 3 * 10 * 2 = 60 points. 
Whereas if you give food a weighting of 25, 2 points of food will only 
give a weighting of 50.

There is really no way to fix this while keeping CMA.  Allowing 
ever-higher values for food weighting are possible but breaks the GUI 
interface.  Perhaps a "maximize" checkbox could be provided allowing one 
to maximize (ignoring weighting) a specific resource.  Otherwise you can 
just use food minimums or reduce the science (or gold) weighting to 
prevent this problem.

In the past there have been bugs causing the CMA to misbehave and give 
wrong results.  Unless you can find a specific example showing this to 
be the case, I assume the problem you're seeing is the CMA behaving 
correctly and just showing the flaws in its design.  As always, the real 
solution to this should be to change the basic game design so that such 
micromanagement-avoidance tools are simply obsolete.

-jason