AI nation skills

[Zeldor]

thejeff:

There are much less choices for scales on very big maps and bad choices are really not firgiving.

[thejeff]

Granted, that adds more complexity to optimizing pretender design, but there is still merit in ruling out particularly bad choices.
(Some of which is already done, right? I don't see cold 3 Abyssia very often. A race's temperature preference is taken into account. Why not preferences for other scales?)

Or are you saying there's less complexity? One set of scales that is optimal for all nations in a large enough game? Even if that were true, (which it is not, there being some obvious exceptions) it wouldn't hold in smaller games.

[Wikd Thots]

thejeff said:
Not necessarily a list of scales for every nation. I want the randomness in there. I don't want the same pretender design every time, nor a list of 2-3 choices for each nation.

But a couple of things ruled in/out would help a lot.
Some general rules like:
Don't take 3 misforture and 3 turmoil.
and some specific ones:
Neifelhiem: take cold 2 or 3
EA/LA Mictlan: high dominion and/or awake pretender
High production with MA Ulm

Don't think of it as optimizing the AI's design, but avoiding stupid mistakes.

On another note:
If the code is well-designed, there should be little to no lag even for in-game nation specific thinking. You don't have a series of checks at every decision point, you have separate, preferably inherited, functions for races that want special handling.
(Of course, it's probably not well-designed. Most code, including mine, isn't. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Large codebases tend to grow haphazardly and need to be rethought from the ground up, but there is rarely time or interest.)

Well go ahead and write it all out. Post it so we can see it (I already have some problems with your examples).

And, the code wasn't designed at all. It was written on an Atari many MANY years ago and has grown in pasted-in code ever since. That is part of what Johan has been saying the whole time. Changes like some people want would involve rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Not fun (and then won't happen)