Morlic wrote:
I won't have much time until November. After that, I'll hopefully be able to put some time into the AI again. I'd guess end of the year seems doable for the AI fighter adaptations.
Excellent. That means we even have a basic schedule. Assuming the necessary AI adjustments will be done by the end of the year, I suggest we plan the 0.4.7 release for January 2017.
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About diplomacy: Nothing really planned so far from my side. Much depends on what you want the AI to do and what diplomacy options will be implemented in the future.
Of course the basic diplomatic framework needs to be designed before we can put any thoughts into the necessary additions to the AI.
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The current state of diplomatic options in my opinion does not warrant spending much/any dev time on it. There is no benefit of having a peace treaty at all as they can be broken immediately and without consequences (correct me if I am mistaken) - so why bother with it?
Peace must have some sort of incentive for an empire - otherwise there is never a reason for the stronger empire to accept peace (or to not break the peace treaty and surprise attack at any given time). So I think an interesting diplomacy system should be designed first, otherwise it remains a very low priority for me.
Well, the main incentive for an empire to make peace/cooperate with a weaker empire is to join forces against a stronger third empire, isn't it?
But I see your point - without any additional rules that make diplomacy more AI friendly, it's very hard to program an AI that can offer a decent challenge on the diplomatic front to a human player, as evaluating how far another player can be trusted, trying to foresee his moves, all the possibilities at deception, backstabbing, etc. is practically impossible for an AI to perform at a level that can really challenge a human player.
It's actually a similar problem as with starlane travel: we decided to stick with starlane travel only and don't do offroading at all to make things easier for the AI. I think when designing diplomacy we should try to make it as AI friendly as possible (without making it too boring of course).
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@Tech tree rework pre/post influence: I expect that influence mechanics may require quite some extensive AI adaptations. I prefer not having to worry about a changed tech tree (excluding stuff directly related to the influence mechanics) at the same time. So either do it well beforehand so that the AI is already adjusted and well-tuned before influence is introduced or do it afterwards. I am fine with both approaches.
I strongly prefer to implement influence mechanics first, adjust the AI accordingly, and once that works sufficiently well, we can think about a major revision of the tech tree. Because when adding influence we'll have to extend the tech tree substantially anyway, which means either a stop-gap solution where we just add a bunch of essential techs and do a major revision of the tech tree later, or redesign the tech tree immediately.
Which means, if we do a big revision of the tech tree first, we'll have to do another one at some point. If we do influence first, just add some essential techs to get things going we only need to do one big revision of the tech tree afterwards. At least that's what I expect how it will turn out...