Does anybody ever follow the advice?

Jim W · August 16, 2000, 01:23

You're zipping along in the game, and you discover some technology. Immediately you have a list of other techs you could research. You also get advice as to what you should build, and why.

I've found that, fairly often, that advice is minimally useful to me. In fact, the one time I tried following the advice all the time, I mucked things up badly.

Does anybody follow the advice? Is it just put out there to frustrate us?

Pleawe note, I'm talking about tech advice, not building advice. Thast's a whole different story.

Jim W

Smash · August 16, 2000, 01:49

I turned it off in game options long ago.Mostly bad advice.

August 16, 2000, 04:18

I don't think the advice is that bad. If you follow it you will be just mirroring the ai tech route I'm sure. since it is based on those numerical values in rules.txt. Some are rated appropiately like railroad and automobile. But some are just terrible choices.

tonic · August 16, 2000, 04:35

There's been an endless litany of the foibles and idiocy of the AI here. Well I reckon that it's basically the same engine that drives those "advisors". No substitute for the human's knowledge and skill minable from the forum and archives here.

Oldman · August 16, 2000, 04:55

What Advice... ???

August 16, 2000, 05:16

that might be a challenge. diety level and follow all advice. Including domestic/military advisor advice

Scouse Gits · August 16, 2000, 06:34

Black Bart - that thought makes me cringe - even if it proves to be a great challenge I don't believe I could bring myself to build multiple laundries in a size 1 city!

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Scouse Git[1]

"CARTAGO DELENDA EST" - Cato the Censor

Ming · August 16, 2000, 07:56

Advice... from the computer...
HA HA HA HA!
I turned that feature off a long time ago.
But I will admit, for amusement value, it works like a charm

SCG · August 16, 2000, 09:06

quote:

Originally posted by Black Bart on 08-16-2000 05:16 AM
that might be a challenge. diety level and follow all advice. Including domestic/military advisor advice

hmm, seems like i remember a thread by AH at some point about doing that on warlord and getting a rather late victory date :P

Personally I find a lot of what they suggest hilarious

I sometimes turn it on just to lighten up the game some.

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April Cantor: Sire, in order to expand further we must first gain favor of the King

SCG: darn, I've never really got the hang of that tribute thing, guess it will be a long time until i make prince

*goes off and starts gifting gold and techs*

Tom DeMille · August 16, 2000, 11:37

Yes, I'm sure the AI civs would challenge you if you followed advice, set your cities to autobuild (without an autobuild.txt file to guide them), and set half your settlers to automatic (the others you could use to found new cities).

Oh, and use the goto feature for all movements.

Jim W · August 17, 2000, 00:12

quote:

Originally posted by Tom DeMille on 08-16-2000 11:37 AM

Oh, and use the goto feature for all movements.

This brings to mind a curious incident in one of my recent games. If I tried to send something from city A to city B, it ran off the railroad and went around in circles. However, when I sent things from city B to
city A, they zipped along with no problem at all.

I got micromanaging traffic in the one direction. but I'm blowed if I can figure out why it would work that way.

Jim W

Tizzy · August 17, 2000, 07:55

That sounds similar to a problem I sometimes have with my naval units. I send them on a goto, not necessarily a long one, just a few squares sometimes, only to see them zoom off in the opposite direction. I just figured it for a bug in the program.

As for advice, once when I was jsut starting out, I decided it would be interesting to play a hot seat game, controlling 2 civilisations myself, one which I'd direct in my normal(?) way, and one following the advice given.
The one which followed the advice did much better

Now that I've played it a bit more though, and have a plan and a strategy, following the advice leaves me much further behind than I would be on my own advice.

Tiz

Ming · August 17, 2000, 08:42

Tizzy... It's very possible that the ships headed in the wrong direction because of the end of the map. The goto command tries to move them in the quickest and straightest line. However, it doesn't recogonize that it is faster if the route to be traveled crosses the 0 vertical map coordinates. So it will go the long way

Jim W · August 17, 2000, 13:00

quote:

Originally posted by Ming on 08-17-2000 08:42 AM
Tizzy... It's very possible that the ships headed in the wrong direction because of the end of the map. The goto command tries to move them in the quickest and straightest line. However, it doesn't recogonize that it is faster if the route to be traveled crosses the 0 vertical map coordinates. So it will go the long way

But this doesn't explain why something would be willing to go one way and not the other. I know about the O-axis thing, but it should work the same both directions, shouldn't it?

Jim W

jpk · August 17, 2000, 13:25

The 0 vertical axis thing is but one of a million things that confuse the GoTo command.

Every beginning text book in operations research covers the shortest path algorithm. It is fast and can easily handle terrain, road, and railroad adjustments necessary for Civilization.

Think of putting a drop of ink at the destination. The ink will flow infinitely fast along rail lines, three units per time unit along roads or rivers, etc. Eventually the ink will reach the starting point. Determine the first drop of ink that reaches the starting point and then reverse the path that the ink followed to get the desired path for the unit.