[fixed] ressource multiplyer in game setup

[titi]

Currently we have 4 different cpu players: cpu-easy, cpu , cpu-ultra and cpu-mega.
In fact we only have 3 really ( a bit )different implementations: cpu-easy, cpu and cpu-mega.

Cpu and cpu-ultra are basically the same, the only difference is that cpu-ultra cheats when harvesting ressources. It gets 3 times more gold each time the workers arrive at the castle.

What I have in mind now is to make it possible to select a free ressource multiplier for each CPU type when setting up a game where you can choose between 0.5 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 .
This would give us 6*3=18 different cpu levels! But how to make this visible in:
- the game setup in the custom menu?
- the scenarios and tutorials

And i think we want to keep the normal cpu names too for compatibility reasons ( or not ? )

Ideas for the custom menu:

1) 18 new cpu strings .... bad idea
2) a new column to select the cpu multiplier in each cpu played line ( maybe not only for cpus? ). But this will make the custom menu again more complicated, so i don't really like the idea.
3) A combination of 1) and 2): One column to select ( human/network/cpu ) and another to select the cpuname( with the 18 strings )
...

Do you have better ideas! Please share them and discuss my ideas.

[softcoder]

I say we keep what we have today but add only 1 new type... CPU custom which then enables the user to pick a custom multiplier! When picking normal pre-defined CPU's we would show the multiplier as read only.

How does that sound? Then we have only 1 new string 'CPU Custom'.

Thanks

[Zoythrus]

why must it be a multiplier and not a personality? like turtle, rusher, steamroller, and balance.

[tomreyn]

I like softcoders' suggestion on how to implement this in terms of UI. Other than that, while the possibility to modify the CPUs by adding a resource multiplyer is technically great, I personally think this is one of the features which doesn't need to be fully configurable. So I think some kind of 'advanced options view' (as suggested by softcoder) with preset multiplier options to choose from (such as "1.0", "1.5", "2.0") can be nice, but be sure not to overengineer it nor to make the difficulty selection unintelligible for newbies.

[claymore]

I also like softcoder's idea, but it would be nice to allow advanced players to select arbitrary float values in one of the config files. For example, it's easy to picture 0.5x being too great a handicap, and 1x being slightly too hard.

[m0ellemeister]

What about a slider controll for setting the "difficulty level" of an cpu opponent, lets say from level 1 till level 18?
Maybe it's possible to define a lable for the slider controll, which displays from "cpu easy" to "cpu mega" depending on chosen level?

[Omega]

What about a slider controll for setting the "difficulty level" of an cpu opponent, lets say from level 1 till level 18?
Maybe it's possible to define a lable for the slider controll, which displays from "cpu easy" to "cpu mega" depending on chosen level?

I agree, a slider could be more interesting than set difficulties, but why 18? Why not 10 or some other value?

[m0ellemeister]

I agree, a slider could be more interesting than set difficulties, but why 18? Why not 10 or some other value?

I've just picked up the given possibilities by titi. So, don't take my example too serious :-)

[titi]

Also sliders might be a good idea, we have no sliders :/ . Beside of this sliders are not very exact. Thats good and bad on the same time. Its good because you can select float values like 1.66 as multiplier. But its bad because you cannot easily select a multiplier of the same value again.

But because we have not sliders its out of discussion anyway.
I currently think about an idea which is based on softcoders suggestion, but we don't add a "custom" cpu to enable the switch, we just use the CPU-Mega to do this. If the selection is not cpu-mega, we either hide the switch or make it not editable.
Additionally we allow to change the multiplyer in scenarios for all kind of cpus.

[John.d.h]

How about:

CPU (easy)
CPU (default)
CPU (ultra)
CPU (mega)
CPU (custom)

[titi]

thats what softcoder suggested...

[John.d.h]

Whoops.  I guess I didn't notice that.

In that case, I second his motion.

[Ishmaru]

The multiplier option should be for all ai types. Maybe I would want a non-aggressive cpu easy with a resource bonus (produces less units but better quality ones). Maybe 1.5 multiplier would be too difficult for cpu mega but easier with a cpu easy.

If there is no difference between cpu and cpu ultra except the multiplier, then if you do implement this that there is no need for cpu ultra and should be removed.  If you are worried about compatibility with scenarios than maybe just remove it as an option from the custom game screen, so it would be accessible through lua scripts only.

Hope I made sense...

[titi]

ok I work on this now.

@ishmaru: good point! I think I will really remove the cpu-ultra. I will keep it for scenarios for backward compatibility, but it will disappear in the custom game menu. So we stay with 3 cpus all with multipliers.

But thats my current plan, maybe i will change my mind when we test a bit . For the moment( while in development ) I will start to add multipliers for everything even humans.

[ultifd]

  hehe, we tested it a bit, and it seems to work...too bad we need to work out the performance problems first.

[titi]

What do you think about my latest change ( done with in svn revision 1228 ).
Is this a way to setup resource multiplier ok now ?

By the way, its also available in scenarios now. You can specify something like this now:

<player control="cpu-easy" resource_multiplier="3.0" faction="magic" team="2"/>

of course the old way without this new attribute works too