Re: Exploratory Transports

[Lincoln Peters <sampln@sbcglobal.net>]

On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 11:09, Elijah Meeks wrote:
> I'm seeing transports take on units and then go into
> exploratory mode in Korea-2006.  I don't understand
> it, there's just two hexes of sea in some cases and
> instead of landing reinforcements, they just swim
> around in the Sea of Japan until they run out of
> ACPs--turn after turn.  Any suggestions?

I am aware that the function that determines how useful a unit is for
exploration (which I re-wrote a while ago) bases its decision on a
unit's ACP per turn, fuel requirements (if any), and how much of the map
it can explore (water cells in the case of ships).  So unless you've
enabled see-all (in which case exploration is totally unnecessary),
units with huge fuel capacities should be favored as exploratory units
(prior to the re-write the AI considered short-range, high-speed
fighters to be the best exploratory units in the standard game).

As for your transports attacking enemy ships and then changing to an
exploratory plan, I have no idea.  It must be a bug in some other part
of the AI code (not to mention that the AI doesn't understand transports
at all).  Although a possible fix *might* be for exploring_worth to
always return 0 if see-all is enabled.

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.
		-- Tennessee Williams