Re: Major bug and what to do about it (long)

[Hans Ronne <hronne@comhem.se>]

>And of course if the view isn't cleared, the AI (or less-intelligent
>human player :-) ) could keep shooting over and over at the mirage
>aka decoy, which is exactly what the crafty Xconq player wants to
>be able to set up, heh-heh.

Right. The question of when to clear the view is actually quite tricky.
Should a single failed action do it? I don't think so. But there has got to
be a point where even a stupid AI realizes that it is shooting at a mirage.

Another thing I thought about is to gradually let a unit view fade away as
it ages. The views have a dating mechanism, but it is currently not used
for anything. The corresponding thing for the AI would be to make a unit
view a less attractive target as it ages.

It should be noted that most of these problems will go unnoticed in a melee
game where the enemy units that you target usually are within vision range.
The same thing is true for short range firing units. A game that I am
working on has a unit that can fire from 20 cells away. This creates a huge
shadow zone which highlights the problems.

>So I think if you can change the two actions to always take a view
>unit instead of an actual unit, you can solve the problem in a
>relatively localized way.

Yes. Or we could change the AI code so that it preferentially uses
fire-into instead of fire-at (which might actually make it a better
player). But this would not provide the simplification that I think would
be a huge benfit in the long run, particularly for AI development.

There is also the problem of what should happen if the targeted unit is not
there, but something else is sitting in the cell instead (not an uncommon
situation). My feeling is that fire-at should somehow default to fire-into.
The probability of hitting an unseen unit should not be affected by the
fact that you think you are shooting at something which is not there.
However, this line of thought, when pursued further, also makes you wonder
if we really need both actions.

>Pruning down the number of actions would certainly simplify
>Xconq, and it needs simplification. The most-affected games
>would be those at the tactical level, although if the interface
>isn't there or is too obscure for players to use much, the
>actions' absence won't be noticed.

I agree that tactical level games would be the most affected ones. As I
mentioned in a reply to Eric, I think that tactical unit deployment
(putting a phalanx in the same cell as a chariot to protect it) would
become much more important than it is now. But this should make most games
more interesting.

Hans