The Inefficient Mechtron

[Firewind]

I have just observed the AI going out and putting energy in the river and food on the plains almost right next to it.  Is this normal for it???  It's just weird, and it seems almost like it went out of it's own way to do it.  It corrected itself about two turns later, but still, it cost it a pretty penny during those two turns.

[Chuckie Chuck]

The AI is sadly quite poorly written at the moment.  The last revisions to improve it actually made it worse than it was.  The attempt has been to match the original AI in the c64/atari versions, but if anything, it's further from target now than it was before the last changes.  There is also a thought of trying to make the AI actually play more like the typical strategy used in 4 player human games.  I think the last revisions were to try to accomplish that, but it seems to have just made the AI completely unproductive.  It has become a self-saboteur.  Much to be desired, and that why we generally try to avoid running a game with AI involved.  If I want to do a training style AI game, with no other humans, I'm more apt to start my emulator and play the old Commodore version of the game then I am to run a training game with PlanetMule.  If I'm reduced to playing old school 1 player trainers, I'm gonna play real old school.

[dynadan]

I think the AI plays pretty good and could be fixed with some minor tweaking.  Whenever a bot sells a lot of food or energy (even when there is no shortage) it goes crazy and switches all of its plots to that commodity.  I think that is the cause of most the other problems we see the bots have.  When late at night we are forced to play with a bot after hours of waiting we have made private rules that you have to leave the bot 2 or more extra of food or energy.  This helped the bot play better sometimes, but if the bot ever sold a lot of a unit (like after a food or energy event) it would go crazy like we have all seen.

I know programming AI is complicated stuff, so maybe an easy fix is just to allow the bots to only have 2 plots max of food or energy until round 6 and 3 plots max after that.  Or possibly its as simple as just changing the weight it assigns each commodity. 

[Keybounce]

Is the AI programmed in some sort of script language, or in raw C code?

[Chuckie Chuck]

AI class files are found in...

data.jar \com\turborilla\mule\ai

I don't know much about java script and class files, but if you do, that's where to start.

[Keybounce]

Sadly, that would be .class files -- those are compiled java.

What would be needed is the source code.