From: sfd@bezier.berkeley.edu (Scott Drellishak)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: Re: sfop vs the world
Date: 16 Apr 92 19:30:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: bezier.SFD.92Apr16143027
Organization: First Church of "Bob", Proctologist
NNTP-Posting-Host: bezier.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: paulsen@eniac.seas.upenn.edu's message of 16 Apr 92 03:42:14 GMT

Just some minor comments, and a conclusion.

In article <74224@netnews.upenn.edu> paulsen@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Commodore FreeKill) writes:
   The bots were very good at fighting, but it was hard for me to tell
   because of the incredible lag that kept occuring.  I had to scum
   kills to do get any.  It was pretty easy, though.  The bots keep
   fighting until they are out of fuel.  Then you tractor them in and
   phaser.

This is an ongoing worry for me.  I suppose I could have them refuel
sooner, but then they'd always be refueling (since robots tend to
use up fuel like crazy).

   The other way was to sit near a refuel planet that had armies.
   Then the bots come in cloaked and try to bomb it.  It was pretty
   easy to kill them then.

   We took a lot of planets by exploiting the fact that they can't see
   cloakers from far away.

Well, this is a server feature (hidden), not a sfop bug.

   Once you were cloaked, they tended to ignore you.

*Not* true.  They pay as much attention to cloakers as to everyone else.
In fact, they don't get bored following cloakers as fast as the do following
uncloakers.  If you catch my meaning.

   This helped a lot in taking planets.  Another flaw that we noticed
   was that they like to soften planets by putting a few armies on
   them.

Well, actually, they "soften up" planets when they can't find enough armies.
The problem was that you guys kept the sfops scout-bombed, so there were
rarely enough armies to tank up and take.

   This is usually ok, but they would soften up agris, and
   leave agris neutral while they go get more armies.  Usually, we
   would take the agris back immediately.  I would venture in guessing
   that the bots neutralized our agri about 10-15 times with only
   actually taking it 2-3 times.

I definitely have to fix it so they don't just soften up agris.

   The other flaw that we noticed was that the teammates like to shoot
   over other teammates.  We used this several times to kills their
   army carriers.

Somebody commented on this in the game.  What does it mean, "like to
shoot over other teammates"?

   Also, the bots rarely ogged.  It may have been much harder to take
   planets if the bots were actually making an attempt at stopping us.

They weren't noticing who was carrying, so they never got organized and
ogged.  So, I changed it so they ogg people with kills.  Next game should
(I hope) be really bloody.

   However, for most of the game, it was about even.  At one point, it
   was about 13-7 in our favor, and then some people left.  The bots
   quickly took back their planets.  If the bots could defend their
   space better, the humans might have troubles against future sfops.

   Brian

The game ended a while later with the sfops with like 2 planets.  I
put the "master" robot in a starbase, and told it to go out to the
front, just to see what would happen (and thus leaving the home
planets undefended), but somebody genocided before I could see how
badly sfop plays starbases.

All in all, sfop needs just a little bit more smarts, and then I'll be
out of good ideas.  Then I'll have to write that natural language
parser for the message facility.

Scott
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek