What is TexAI? How do I play with it?

[cazfi]

I've never run an autogame - how do you do that?

doc/HACKING

[Sanguivorant]

I've never run an autogame - how do you do that? Or is there anything on the wiki that explains it?

This functionality would be quite useful if I ever get up the nerve to try and improve the ai code.

Pretty easy.

I start up any game then type these commands:

/observe
/set minplayers 0
/set timeout 2
/set first_timeout 1

From seeing hundreds of these games I kind of get what the AI can and cannot do, I just don't know how to tackle it. For example, I just discovered last week that changing how the AI calculates its wants can make it favour more aggressive units (like Legions rather than Phalanges). Or if you remove code that defines an air unit as one that has no fuel requirement, it will build fighters and stealth fighters.

The AI does not know how to control stealth bombers, missiles, and does not build them either. I think that has to do with profit calculations and the AI believing it is almost always unprofitable to build these units.

[Dino the Dinosore]

My ideas for AI improvements:

- Watching AI's that I have an embassy with I often see them running a very high tax rate and having a huge amount of gold. Which is good for me if I can sell them tech, but having lots of gold and not using it is a waste. Would be better to keep tax as low as possible and increase science, or at least spend the gold on rush buying.

- I sometimes see AI's produce lots of useless units. Looking at the world map after a game has ended I sometimes see they have way more workers than can be used. One time I saw a lineup of about 20 Caravels sitting in the ocean. AI would be better off building more caravans, at least they are always good for something.