on the theme of alien cheaty vision. i don't care if you remove it. As a alien, i just follow my nose 'cause you human stinks.
@shaunc311, i read you say here are/was up to 10000 possible moves. i don't understand why. if each alien go 30 TU they have max 2*15*2*15=900 new possible positions each (in fact less cause here are corner that are too far away) on void map. I think you can prune many of this possibility.
I read the most of the wall discussion, so i will explain how true alien plays.
about moving alien
That's a basic in military alien, there are secured places and unsecured places. At the beginning, it's impossible to find human in a harvester. If we lose the advantage of god-vision (that was not god vision, that's alien advanced detection), you should make some map marking of where human bastards can be found and where they can't. it's just some probability... over a box. With that aliens will not have to look forward at each turn. Here should not be many level, to start with. 0% is i'm sure where is no enemy, cause i see i or cause i control all the access to go in (that's the funny thing to program), but it can be realy easy cause we alien arrive first so all the map could be set at 0%, then we see your dropship. it makes noise, heat and it stinks. Next round you put a 50% in all human accessible position. You force 0 in position where you see human are not, 100% where they stand.
We aliens have observed that if we loose, it's because human go at us.. so this is a good guess to improve (unvisible) human estimation by saying human are most likely to come at us than to go in opposite direction. Even an Ortnok beast understand this.
about fire
When we alien open fire, we have a goal. There a to kind of goal: to wound (*** the medikit) or to kill. The wound kind of fire should be used when reenforcement are available (so to say there is a living alien how can be here in 1 round).
There are optimized place to fire. before moving a alien you can make a map crossing number of fire, hit probability (staying and crouched, current AI ignore the fact that we can fire crouched) It's hard to teach an Ortnok that the more it walks, the less it fires. If we are on a hit and run fire, with that system you could go to quit cove, walk to get higher success rate, and retake cover.
If we are on suicidal mission, we can go to the best place to fire the best shot and praying not to be shot back.
I you allow us plan next round... we may do more sophisticate things.
about team playing
There is a fantastic pun in french how says "team's spirit, it's one spirit for one team". It explains how good French football team is. Alien can mimic this. And it's military basic too. alien associate when they are less than 5 boxes away AND whith a maximum number of participant (3 aliens/groups sounds good).
how work a group? (it remains me my military classes), the speed of the group is the speed of the slowest, the group try to move together. There is one leader with chose the targets and the (2) others shot at it until the human die. The good new it that those two alien will not have to call the think() function, computer friendly idee. The will just obey the order. And for us, Alien, orders are absolute. it remains me my military classes, i said.
As a cheat, it could be usefull for alien to see how wealthy are the human. it could allow us not to keep our own record of the number on damages needed to kill one human and how much the human already get. i know, medikit are human way of cheating.
i explain one other point, i previously said that some other alien could request support. My idee on the point is to alert a group of alien not to far, which are not engage in fight, to come quickly. To avoid human get used to set up traps, the alerted alien should refuse the support from time to time, or chose if he gets two alert from two distinct groups.
on sheevar
i just noticed someone say, hoho givind god-view to sheevar is ok. Don't forget that, we alien have hive spirit (not shure of translation). What one alien knows, all the aliens on all the galaxies know. If one Sheevar gets god view, we all get it.
on spides
Bloody AI makers, robots are expensive. as of rev 32055, spiders are fearless and run right in front of human, but don't attak cause they have no more TU. Now all the human rebels have plasma swords. The very first they do, is to destroy them, it costs them 2+7 TU. They can all keep on shooting. There are two solutions, first you give more TU to spiders or you don't send them as long as they can't make one attack.
on human learning technics
There are few things that can make alien adapts to the player. I think there are two kind of players, there are players how allow causalty and players how don't. if we can look in the savegame how much dead soldiers there have been (the count, the average and maybe the standard deviation ) we can guess if we have a player who will get frustred if aliens kill too much soldiers and restart the game. In this case, aliens should prefer suicide mission.
On the other hand, alien can spy human activity and politics. I think there are cases where trying to game over the player with a too much civilian loss is relevant. (i never get this, i just see it in translation strings).
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i'm just giving ideas, don't know what the api is capable of.
