Re: Revised exploring_worth function

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

With the new code (and the multiplication fix), the explorer worths of
units in the standard game are as follows:
infantry:		6
armor:			40
fighter:		54
bomber:			108
destroyer:		300
submarine:		300
troop transport:	400
carrier:		1600
battleship:		800
nuclear bomb:		360
base:			0
town:			0
city:			0

That does make sense, because carriers have a longer range than any
other unit (400 cells, unless they're supporting aircraft).  I'll test
it with some other periods and see if it holds up.

On Sat, 2002-07-20 at 03:40, Hans Ronne wrote:
> On the general question of exploration, I agree with Bob that it is
> important, not only in the early phase of the game, but also later in order
> to locate both independent cities and enemy units. The current AI code is
> not very good at exploring, particularly in games where the terrain is
> seen. This is because the exploration code only tries to explore unseen
> terrain. I have been considering changing this for some time, so that it
> also would look for enemy units. One of the fixes I checked in recently
> (mplayer_decide_plan) assigns units that cannot fight to exploration even
> if all terrain is visible. However, this is just a hack. It would be better
> to fix the exploration code.

Maybe as Bob said, there should be a short-range exploratory plan (for
esp. fighters) and a long-range exploratory plan (for esp. armor,
battleships, et al.).  Or maybe the city/town should have a goal in mind
when building exploratory units and then build a unit with an
appropriate range, and so if the built unit inherited the city/town's
plan, only one exploratory plan would be needed.

Maybe there should also be a reconnaissance plan that tries to ensure
that certain known cells are re-visited every so often.  It seems to me
that it would be fairly easy to decide out which parts of the map should
be subject to reconnaissance (a certain radius around each town and
city, at least), but an obvious problem would be to ensure that it is
done as efficiently as possible (i.e. don't have two airplanes
performing recon on the same area; ensure that units cover as much area
as possible before they would have to resupply, etc.).

Another issue I see is that the motion algorithm not only has difficulty
with maze terrain (as I noted when debugging cave2.g), but it also seems
unable to let units know when they're trying to go somewhere that they
can't go.  One thing I saw while testing was that an infantry unit was
trying to march to an independent town and capture it, but they were
separated by an ocean!


By the way, the "abstract" period Bob was describing sounds a lot like
"postmodern".  Could they be related?