forum.freeciv.org

Hi All,

I'm a long time player and a Maths lecturer. I've a student who will be looking at the Mathematics involved in Freeciv as part of their final year maths project. The obvious analogues with organic growth and population expansion are where we'll start but I'd like to look at other aspects too. Is there any way to set AIs playing against each other and watch the results? I see some turn timing options (to stop the computer playing so fast I can't keep up with the action) but I struggle to start a game as an observer without a human player. Any advice you could offer would be great. I seem to remember that it used to be possible (that was why I suggested this project) in an earlier version but I can't get it working now.

Thanks in advance if you can help!

Try:
If you can't do this through the front-end, run the server separately, change the settings and start the game. Then launch the front-end and connect to the server (you'll see it under the LAN games list running on localhost).

The other advantage of running the server separately is that you can still change the settings such as timeout if the front-end becomes unresponsive due to the action happening too fast.

Thanks for that super fast response - I'll give it a try.

Limited success - Setting up the back end first and then joining allows me to create a game with just AI and then to either observe one of them or observe globally. The game seems to stop straight away though - Each AI (I checked using the edit option) seems to have moved their explorer but not settlers/workers. The turn done button is greyed out also. Any ideas?

Scratch that - tinkering with the turn timeout seems to be working - thanks again for all you help; I can cobble something workable together from here!

Yeah that's right, you have to set timeout to >0 because when it's off it requires all human players to end their turn, which is not possible in an AI only game.

No problem!