Thought process of a colonizer

[Lincoln Peters]

On Sat, 2002-06-22 at 08:19, Stanley Sutton wrote:
> Comments:
> With such a steep gradiant on the movement reducing the potential value,
> you don't have to search all squares, just the ones withing n moves of
> the starting point, where you can calculate n based on whatever will
> reduce the value to colonize to less than some value.

The gradient on movement shouldn't really be that steep; I just wasn't
sure what coefficients one would want to attach in order to make it less
steep.

>  
> Don't do the evaluation every turn, just do it  when you start, or
> arrive at a destingation.  I'd add a large bonus for being on a
> colonizable square to keep from having "wandering" colonizers.

As I indicated in my last message, that wasn't my idea.  I thought that
this thought process could just be run while the colonizer is searching
for a spot to build, and then just go there.  It would be unnecessary to
re-run the whole thing while the colonizer is moving to the chosen spot.

>  
> Add a terrain property which precaluclates most of this, as it should
> only change if terraforming or exploration goes on.  You can cheat, and
> know the value at board generation time, or be more realistic, and
> calculate it as new territory becomes available.  

That might work for determining the value of each individual tile, but
not for evaluating the area covered by a city.  You don't want a side to
know how valuable an area is if it hasn't mapped the entire area!