CRT Combat Model (long)

[Hans Ronne]

>One thing I noticed when I was debugging "Cave of Amazement" (cave2.g)
>was that if a unit was carrying a living item (for example, a dwarf was
>carrying a Humanity stone), their plans might be so different that the
>living item was never able to accomplish its plan.  In one case, a dwarf
>had a colonizing plan and was building an orc hole, but the Humanity
>stone it carried wanted to hypnotize a skeleton in the next room!

You will also notice that after a while the AI decides to put the occupant
into "reserve" mode since it fails repeatedly to execute its plan. By the
time the transport reaches its destination, the occ has frequently
forgotten what it was supposed to do. This is the problem I was referring
to earlier. I have a number of times observed the following happen in the
WW2-Europe game:

British armor in Dover sees the German held city Paris and decides to
attack it.
British armor waits for transport.
Transport arrives and picks up armor.
Transport goofs around, taking ten turns to cross the Channel (this is
where we would need a PLAN_TRANSPORT).
Meanwhile, british armor replans and is finally put into reserve mode.
Transport arrives in Normandy.
British armor just sits there and wonders what to do.
Transport returns to Britain with armor still on board.

>By the way, I have a new version that (sort of) fixes some bugs that
>were in the version I submitted, but unfortunately, many of the problems
>had to do with Xconq or the AI code itself.  If anyone's interested, I
>can provide quite a list of eight major deficiencies that I discovered
>while debugging that game.  Of course, these problems aren't as
>important as fixing the network code, but I would hope that they would
>eventually be addressed.

If you have a better version, send it to me and i will check it in. It
doesn't have to be perfect - none of the games is. As for bug reports, of
course you should submit them. They are always welcome.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se