Re: Two more AI bugs

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>On Thu, 2002-06-27 at 17:21, Hans Ronne wrote:
>> Please check that the game now works as expected. As for the second problem
>> that you described for the 3rd-age game, I don't know if it is related to
>> this bug, so perhaps you could check it, too.
>
>I see that in Colonizer, the AI is actually building new air units, but
>it still occasionally tries to build a non-air unit.

What exactly do you mean with "occasionally tries to build a non-air unit"?
How do you detect this? I did a fair amount of debugging with the new code,
and I never saw the AI try to build anything but air units. After the fix,
that is.

It does seem,
>however, that the only new air units it builds are motherships.  It
>would make more sense if it built more fighters than motherships,
>because the fighters require less CP's and hit almost as hard (and they
>move faster).  Besides, the mothership is intended to be a transport,
>not a weapon.

The reason for this is that the AI tries to build as powerful attack units
as possible. Check out the code in offensive_worth (ai.c). Since your
motherships are the only units in the game that can fire at a distance,
they are deemed to be superior by the AI. If you want it to build other
attack units, either give them the ability to fire at a distance, or take
it away from the mothership.

>However, it seems that the AI thinks that spaceports favor land suitable
>to cities, such as plain and steppe regions, whereas they would work
>better in desert or mountain regions.

Since your spaceports are advanced units that can grow in size, the AI will
pick a spot where the material needed to sustain a big unit is available.
In your case, it gets confused by the fact that no such material is defined
for the spaceports. You should add a spaceport entry in the
unit-consumption-per-size table. I guess fuel would be somthing needed to
maintain a spaceport. Perhaps also food.

>It didn't fix the problem in 3rd-age; I tried it again, and I'm still
>seeing things like cities of Rohan trying to build dwarves and
>olog-hai!  Although I never saw it try to build a unit that was
>restricted to sides not in the game (i.e. if the ents aren't in the
>game, nobody will try to build ents).  This problem doesn't seem to be
>related to the problem in Colonizer; it just showed similar symptoms.

Well, I suspected this would be the case. But thanks for checking. I'll
take another look at this particular bug.

>One thing I noticed, now that you mention the "don't build ships without
>a shore" code, was that in 3rd-age, I frequently see landlocked cities
>building various ships (dromunds, galley, longboats).  The ships cannot
>leave the city, and they only have a marginal effect on defense, so why
>build them?  Maybe a quick fix would be to make ships vanish on land (it
>seems to work in the standard game).

The code should work as follows: no ships are built in cities that lack
adjacent water cells. In addition, no ships are built if the adjacent water
cell does not border on another water cell. This in order to prevent the
building of battelships in the city pond. However, since the old code was
broken, anything may have happened then. Have you seen this also after the
fix?

Hans







Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se