Re: New ai available

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>   Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 20:12:59 +0100
>   From: Hans Ronne <hronne@pp.sbbs.se>
>
>   Now here is the funny part. You would think that this crippled wreck of an
>   ai would hardly be able to defend itself. In fact, it still puts up a
>   pretty good fight. Thus, when I ran them against each other, the iplayer
>   even managed to beat the real mplayer a few times. Not bad for somebody who
>   just had 60% of his brain removed!
>
>Yeah, I was experimenting with it this morning, and one notable
>difference is that the iplayer doesn't explore.  But it does seem to
>fight pretty well!  I turned it on in the intro game just for yucks,
>it wiped out the robots and handed me a win, before I even saw one of
>the robot cities...  We probably want to make the aggressiveness
>adjustable, since it would be grossly unfair to lose just because you
>happened to have more independent units nearby.
>
The failure to explore is striking. I also noted a tendency for units that
stray away from the center of action to go asleep or into reserve mode,
which you don't see (at least not that much) with the regular mplayer. This
attrition by falling asleep seems to be the main reason why the iplayer
usually looses against the mplayer in the end.

I think the best way to control aggressiveness would be through
u_ai_tactical_range, which triggers the knee-jerk attack reaction. Right
now the iplayer uses the same default for all units as the mplayer, which
is 4 cells. With an trigger range of perhaps 2 cells, at least for most
unit types, it would become more docile. Perhaps one could even have a
popup menu that sets this range for each ai player and thus decides how
aggressive it should be.

Come to think of it, this behaviour is really too predictable. You should
not be able to always avoid attack from an ai by staying exactly 5 (or 3)
cells away from its units. It would be better if some random dice number
also factored into the attack range.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se