PATCH] Need to improve the AI handling of bartering

[mimo]

When playing with several AIs, bartering quite often lead to ridiculous exchange rates where we can buy several hundreds wood, stone or metal with 100 food. Looking at the code in ai/aegis/headquarters.js it seems that the AI try to barter when it needs a resource, whatever the resource and whatever the exchange rate are.

As food is illimited, the AI should refrain to acquire food with bartering, but rather try to construct new farms when needed.

Then, when bartering, it should check the exchange rate, and not barter if this exchange rate is really too poor.

In addition, for higher AI levels, the AI could do preventive bartering selling its food excess when the rate is good (both to constitute stocks of resources and to bother its opponents by making food bartering less profitable for them).

[wraitii]

Interesting input. I think I haven't really rewrote bartering for the new Aegis while I changed a ton of other stuffs, so incoherent behavior is not too surprising. Usually it's mostly done to overcome the AI bad resource planning.

[wraitii]

Moving to A16 or I'll completely forget about this.

[mimo]

Here is a patch for it.

[leper]

headquarters.js at line 781 needs braces around the if (as the else if doesn't do what the indentation claims that it does).

[mimo]

Thanks, new version updated

[wraitii]

Thanks for the patch mimo… I've given it a look and it seems good, but I fear your algorithm may be too clever (it assumes a human player and not the current AI). I'll use all your changes but write my own new "TryBartering" function to be cleverer. Might switch to this when the resource collection is improved.

[wraitii]

In 14582:

Various improvements to AI's early game. Simplify some code and improve on other. Add a few different strategies (Rush/normal/boom, quite basic for now, refs #2344).
Aegis should mostly respect tech limitations so I'll ref #1964.
I'm going to go with #2364 is fixed, the AI should be more efficient in early-game, and late-game is a known problem.
Fixes #2274 and fixes #2379.
Refs #2372 as it should fix several of those warnings for AIs.
Fixes #2256 with a new bartering system, in parts taken from mimo's patch.