Un-Civilized
So I just finished my first game of Civ IV. It took a little over 8 hours and I ended up loosing closely to the Germans in a space race. The game is simply amazing. I’ll need to have a few more games before I can make a detailed description of exactly why it’s so good, but I thought I’d give a few details on what I think makes it such a good game.
The first thing is the fact it feels like Civ. I was a little worried when I first started reading info about it, and especially when I started seeing the screenshots. The game has changed quite a lot, however it still holds true to the civ flavor that I’ve come to love. It all fits together in a cohesive game which stays interesting and exciting the whole way through. The ‘end-game’ has been fixed up and I like the way the first few ages take quite a bit longer to get through. The changes to combat are excellent and while it will take a while to get some solid strategies down, it handles the paper-scissors-rock style of so many RTS games extremely well. I might put up a full review of the game once I’ve had a few more tries if anyone is interested.
In other news, I did some AI coding this morning before I began my day long civ-fest. I’ve now got the enemy ship firing counter missiles in response to missiles you fire at it. I also sat down with a math’s friend and went through the missile interception problem. It seems that it IS in fact extremely hard to calculate, and so far the best I can get to is a 4th order polynomial, which is no walk in the park to solve. For that reason I’m going to fall back to my ‘plan b’ for now. I will basically break the path up into small parts and find the best point to aim at. This will be substantially slower than a simple mathematical formula, and not truly accurate, however for now I believe it will do that job.
Not having tackled a missle (or any other object) interception problem myself I will say this: how do actual real life missles do it? Like umm, what does the US military call it? The Patriot? Somethign like that. Anyway. Can’t you just get the missle to track the other missle like an AI bot walking towards a node in a path? Except in this case, it’s always moving. I’m sure there are better (and more complicated) ways of doing this, but I think this should get you at least 70->80% of the way there, or make a good quick’n'dirty implementation. (or maybe I just don’t understadn the problem
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On CivIV – just got it, havn’t had a chance to play much yet. REALLY like the new menu system lay out though. The new promotions systems sounds fully sick, as does religion and governments. It’s the biggest overhaul since the originals inception I think.
From reading an article while I was doing my CS studies I believe this is the way that the patriot missile system does its task. Essentially the scud is a large slow flying bus sized contraption with a warhead on it. The patriot on the other hand is a very fast interceptor missile, travelling at about Mach 4.
The guidance system works by tracking objects on radar, predicting their trajectories as if they were scuds, and if the trajectories match within a given error range the missile is launched. This would indicate that the patriot is aimed at the radar object, and fired, probably having some sort of simple radar guidance making it hone in on its target.
If you wanted to find a real algorithm for intercepting missiles you could ask the people working on the US missile defence shield project, though with the results they’ve had you might be better off just using a quick and dirty system. Heck why not just launch several interceptor missiles and some countermeasures to boot. Then you could just roll some dice and see what did what?