Scenarios and AI

[vaustein]

Hi! Is it possible to run Civilization 2 scenarios under Freeciv? Is this expected to be possible in the future? There are lots of Civ2 scenarios on the WWW, and it would be neat to play them with Freeciv.

Also, several comments mention the difficult AI. Why was it decided that the AI would be aware of player map locations and other intelligence data? Doesn't that itself unbalance the gameplay and is, in fact, a cheat?

Thank you,
vaustein

[MacHatter]

Civ 2 and Freeciv use different file formats. Unless someone were to figure out how to convert between the formats, you won't be able to use them.

About the AI. The AI is one of the hardest parts of the code to understand. There has been work on a client side AI, but it isn't complete yet. The developers are aware of the shortcomings in the AI.

[Per]

Yes, the AI cheats. It is omniscient. However, when making an AI, you have glacial speed, incredible stupidity, or cheating - pick one, and you can avoid the other two.

Some people are working on a freeciv AI that both doesn't cheat and isn't stupid... let us hope new CPU speeds can catch up with them

[CapTVK]

Isn't there some work being done on something called the BORG AI? I saw it mentioned in the FreecivAI mailing lists, apperently is well defined and structured , but not as smart as the current game AI.

From my point of view, I just hope Freeciv will one day get scenario support similar to that in Civ2 and ToT. It's easier to tweak a scenario script and "compensate" the AI (victory scores, specific targets, X unit creation when unit killed, flags etc...) than to rewrite the entire AI. Captain Nemo's work (2194 days, Red front, 2nd front etc..) is proof of that...