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Topic: Empire AI stuck without wine in early game on flat map

Magzimum
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Joined: 2015-12-31, 12:23
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Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2016-01-03, 22:30

So, everyone who's played Empire will know that a vineyard, winery and a marble mine are vital to prevent getting stuck without marble early in the game, which for the Empire ends the game.

I was rather disappointed to play a game against an Empire AI, to find out that it got stuck. It did build a vineyard, winery and a marble mine (one vineyard, one winery for three marble mines). Unfortunately, it had built its roads around the vineyard so tightly that the vineyard's productivity was zero. So no grapes, no wine, no marble (on a completely flat map I made myself - may upload it later once I find out how that works). And that was the end of the AI. There was plenty of space, and no limitation whatsoever, so just some bad decisions...

So, a friendly suggestion from my side: if the AI does a check whether productivity of the vineyard is 0%, perhaps it could reroute roads as a quick-fix, or even remove the nearest building altogether (together with the road leading up to it)? As a more general fix, the AI should build more vineyards anyway. It appears to think that 1 is sufficient... and so even when it gets its marble economy going, fails to expand it.

I did a few double-checks, and whether the AI is aggressive or defensive, it appears to often place the vineyard very close to the headquarters, which often gets very busy with roads. It happens very frequently that the vineyard doesn't work. On maps with some height differences (e.g. using the " height noise" in the editor), this problem seems not to occur, since buildings are less dense.

p.s. I play "build 18". p.s.(2), map uploaded: https://wl.widelands.org/maps/flatlands/

Edited: 2016-01-03, 23:07

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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2016-01-04, 00:34

build 18 is really very old. Our fault - build 19 is really overdue.

So please get a current trunk

But to the road question, AI does not control placing of roads and is totally blind in regard to vicinity of such not-performing building. But generally, the current trunk should perform much better.


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king_of_nowhere
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Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
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Posted at: 2016-01-04, 00:40

Your attempt to help improve the ai is commendable, but build 18 is a couple years old, and the ai has already been significantly improved. Mind you, it still has plenty of issues, and a good human player can still play 1v7 against ai and mop the floor with them, but it has improved a lot nonetheless. You ca fine the latest builds in the download section, under the official one. Talk of officializing build 19 has been ongoing for at least 6 months, I have no idea why it hasn''t happened yet. I supppose there are still a few cirtical bugs they want to fix before releasing an 'official' build.

'Aggressive' 'normal' and 'defensive' have no influence on what the ai will build. the oonly difference is that a normal ai will attack you if you have less military power than it, an aggressive ai if you have less than 1.2 times its military power, and a defensive one less than 0.8. Recently there was an attempt to make difficulty levels by limiting the amount of certain buildings the ai can make - while it is still incredibly weak for a strong player, it was becoming strong enough that beginners couldn't beat it - but that had some bug issues, not sure how it is right now.

Anyway, I have no idea if the problem with making roads around a wineyard has been fixed or not.


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Magzimum
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Joined: 2015-12-31, 12:23
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Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2016-01-04, 07:41

I had the latest "official" build, as installed (and possibly updated) through my Linux Mint (17.1) Software Manager.

Thanks to your tips, I now have the latest "Daily build" (bzr7686-201601031816) and this problem is actually already solved.


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king_of_nowhere
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Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
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Posted at: 2016-01-04, 11:46

if you don't see this problem, it doesn't necessarily mean it is solved: it could be that it only happens once in a while. But likely it is solved. If you see it again, report it


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GunChleoc
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Joined: 2013-10-07, 15:56
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Posted at: 2016-01-04, 14:43

Since Build 18, I have programmed buildings like the vineyard to create messages when the productivity drops too low, and I think the AI is using them to decide whether a change is needed - I'm not dealing with the AI though, so Tibor will have to confirm this.


Busy indexing nil values

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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2016-01-04, 20:34

AI is not able to clean up the space around 'space consumer'. It cant even prohibit roads around them. If everything is OK, it will build second building of that type and first one will be dismantled due to low performance...


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