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Re: ...and the AI's decision-process around resignation


>In the same "Colonizer" game, I have found that if I play against the AI
>mplayer with the "Last side wins" scorekeeper, after about 10 turns, the
>AI is willing to declare a draw, and then usually resigns by Turn 12.

I would agree that the AI resigns much too easily, particularly at the
start of the game. However, Stan wanted it to resign before the game ever
became boring. That's why the resignation code works this way.

>Once the game ended, I looked at the AI player's plans and the tasks
>assigned to units, and it seems that the AI had assigned a "Colonizing"
>plan to all the settler and engineer units, but none of them had built
>anything yet.  I also noticed that the other units always had either an
>"Offensive" or "Defensive" plan, and most of the units that required
>fuel has used up most of their initial supply.

Nothing wrong so far. This is how things should work.

>My best guess as to this behavior is that when the AI sees that it's
>running out of fuel and it's not producing a heck of a lot, it fears
>that it'll starve and surrenders.  I'd guess that it looked on the
>situation similarly to medieval and classical warfare, in which a
>heavily fortified location often had to be starved into surrendering if
>it couldn't be captured by military force.

No, the AI just thinks it is too far behind in the game. It's too dumb to
realize that all these settlers are just one or two turns from becoming
cities. Since cities have a much higher score, the AI that moves last, and
thus has not built its cities yet, frequently resigns at this point.

>The strange thing is that the mothership (which every side starts with)
>*can* produce 1 fuel per turn, but it must hold its position to do so.
>Furthermore, that should be enough because no units in the game consume
>anything while they're occupants, and there are no threats early on that
>would justify any of the fuel-consumers being active.

Can't tell what happens to your fuel without examining the game in more
detail. However, an obvious suspect is the supply code, which tends to mess
up things. Unfortunately, it is on by default. To turn it off, include the
following line in the variants part of your game module description:

  (variants

    ...

    (supply false)

    ...

    )

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se



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