MadmanAtW
Knight
So I see that a couple of builds there are "City Defense Sword". Is that a good idea? Swords are not a unit that one usually thinks of as defenders.
I'm not sure anything's jumped to mind that hasn't already been said, but I wanted to say that I loved this view "under the hood". Fascinating stuff.
I think the notes here could provide months worth of better AI changes...
1. Make the AI value a bit more highly the prospect of continuing on with a build and finishing it if the AI has already sunk hammers into the item. AI should still have the flexibility to abandon production items when really needed, but try to give the AI some incentive to be less capricious about changing production just because the city grew a pop, especially if a build already has like half of the hammers invested. Don't waste those hammers, if at all possible! The AI should value staying with a build more and more vs. switching mid-stream to other options the more %hammers the AI has invested in a build.
Sunk costs are not relevant to decision making. If switching is better, it should switch. If not, it shouldn't. There isn't a need for that kind of weighting to deliberately avoid sensible economic criteria in favor of sunk costs.
The other suggestions sound good.
Sunk costs are not relevant to decision making. If switching is better, it should switch. If not, it shouldn't. There isn't a need for that kind of weighting to deliberately avoid sensible economic criteria in favor of sunk costs.
The other suggestions sound good.
It depends whether the AI takes the "true remaining cost" of its choice into account. If choices are based solely on an attraction value of some kind, then it may make sense to account for sunk costs, simply to gauge the true return per hammer. Sunk costs don't affect the benefit part of the trade-off between two choices, but the AI should be willing to continue with a build order with lower absolute return if it offers an acceptable return per hammer.
The caveat being that I don't know how these choices are made as well as BBAI people.
No, you simply never use sunk costs. The RELEVANT costs involved in this case are the remaining costs of the invested build and possibly hammer decay, with the benefits of the current investment compared against those of switching.
Any hammers already invested *need* to be disregarded in this process. The only relevant hammers toward the item being built are the ones that are not yet invested and thus can vary between decisions.
Yes, but do we know whether the AI takes remaining hammer cost into account? If it doesn't, then it ought to do so, and that's when sunk costs become relevant, because they are isomorphic to remaining costs on a proportionate level. (No need to shout; I have spent much of several degrees' worth of study investigating cost-benefit analyses.)
Missionaries are not wasted hammers.