AI sometimes runs out of trunks with castle village

[fk]

If the AI fails to build the first woodcutter's house, then it continues with a weaving-mill and runs out of trunks for the second woodcutter's house.

Perhaps the players should have more trunks from the start, or the AI could first try to build three woodcutter's houses instead of one, but this is not yet fail safe. Otherwise there could be checks to see if a road can be build to a building site before deciding to build, or safety checks for the use of trunks.

In the replay in the attachment the blue player is unable to finish it's woodcutter's house.

The same problem occurred in another game with the atlanteans tribe, it is not specific for the empire.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for reporting this issue.

I haven't looked at your save game specifically, but I guess the underlying problem here is that the AI is rather bad at dealing with limited resources. While easier said than done, it would be nice to see the AI better at planning and perhaps focusing more on setting up a basic "construction material" economy both at the start of the game and when it needs to recover. Ideally, it should even be able to deal with things like the Hardcore starting condition [1].

[1] https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/830/

[fk (fredkuijper)]

"but I guess the underlying problem here is that the AI is rather bad at dealing with limited resources"

I agree with that, but I think that the problem is twofold. In castle village the player starts with 13 trunks of which 7 go to the sawmill immediately. The limited number of 6 remaining trunks is very low for a setting of which I understood that it should give the player an easy start. So it might be a good idea to increase the initial number of trunks, independently from other solutions.

(btw. I confused the atlanteans with the empire, but this doesn't matter for the problem.)

[TiborB (tiborb95)]

Hi,
revision 7080 in trunk contain further batch of AI improvements, that includes also changes in buildings prioritization.

Now AI should always manage to built (and complete) first woodcutter. But if your experiences differ, let me know.

[SirVer (sirver)]

setting to incomplete. If it times out I consider it fix committed.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build19-rc1.