Before you continue, please keep in mind that I have no knowledge of c++ so I havn't got a clue wether something is possible or near impossible.
> For Big Pond, it did very well. It won. No suprise as its a bigger map than
> the others. It used more spacing than Garden 3 did.
>
Heh heh, I do 99% of my testing on Big Pond so its no wonder it plays best here.
Lol. Hmm.... a quick thought. A map could be 512x512 and nicowar could loose if it didn't have space right? So we should probably stop refering to nicowars success based on the size of the map but the space available for expansion? Your call.
Sometimes this is exactly the difficulty. Nicowar builds its buildings
following fairly strict rules. It always leaves enough space to
upgrade the building + 1 square away from other buildings (not
ressources). So yeah, castor places Inns in pairs, like it does other
buildings when it has the space. I have seen it place barracks,
racetrack, and swimming pools in pairs). I have been thinking about
sperating spacing into a building specific attribute, so that a
building can be placed really close to an Inn, but has to be more
spaced for central buildings like the Swarm.
The when you can't find enough room part is iffy to implement. This is
exactly why I praise the Castor programmers like I do, because they
are quite good at doing "threshhold" based algorithms like this, where
as I tend to avoid threshholds all together, as they come with a vay
of inaccuraccy.
Well, a few things to say and expand on. Group things that dont need space to upgrade or can upgrade atleast once without space. For eg, in all my tests of Nicowar, the inns are pretty much the last thing to get upgraded. Infact, I have never seen a lv3 inn before. So build them in groupd of 4 (in a square shape) to save space. They can still be upgraded to lv2 for more room since only lv3 needs that extra room for upgrading. As far as hospitals, shocking. Scattered everywhere. Group them in 4 (just like the inns). From the test I did with Big Pond earlier, the grouped hospitals would have saved enough room combined to make 2 swimming pools. Barracks and schools dont need extra room for upgrades. Group them in pairs (schools right next to swarms preferably, so newly created members can jump stright in hopefully). Doing these things will create lots more room, but still keep things functional, accessable, and upgradable.
I don't need to copy castors placement code, my existing code works
just enough. The towers thing has been iffy in the past, it has almost
uselessly takin up workers when Nicowar could sufficiently defend with
warriors, including on maps like Garden 3. The change to have towers
constructed is incredibly simple, a couple of header file changes, but
requires much experiementation.
Yes, towers can take away free workers. But since Nicowar isn't smart enough to make the war flag chase enemies and eleminating them from coming right back, or determin like entrace ways (see G2, wild river, stone bases, and the sand square) its the only other means of quick defence (and holding them off till warriors arive) if groups of castor invade.
Your suggestion is, then, to give more units to upgrading and less to
constructing, yes?
Well, sort of. A fully upgraded city should be established before venturing out. Doing so will mean you have better warriros and workers as soon as you can (for protection and speed). They'll work more effeciantly and faster when the time to expand comes. If you expand right away, not only will the buildings be vunrable (because the workers at that stage wouldn't have learnt how to upgrade buildings to make them stronger) but the rest of the civilsation will be too. So yer, atleast till and upgraded barracks and school at minimum are completed, hold of on expansion.
I don't control the retrive thing. If the workers can grab the fruit,
they will, so there is no control whatsover. The exploration flags are
put on the three nearest fruits of each type, which is a
reccomendation made from many people on this thread.
Stick a forbidden zone on all fruit exploreres find and then they wont go to them :P
Converting is a very important aspect of the game, it doesn't cost
anything but the harvesting of fruits. I don't see conversion as a
negative aspect in *any* circumstances, considering that if it didn't
convert enemy units, it would go on happilly. If you do convert enemy
units, but they starve to death, you haven't lost anything, you still
have all those swarm made workers you would have if you had done no
conversion, but your enemy has lost something, his workers have just
converted to his opponents team and died, so no losses here or there.
Well, I always though that to convert units, you need fruit. To get fruit, you need workers. To get workers, you have to pull them away from other jobs that are more important, like upgrading to get a small army (10-15 globs) for defence. Stop converting, and your globs wont have to work so hard.
And now for some new discussion.
First a query. I have not seen the code to work out how many users to place working on a swarm/inn implemented yet. Swarm is still at 5 and inn at 1 :( I was wondering if you still going to implement it? Incase you forgot, for the swarm, 3 initial workers + .25 for every sqaure it is away from wheat, and for inns, same calculation but add 1 for every 20 total colony members.