AI -- the Thread

[LDiCesare]

I have coded a lot of the stuff mentioned above, though it is not yet complete: I must do the boarding on a ship part.
Please note that choice of an enemy target (land) is not that easy, particularly considering that you have to see the target in order to have an idea of the opposition there.
Choosing a port from which attack is possible is also a bit hard.
I am unsure the first implementation will pick good squares, and the placement of the ships to defend the coasts will need optimising.
I'm going to finish that first. Then interception orders will probably be needed, but they will be quite hard to get right as moves are simulaneous (note that historically, a fleet at large would be hard to catch before modern days unless you knew exactly where they were coming from and where they were going).

[yellowdaddy]

Originally posted by alms66
If there is the possibility of a naval battle, there should be a 'scouting' phase to see if the defender has time to move against the attacker. If so, have a naval battle, and if the attacker wins, he can land his troops to fight the land battle, if he looses, he looses his troops (assuming he was destroyed, of course). Regarding Constantinople, just because there is no place to land the troops doesn't mean it can't be done. It's a matter of transferring to smaller craft that can make the landing, or landing a few miles away and marching to the city/battlesite. At Clash scale, I think we're safe in allowing it.

I suppose it depends on what scale you're playing at.
If you've got huge 200km x 200km tiles, then you're probably right.
If the scale were less than 50km x 50km, then perhaps it might matter if you built your city on a coast which had only cliffs on it...

What about naval attacks on swampy-mangrove coasts like the Florida Everglades or Nile Delta, or fast tidal mudflat coasts like Morecambe Bay or The Wash in England?
Some of these are quite large areas which would cover 200km or more, and you might choose to place a city along such a coast to benefit from the protection against coastal attack.

[LDiCesare]

We may have ports on certain coasts (this has been discussed some time ago I believe, and there's provision for it in the code), so making all coasts usable or not for landing is a possibility, but doesn't really affect the ai that much. It has almost no implication on the ai since it just removes a target from the list of targets to consider.

[LDiCesare]

Small progress report:
I have a functional naval ai. It's far from perfect as it needs a much better placement of its units, and to coordinate various task forces when attacking enemy units. But it manages to move from Carthage up to the Italian coast and attack the Roman navy, which is already a good point.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
... it manages to move from Carthage up to the Italian coast and attack the Roman navy, which is already a good point.

Sounds Great!

I've got some time to code this weekend, so I'll see what I can do about my numerous to-dos for 8.1.

If there's anything of particular importance to you, please post on it in the d8.1 thread. I've already got the Admin Level infra that you need for the social model on my list.