Standard Game

[Brian Dunn <bd1@sysmatrix.net>]

A few quick ideas which may make the standard game more challenging:

1) The default has a big ocean often split in half by a piece of land stretching from one end of the map to the other.  The computer is not very good at making 'canals' with bases, so it could be more useful to default to smaller islands.

2) The AI tries to be clever by building what it thinks it needs at the moment.  I don't know if it takes into account what could be useful to have later on.  The game designer did add unit types to the game for some reason, though, so a (simple?) improvement for now might be to simply have the AI build some of everything, perhaps in a mix proportional to how much it costs to make it.  This could solve the problem of the AI never making any capital ships.  I've also seen it make only bombers and never any transports, for example.

3) Transports often go into attack mode without any occupants.  Perhaps transports without much offensive power of their own could be told to wait until they have occupants before going into attack.  Empty transports would return for armies to gather up, instead of attacking bombers and such.


These are noticable by making a default game with two AI players, world seen, all seen, sequencial play.  Watch it for a few minutes.


I may take some time to try to figure out how to do these things, but I figure someone else who is much more familiar with the code may be able to rip them out in no time...

Brian