Re: Recent Xconq improvements

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>Hello Hans!
>
>Very intresting work with the AI player.  Could binaries for this be
>created at your home page?

As soon as I am done with updating the game modules and readme files I will
make pre-releases for all platforms that include not only binaries but all
the other stuff as well. My work on this has taken a little longer than I
thought it would, but is well under way. Please understand that it takes
some time to go through more than 80 games and 300 associated files.
Moreover, a number of problems that I came across could not be fixed in the
game files, but required kernel hacks. Most of the recent xconq
improvements were in fact prompted by problems that I discovered while
testing the games.

>I'm still tweaking the postmodern.g scenario and maybe the changes above
>would make the AI behave
>more sensible (I've seen that the AI has had an annoying tendency of
>developing engineer troops
>which it then sends out for creating lots of cities, towns and villages.
>Sure a good idea, if it
>wasn't for that it's bad on doing a systematic COMPLETION of all
>unfinished cities/towns/villages
>it leaves lying around :-)

Part of the problem is that the engineers get distracted by nearby enemy
units and lured away from their build task. This is hard to avoid if it
takes 45 turns to build a city. Perhaps one should shorten the build times,
or even make it complete in one turn, with the engineer being consumed in
the process. The ai code is really written for that kind of civ-like
building. Any situation that requires a mobile unit to switch back and
forth between different tasks is problematic. This can be seen also when
transport tasks are interrupted by fighting.

Another problem with the postmodern game is that it takes 50+ turns before
anything happens due to tech development. Perhaps one should give all sides
the ability to build infantry right from start?

Hans