Re: plan_transport

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Hi Peter, Hans, others,

I agree with most of your points.

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Peter Garrone wrote:

>  - Something needs to be added to the ai code so that it can distinguish
>    a simple ferry from something offensive, like an aircraft carrier or
>    bireme/trireme. This is asking a lot but perhaps some simple
>    heuristic could fix this. So a bireme would not go onto
>    PLAN_TRANSPORT, but instead grab an archer to help it in sea-battles.

Perhaps this could be an additional U_PROP or UU_TABLE rather than 
an AI heuristic. That way the game designer has the flexibility 
to designate units in some 'ai-occupant-helps-transport' table. 
Another thing that I have been thinking about for a couple of 
months now is whether 'ai-peace-garrison' and 'ai-war-garrison' 
are really the best ways to go about specifying occupant/transport 
recommendations to the AI. I think that perhaps these should be 
TableUU things, so that the AI (with proper coding added) can be 
more discriminating about which units to garrison with.

>  - consideration could be given to implementing refueling behavior, 
>    a boring detail for the human player,
>    while extending the pathfinding state space.

Sounds good.

>    This is my "wishlist". I will attempt to implement it in stages, so
>    that a partial implementation may suffice for a 7.5 release, comments
>    invited,

Thanks,
  Eric