Given that you are already working on Nicowar, here are what I think are the most important points for improvement:
1. Nicowar could really benefit from better handling of resource overgrowth that cuts off individual buildings (and sometimes traps individual globules) or which divides the main base into two portions. I would suggest computing some kind of minimal spanning tree that connects all of Nicowar's buildings and placing clearing areas (and maybe also clearing flags of radius 0 and 1) on this spanning tree. 2. It would be nice if Nicowar always planned its attack route and kept it clear of resource obstacles. Right now, it simply relies on the AI of the individual globules to find their way to the target. This can cause problems as resource overgrowth can make this path become longer and longer. I've seen Nicowar sending its warriors all the way around the world and even further to attack. This makes the attack much weaker, because the warriors run out of food soon after reaching the target and often starve on the way back. It is also easy for a human to take advantage of Nicowar by farming a wall and carefully choosing where to leave an opening. You can force Nicowar's warriors to march past a chain of defense towers on their way to the attack (and they go past the defense towers another time on their way back to heal and eat, so you can often kill most of them). When Nicowar's enemy is using resource walls, it would be better if Nicowar usually chose to attack through the wall by clearing it, because this will generally find a less well defended part of the enemy base. 3. Nicowar should use its ground attack explorers once it gets level 4 schools to attack enemy bases and to support ground attacks. Otherwise it's just a matter of holding out against Nicowar long enough to get your level 4 schools and then you can nuke Nicowar with ease. 4. Nicowar should notice when it is being attacked by ground attack explorers and defend with its own explorers and new defense towers (and also switch its chosen target to the attacking player). 5. For playing with random maps, it would be nice if Nicowar handled things better when its initial hive is not close to a large enough patch of wheat. In this case, it would be good if it built another hive near wheat sooner, and turned off its initial hive to prevent wasting worker effort. Otherwise it performs _extremely_ poorly in this situation, due to the long worker trips in feeding the hive. 6. It would be nice if Nicowar switched into war mode (and chose the attacking player as its target) if attacked early. Otherwise (and this happens quite a bit on random maps unless the map is huge) if you start close enough to Nicowar you can just go on the attack immediately and wipe out the mostly defenseless Nicowar. 7. Nicowar should clear wheat/wood in order to have a good path to stone/algae for building schools. On random maps, Nicowar often fails to build/upgrade schools because resource overgrowth makes it harder to get to stone/algae. 8. When farming, Nicowar should designate areas to grow wood or wheat, and put clearing flags (of radius 0 or 1) to clear wood in wheat areas and vice versa. Often, Nicowar's wheat farms get clogged by wood overgrowth. The reverse also happens (although less often). I hope these comments are helpful. -- Joe "Bradley Arsenault" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I went back over Nicowar again. I tested it on a wide variety of maps, > evaluated its performance and I've made several improvements. Most notably, it > now manages food much better. This includes barrior-backed farming, adjusting > the number of units assigned to inns and swarms, and turning off swarms if we > are in a food deficet, and turning them down when there are allot of units > eating (a pre-emptive tactic). > > It also attacks sooner, but it still waits untill its "ready". So this far > improves performance on maps where it has a hard time reaching its warrior > minimums, but doesn't rollback performance on maps with lots of food, where it > has no trouble maintaining its size-oriented colony. Some of my other changes > inlcude more intelligent building placement. > > On maps where Nicowar performed bad (like Isles or Garden 3), it now performs > with marginal to good performance. It also keeps itself from overflowing with > workers, which substantially improved performance in longer games on maps like > Big Pong and Four Squares. > > I just watched it play a very interesting game on Isles. It had wiped out one > castor and was beating on another when the third rushed into its base. It had > no warriors here (they where all off fighting) and was beaten close to > extiction, completely wiped out on the original base. Thankfully however it > had > a few inns and stuff on another island, which it quickly expanded thanks to > the > starving-recovery code. The third castor pulled out from the main base to > attack the alternative one, where my Nicowars adaptive style started > re-building in the original base, and quickly put itself back together. The > barrior-backed farming caused the original base to overgrow, and only one > entrance there was to it. Its leftover workers put together new barracks > quickly, and it soon had an army to defend itself with. The second base was > being attacked still. The castor came to attack Nicowar one last time, however > it defended with level 3 warriors, and soon attacked the enemy castor itself. > The enemies warriors where still caught at the second base fighting, and > castor > lost. I looked at the end game screen, and there is this very humerous and > very > large dip in the number of units, going from 119 units to 26, and then it > started climbing back up again. > > I need some sort of defense mechanism, to keep it from being nearly wiped out > in the first place. > > -- > Really. I'm not lieing. Bradley Arsenault. > > _______________________________________________ > glob2-devel mailing list > glob2-devel@nongnu.org > http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel _______________________________________________ glob2-devel mailing list glob2-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel