Fred: Tasks for upcoming releases

[mattsc]

Main upcoming tasks for AI-demos

• Overall operations assessment
  • Reduce Fred's exaggerated defensiveness
    • Increase overall aggressiveness
    • Improve accounting for time-of-day related changes
      • Operations layer assessment
      • Apply in tactics layer evaluations
    • How do we deal with chaotic enemy factions?
  • Make more decisions up front
    • Overall behavior for the turn
    • Where to set up the fronts
    • Which parts of the map are too dangerous to move into
    • Which units to use for what
    • More?
  • Do we want different behavior by zone?
  • Overall direction of movement
    • E.g. if enemy leader does not stay on keep
• Mid-turn operations updates
  • Clean up how this is done
  • Add updates for
    • protect_locs
    • Retreaters
    • Leader threats
    • What else?
  • Set a flag at execution that triggers certain re-evaluations?
• Village grabbing operations assessment
  • Don’t grab villages too far forward if unit can be trapped
  • Don’t always execute grab right away
  • Decide if grabbing new villages or holding current ones is more important
• Advancing operations assessment
  • More aggressive advancing when winning
• Holding operations assessment
  • Better assessment of hold utility
  • Prefer holds close to (and do not go past)
    • Units which have already moved
    • Impassable hexes
  • Improve restrictions on holds with single units
• Retreating operations assessment
  • Improve adjusting direction of retreat based on overall situation
  • Use safest village, not closest village for leader retreats
• Attacking operations assessment
  • Don’t use too many resources on individual attack
    • in particular on leader threats
  • More restrictions on favorable attacks when resource starved
  • Delay enemy leader kill to get most XP
• Leader action operations assessment
  • Ensure leader retreats when poisoned and/or slowed
• Pre-recruit operations assessment
  • Better assessment of which hexes to recruit on
• Move execution
  • Move out of way
    • Improve direction of MOOW
    • Do not move into final position if not necessary
  • Attacks
    • Don’t leave units exposed if not all units needed
    • Improve conditions when to abandon attacks
• Functionality
  • Hold back on pre-determined actions
    • but treat them as if they had been executed
  • Clean up which type of power/value/etc. parameters to use in each situation
  • When does time-of-day need to be considered?
    • Prepare for Fred playing Side 2
  • More consistent use of value_ratio and similar parameters
  • Correctly take specials into account for hit_chance

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Roadmap for upcoming releases

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It's just a tentative collection of ideas for the main tasks for the next releases.

All releases

• Of course, bug fixes and taking care of newly discovered problems and issues always have the highest priority

Later releases might focus on any of the following

• Code clean-up:
  • Pull out hard-coded parameters
  • Enable Fred to play other maps
  • Further improvements to attacks, holding, advancing and/or retreating
  • Internal clean-up of code and evaluation speed-up