Army Workshop? Straight from SMAC!

[fed1943]

Just speaking as player(I'm not engenier):the workshop is nice(the player can chose,specialise his unities or just to create half a dozen,or less,types for the whole game);and I don't see the problem as workshop v. promotions system,the two things can be together.
Sure,or attack and defense are two things or just one.
Best regards,

[ben04]

Originally posted by Solver
But writing the AI for different things is of different difficulty. Writing an AI that could deal with the workshop is harder than making it deal with promotions. At least the Civ4 AI mostly does well with promotions; I doubt the AI, for all efforts, would be made able to deal effectively with the workshop.

The reason why is that with Civ4 it's nearly impossible to get the promotion system wrong, at least not with the few XP points that AI units get. Now if commando was available directly I can assure you that the AI would first send cavelery into the enemy land to destroy all roads and then send in units with the commando promotion. Also I havn't yet seen the AI spcialize troops. For example a whole stack of only shortmen with just city raider promotions. The cheap promotions are all equally good if you don't know the troops of the enemy so you can pick randomly.

However it's only nearly impossible to get it wrong : Do not promote in times of peace. If you don't then you can quickly adapt to the enemy and you can use the promotions to heal your troops. However AFAIK the AI always promots it's troops as soon as possible.

Up to now I've also always seen the AI promote a unit as soon as possible loosing the health gain that you get with the promotion.


And it wouldn't even be that hard to get it to handle that:
Rule#1 : Only promote when an enemy unit can directly attack you.
Rule#2 : Only promote when your chances of winning are less than 80% when defending or attacking except if you job is city defending.
Rule#3 : If there are several promotions that will get you above 80% then make a list of all enemy units that you see. Class them into groups against which you can promot. [For example the following promotions are available : Cover (a), Combat II (b), Shock (c) and City Raider I (d). All axeman on the fields would go into group a and all caverly on the fields into c (as its the best promotion against those types of units) and all units in cities would go into group d.] Now do the sums of the inverses of the mouvement points that these units need to get to you. Pick the promotion with the greates sum.

Apply this ruleset for each unit after having moved it.

This rather simple set of rules would be enough to handle the following promotions:

• Ambush
• Charge
• City Garrison I-III
• City Raider I-III
• Combat I-IV
• Cover
• Drill I-IV
• Formation
• Guerilla I
• Pinch
• Shock
• Woodsman I

This would cover about nearly all promotions that the AI can get. Problematic would be Guerilla II and Woodsman II as this set of rules would not weight the movment advantage which can be curcial for units on scouting missons. Probably best to have a special set of rules for these units. Also siege weapons need an own set.

You could of course do some fine tuning. For example only take fortified units into consideration when deciding if a city raider promotion is the one to take. Also Flanking I-II and medic will not get picked. Flanking is in my eyes so weak that it can be ignored and medic could be implemented by setting a unit of the stack into a medic mode. An explorer would be a good unit for this job as it will be the last to be attack. The problem is that it wont fight so it wont get any XP so wont get the promotion. A solution would be to make this promotion available for recon units right away and only make the AI build units for this job in cities with barracks.

PS: I can't wait for the SDK to be able to try this out.