Capt. Harlock
Posts: 5358
Joined: 9/15/2001 From: Los Angeles Status: offline
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quote:
I remember back in the Mid 1980's when SSI came out with North Atlantic 86 for the Apple. Great game back then, but after a couple of runs through the game, all I had to do was place all my missle launching subs up north of England, pull out my Exocet equipped surface ships from my British fleet at Iceland, send the rest to America for later use, and then just wait for the inevitable Soviet amphibious assault on Iceland, all the while putting all my best planes (Tomcats, Tornadoes, and Eagles) on Iceland, maximize supplies and three days before their landing start moving in 25,000 new troops. Worked every time because the AI did the same exact thing every time. A simple little additiion of having the Soviets randomly launch an all out, unsupplied Airborne assault in Iceland on turn 1 instead would have added infinetly to the unpredictability of the solitare version of the game. And added only about 400 lines of Applesoft Basic code! I remember the game as well: in fact I managed to print out the "source code". (It was uncomplied Applesoft BASIC.) 400 lines was not possible; remember we're talking about a program that must fit into 48K of RAM, and come from a 143K floppy. But now we have huge amounts of RAM and hard disk space available, so we should be able to have a genius-level AI, right? Well, no, we still have major limits in the ability of the programmers to produce a game in a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost. However, let me elaborate a little on my idea of giving the AI better intelligence. There comes a point in the game when the Japanese side needs to switch to playing defense, and the Allied side should switch to offense. Perhaps the higher level AI could be given a more accurate calcualtion for when that time is.
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Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers? --Victor Hugo
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