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From: "Dennis Moran" <coolio@coolio9.com>
Subject: Re: AI in Civilization-like games
Message-ID: <01bc30ea$31d42b00$560520ce@technodrome>
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 02:48:49 GMT
References: <33289600.12DA@und.ida.liu.se> <3329DE87.647D@sn.no>
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Hans Andreas Starheim <hstarhei@sn.no> wrote in article
<3329DE87.647D@sn.no>...
> Santiago Burbano Baselga wrote:
> > 
> > Hi!
> > 
> > After programming some scrolling kill'em-all games, I want to program
an
> > strategy game.
> > 
> > My objective is to program some kind of Civilization clone. But I'm
> > completely ignorant about the techniques needed to implement the AI
> > stuff.
> > 
> > Could somebody point me some good ressources and book about the
subject.
> > 
> > Santiago Burbano
> > Linkping (Sweden)
> > e96sanba@und.ida.liu.se
> 
> 
> I will not direct you to any literature on the subject, as all the books
> I have read on AI have been more or less useless for gameprogramming.
> However, let me direct you to the brilliant method of common sense.
> Making the kind of AI that is used in Civ, Civ2 and similar games is not
> very complicated. You're greatest challenge is infact to find an
> efficient way to take care of that enormous number of variables.
> There is little more to civ than simple if..then constructions.
> I can't see how a book could be of any help here... You make simple
> functions to determine what is most useful to build, where to move the
> scouts, when to build a town... 
> Look at how the computer does it... every now and then he produces
> settlers, who sets out into the nothingness. Whenever a suitable spot
> for building is found, the settlers build. Not very difficut to work
> out. But the code will obviously be a mess.
> The most important point is not to overdo the AI part of it. Face it -
> your oponents in civ aren't exactley clever, are they? No, if they were
> to be really clever, and thus making a real match for a human players
> under the same parameters, the code would become too heavy to run on the
> kind of computers the game was originally made for.
> Remember, when the computer has to make several hundred moves every
> round, yuo stop caring about how smart it is, and rather wish he could
> only make this happen a bit faster... (If you've ever played the game on
> a 286, you'll know what I mean).
> I might not have been of much help to you, but I still hope you picked
> up the general idea. Too many programmers forget that not all people
> have pentium 200's....
> 
> Hans Andreas Starheim,
> Norway.
> hstarhei@sn.no
> 
> 

While we are discussing Civ and AI... Could anyone show me an example of
the A* algorithm on a simple Civ-like map? C source code I mean...

-- 
Dennis Moran (aka Coolio)
coolio@coolio9.com
http://coolio9.com/

