RE: AI (was error handling)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

> But if you have advances that require a colonizer or engineer to build
>something indirectly you seem to get into dead ends.  Maybe an
>enhancement might be to have a counter, and if a unit does the reserve
>action n times in a row, it forces it to do something else, or use an
>alternate selection process to assign an action or plan to it?

Indeed. The simple solution is of course to have two unit types in the
game: colonizers that build citites and engineers that build other stuff.
To some extent, game design must reflect what the kernel (and the AI code)
really can do.

>One thing I've noticed in several games is that the path determination
>doesn't seem to work very well in a lot of cases.  I've seen hundreds of
>units massed in the curve of a continent near an enemy when there is a
>land path to the enemy that it never seems to find.  Do we use an A*
>path algorithm for path determination?

This is true, and it has been discussed several times before on this list.
Ed Oskiewicz (if I remember correctly) had some ideas about a new path
algorithm to try, but it was never tested. If you want to give it a try,
please go ahead.

>And the other situation I've seen is where the AI has conquered the
>entire world, except for a raft I had in an inland sea.  It had several
>cities on the sea, but either didn't or couldn't build a sea going
>attack craft to destroy the one remaining enemy unit on the board.  I
>probably should have saved the game so I could run the debug and see why
>it wouldn't desroy me, but I didn't think of it at the time.  I was just
>seeing if the game seemed to still work after making come documentation
>changes.

True. Typically happens in the LOTR game, if the good guys defeat the bad
guys. There is always this dromund left in the Sea of Rhûn ...

The way the code works right now is that marine units are built sometimes,
at random, in cities that have at least one water cell that borders on
another water cell.  So if you wait long enough, it will build a ship. But
the AI could be smarter about this, I agree.

Hans