AI Managed Lines

[mopoona]

If you focus your game on trains and airplanes you don't want to spend a lot of time to create the necessary bus networks in each city.
While your network grows the demand on these bus lines will increase too. This results in some overcrowding and with it long waiting times and possibly some other problems due to the nature of the routing system.


Managing this new demand is tidies and not interesting or demanding in any way. I was thinking how you could give the player the possibility not to have to care about this problem.


Adding more overcrowded capacity would not be good for balancing the game. So I think the solution should be a new function. The player would normally add more bussed to the overcrowded routes. This is a fairly easy task. Formulated as an "algorithm":

If line reaches overcrowded state
Then Add another vehicle


This actually is a task the implemented AI is capable of doing. But the title of this post might be misleading, course I don't want to refer to the AI Players.


My idea is the following. If you create a line, you may choose a new option *AI managed* and set a value for the average load of the vehicles of the line (or some other key number).
The numbe of vehicles is then corrected when the demand is increasing.
I think this feature won't be of much use on longer lines, but for short routes it could be very handy.
The feature shouln't be too optimized, though. A player who chooses to manage everything on his own should achieve better results.


I believe this would be a fair option for all players. Additionally I think it is a good idea to let the AI also reduce the number of vehicles . Another value has to be set for this to work.

I'm looking forward to your answers.

[Markohs]

I already propsed something very similar time ago:

http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=8732.0

I think it's a good idea, the thing is... Who will code it?

[kierongreen]

There is a problem with this, once the number of buses reaches a certain point capacity will drop due to congestion on the road network. So a naive implementation of this AI will keep purchasing vehicles making the situation even worse. The interaction between AI increasing and reducing numbers of buses on different lines also has the potential to become unstable.

[Markohs]

sure, it should take more factors into account, the congestion of the streets, if there is a low bus making other buses stop, if a stop has congestion also (vehicles waiting load), if the vehicles are obsolete... etc.

[VS]

shouldn't be too optimized

...probably not hard

has the potential to become unstable.

I'd love to demonstrate predator-prey behaviour with Simutrans lines Finally some way to make the class less boring!

[jamespetts]

Delegating certain functions to AI "managers" is an interesting idea in principle, but is complicated to get right (Kieron gives just one example of why), and would take a lot of time to implement. It is also a feature that one might put in the category of useful to have but far from essential. I'm not against the idea in principle, but I'm afraid that it's not likely that I'll have time to code it any time soon. If anyone were to come up with (and be prepared to maintain indefinitely) a working implementation for this, I'd be more than happy to include it after appropriate testing.