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

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> Fighting a single AI is almost never fun (= difficult), be it strong
> or weak. Just tedious.

Actually my experience is that the single AI case is usually the most
challenging in the standards game.  2 or more AI's, you just need to
get out of the way and let them fight each other.  If you can avoid
getting streamrolled for a while, the game will tend to be a cakewalk.

> It is situations where you muster all your strength against one AI
> only to have another one fall you in the back that make this kind of
> games interesting. Even if the second AI is no more than a petty
> annoyance, its untimely attack can frequently derail your battle plan.

That's a worthwhile thing to shoot for.  But I'm afraid I haven't
really seen it in the standard game.  The AI is just too predictable
(in rough terms, it just attacks whatever it is closest to), so it
rarely surprises me.

> I think the best solution might be to enable the ai-may-resign setup option
> in all games, but still leave it on by default. This way, you can always
> play the game the way you prefer. There are some other options too, that
> really should be enabled (but not necessarily set to true) in all games,
> e.g. world-seen and sequential.

Yes.  Maybe it is even worth coming up with a mechanism whereby we
don't have to edit every .g file to make this true.