Re: Death of an advanced unit

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 23:20, Hans Ronne wrote:
> >Did you ever see the AI tell a civ-0 (Level 0 civilization) to build a
> >civ-1 (Level 1 civilization)?  That's when I saw the segfaults, but I
> >didn't create a point-value incentive for the AI to try to do that.
> 
> Nope. It just built endless numbers of troops.

Did you enable "Last side wins" or "Last alliance wins"?  Without either
of those variants, there is no scorekeeper, and the AI probably won't
know what to do.  According to my testing, it will build more than just
troops if "Last side wins" is enabled; you can expect to see it build at
least some engineers, probes, and shuttles.  However, I never see it
build any shipyards, and it often leaves space-colony units incomplete.

It also seems that the lack of any "Transport" plan has disastrous
tactical consequences.  It can occasionally successfully capture an
enemy civilization, but more often, the ground-troops won't be able to
get there (and any units that could take them there have incompatible
plans).  Certain starships can capture civilizations on their own (like
helicopters can capture cities in Civ), but the AI needs a shipyard and
a supply line before it'll ever have any of those ships.

With a map at the default size (120x60, circumference 720), the only
times that two AI-controlled sides are likely to come in contact with
each other is when one side's probe wanders into the other's space and
the other destroys it.

If an AI-controlled side does have a shipyard, I've noticed that it has
a tendency to tell civilizations to build large starships (e.g. an
s-galaxy) that only a shipyard can build.  And even if it can build a
large starship and send the order to the right unit(s), getting supplies
to it is a nightmare!

One more thing I saw was that the AI's attempt to use Brownian motion
for colonization was almost completely ineffective.  This may have just
been because the engineers couldn't use transports, but it also seems
that the engineers should be able to more carefully pick a spot to build
a civilization.  Perhaps Brownian motion is what you want when you don't
have any effective explorers, but when it comes to colonizing planets,
it is essential to know where you want to colonize and go to precisely
that place.