Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005
From: Honolulu, Hawaii
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rkr1958
Let me give an example of what MWiF wants to do that the only way to get around it is to manually set the routes yourself. I wanted to route two CW oil points that were currently being saved in Canada to England and save them there. I had two spare CPs in each of the East Coast, North Atlantic and Bay of Biscay. Should be no problem right?
So, for the first oil point I changed it's save location from somewhere in Canada to somewhere in England. The result was that the oil point was now saved in England as I wanted. However, I noticed that an oil point from Venezuela that I was also saving in Canada now went idle. What?! When I looked at the route the was used for the first oil point that I changed, it was being railed through the USA to be routed starting in the Caribbean - East Coast - North Atlantic - Bay of Biscay. That was madness! Why did it start it's sea route in the Caribbean instead of the East Coast. So I had to go and manually set the route to start in the East Coast and then to North Atlantic an then to Bay of Biscay. Once I did this the Venezuela oil point that had went idle was now, correctly being saved in Canada.
Now, when I changed the saved location of a second oil point being saved in Canada to England guess what? The same thing happened again. And I had to manually route this second oil point as I did the first to ensure that the Venezuela oil point was not idle and was being saved as intended.
I must admit that it's taken me some effort to learn how to do all this. It isn't nearly as intuitive as it should be, but if you take the time to learn how to do it then it pays big benefits. I'm at a point now where I can get things routed and setup the way I want them about 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time I just live with it.
The computer does not 'see' the map. As far as the computer is concerned, what connects to what (be that hexes or sea areas) is completely arbitrary. For example, early in the development of the map, data for some hexes in the Caucasus were coded as being adjacent to the Bay of Biscay). The program code had no trouble with that. You could unload land units from the Bay of Biscay directly into the Caucasus.
My point is that though a human looking at the map 'knows' that Canadian resources going to the United Kingdom can go more directly through the East Coast rather than through the Caribbean. But the program only determines routes by trying all possibilities. When it fines one that works, it stops looking.
As for coding the AIO, I will write code to be more thorough for optimizing routes. Note that the determination of 'optimal' is in the eye of the beholder. The risk of convoys being sunk is something the AIO will worry about. But that is not part of the current code for setting 'computed' routes for the player. How brilliant should the 'computed' route be? I drew a line for how much 'help' the program would provide to the player when Computing routes. Note that some experienced players complain bitterly about the program's initial pass on Computed overseas routes not being what for them is 'optimal'.
On the other hand, no one has ever complained about the overland routes the computer finds and uses. Indeed, as far as I know there has never been any mention in the forums about the overland routes - and there is a lot of code executing to find and implement the overland routes. That that code works correctly is taken for granted.
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Steve
Perfection is an elusive goal.
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RE: What Do You Think Needs to be in World In Flames PC... - 
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) that an AI will be impossible to code if the convoy system isn't attended to - as at present the computer cannot generate the most efficient routes (and in some cases cannot do so without huge manual intervention - which not everyone (myself amongst them) has the brain capacity and/or patience to cope with). 
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