Comment 16 for bug 1516785

ok, i have observed this new ai in action during some playtesting.

First of all, the limits are malfunctioning. For some reason, the limit of one smelting work seem to apply also to "strong" ai, which should not have any limitation at all. Furthermore, it seems that the ai is building arenas, but it is not using them. I assume the new coding introduced some error somewhere.

Second point about those limits: the only really meaningful limit there is 1 smelting works. smelting works are the slowest buildings after farms. they take around 70 seconds to make a piece of metal. limiting the smelting works to 1 or 2 is a really big blow. even in a small map, where i can afford only one copy of each building, the moment i have 3 or 4 farms, if i have one more space i use it for a second smelting works. so i suggest they are increased to 2 for weak and 4 for normal. except, in small or medium-small maps 4 smelting works are the most you can make work. difficult to balance fixed number independent from map size. but i'd still say 1-2 is too little smelting works.

Other limits are not important, or they are even helping the ai. limit to one lime kiln and one weaving mill? i don't remember, even in the bigger maps, ever needing more than 1. by limiting those to one,, you're actually doing the ai a favor: it won't waste space on useless buildings. same goes for two sawmills - although on occasion i made three of those, even in large maps 90% of the times 2 are enough. if the map is not large, one is perfectly fine. same goes for 2 battle arenas, you need a really big economy to make 2 battle arenas work at full productivity. I remember needing two in one single game.

So, my suggestion would be to increase the limits on smelting works to 2-4 or 2-3 (or 1-3, if we want the weak ai to be really weak), while dropping all the other limits except the one on training camps/dungeons

Re: the names of the levels, I am not complaining about the existance of easy levels. I suggested that we made them myself already 6 onths ago (original link: https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/1739/?page=1#post-13757). I merely want it to be clear for a player which is the "default" difficulty level. Alternatively (or additionally), we may add some specific explanations of what the difficulty levels actually do. Just like in many roleplaying games if you hover the mouse over a difficulty level, you'll see explanations like "monsters deal 200% damage" or "player character is immune to paralysis and critical strike", then we could add a similar functionality that will state "ai limited to x smelting works and forbidden to make training camps".