Re: Up next: facility_worth?

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

That's the way it looked to me.  You need some way to ensure that the AI
knows what to build and why.  I don't know if a generic PLAN_BUILD could
do that or not.

It does seem that there is significant overlap between the current
PLAN_IMPROVING and the other plans.  The most obvious example I can
think of is that city walls and barracks could be considered defensive
units.  Maybe construction of defensive (and possibly repair) facilities
should be made into a subsection of the defensive plan, and
PLAN_IMPROVING should only deal with growth/production facilities
(granaries, factories, amulets of power...).  By the same logic,
offensive facilities (e.g. the Ring of Power, the Lightning Stone) could
be handled by a subsection of the offensive plan.


On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 23:06, Stan Shebs wrote:
> I don't remember if I ever heard your several reasons, but there isn't a 
> generic
> plan to build because there are very few games in which building is a 
> goal in
> itself.  The purpose of building is to have units that can achieve some 
> goal,
> and unit doing the building must know what that goal is.  So even if you 
> have
> a plan to build, you still end up needing to go through the same computation
> of whether you need to attack or defend more, and then choose a unit 
> type that
> seems most appropriate - but you build it instead of going to do the job
> yourself (at least if you're immobile and untransportable :-) ).
> 
> Another consideration is games like galaxy, where you want units that
> build their projectiles while moving in for the attack.
> 
> Incidentally, the whole plan type idea was a copout, started because I was
> having trouble turning goals into specific tasks.  In real life, you 
> want a unit
> to be able to have more than one goal, such as a primary goal to explore
> and a secondary to defend against enemies, and there shouldn't have to be
> a need to reset the whole plan type, just because the secondary goal needs
> to take precedence temporarily.
> 
> >Accordingly, the function should start by checking if facility_worth(u)
> >already is set to a non-zero number. If it is, we just leave it alone. I
> >think in general that the game designer can make a much better guess as to
> >the usefulness of different facilities than any worth function that we
> >could come up with.
> >
> There would be interesting interactions with game design in any case, 
> since the
> worths would reflect designer prejudices as much as actual value in the 
> game.
> Lenat's Eurisko was infamous back in the 80s for winning Traveller 
> tournaments
> by finding and exploiting edge cases not anticipated by the human 
> organizers.
> 
> One of the uses of putting worths into doctrine is that you could then 
> have an
> AI with designer-suggested weights play against an AI without, and see who
> wins.
> 
> Stan
> 
>