Re: Supply and AI

[Hans Ronne <hronne@telia.com>]

>I'd appreciate comments on the newest version of Cast
>Iron Life:
>
>http://castironlife.sourceforge.net/xcil-new.zip
>
>There's a lot there:  The Union and the Confederacy
>and a fun tech tree, some native populations, British
>North America with a fleet, French Mexico without much
>going for it and neutral Havanna.  For fighting
>there's some marines, cavalry, artillery and ironclads
>along with your regular infantry and militia.

You have made a lot of progress in the last few weeks.

>The AI seems to understand the way I want combat to
>occur, it can build a decent fleet or army and move it
>around, but it prefers garrisoning its cities and an
>drastically conservative overall stance.  If anyone
>who knows how xconq handles AI has any suggestions,
>please let me know.

This is not the AIs fault, because when I run the game under manual control
I am unable to make any occupants leave their cities. Clearly, something is
wrong with the game module. The ferry tables or the enter/exit tables are
likely culprits.

BTW, if you want the AI to be less protective about cities (generally not a
good idea) you can change ai-peace-garrison and ai-war-garrison from their
defult values of 0 and 1, respectively. However, I recommend the opposite:
a war garrison of at least 2 units is needed in most games.

>I've disabled the supply system.  The material is all
>held in the treasury, so I'd assumed it would transfer
>to a unit that needs food or ammo automatically, but
>it doesn't, and ships and troops end up starving.
>Again, if someone knows how to fix this, let me know.

The supply system does not work well, this is a known problem. Disabling it
is OK in most games. Moreover, sharing of material between transports and
occupants (which is what is most important) does not involve the supply
system and will thus still work if you disable it, provided that the GDL
tables are set up correctly.

>There's also a fatal error if too many transports with
>occupants are placed in a fleet.  You can reproduce
>the error by placing three Marine Divisions each into
>three transports and placing these transports into a
>Fleet.

Do you have a stack trace? If you tell me where the code is crashing it
will be easier to fix.

Hans