OpenPatrician Blog

OpenPatrician 0.7.0

Once again it is time for a new release of OpenPatrician. While this time there are no stunningly visual additions to the release, there are quite some important features in the release: The AI (artificial intelligence) for other players was implemented. While the term AI might be an euphemism in this case, it is just a question of naming. The AI is driven by a set of strategies that allow those player to decide what to do next. This part is also exposed as extension so plug-ins could provide their own strategy.

What is new

•   Plugin update infrastructure
• 13 additional cities (Aalborg, Edinburgh, Groningen, Ladoga, Malmö, Oslo, Reval, Ribe, Riga, Scarborough, Stockholm, Torun, Wismar)
• Blockade action handling
• AI trade engine with 4 different strategies for trading and several for repairing.
• Savegame format to be more memory effective.
• Introduce OpenPatrician Font.
• Many bugfixes

Now then what are those strategies?

here are strategies for

• Deciding if a ship should be repaired
• Deciding when to take a loan and which one. Currently there is only one implementation provided
• Deciding which ship to select to send for a blockade mission. Currently there is only one implementation provided and this strategy is not exposed through the plug-in extension
• Deciding how to trade

For the first and last point of the above list there are various implementations from which the player get’s one assigned. For repairing these are:

• Repair when the ship’s health is reduced to 80%
• Only repair the ship in the hometown
• Only repair the ship in the west of the map
• Only repair the ship in cities with a trading office
• Only repair the ship in cities of type KONTOR

The actual trading strategy are a bit more complex as the contain different trade steps. There are currently four different types of strategies:

• Supply the hometown with all needed wares
• Do trading along one of the predefined trade routes. Trade routes are defined in the map configuration
• Cheap production: Buy wares that are easily produced in the current city and sell them where they are needed. Repeat
• Production chain: Select a ware (secondary or even ternary ware) that needs other goods so that it can be produced (e.g. fish requires salt and hemp) and provide these required wares and sell the produced ware.

Each of these trade strategies are made up by trade steps:

• The most obvious ones are those for selling, buying and travelling.
• For the travelling to work the HireSailor step ensures that there are always enough sailors on the ship. In the future this step will be exposed as well, so the AI can then decide to have more sailors, make the ship an Orleg ship or to lead a convoy
• Then in each iteration (meaning in each city) the RepairCheck step figures out if the ship must be repaired and if so initiates it.
• It might be that the current strategy does not work out so well for the AI player and they need to take up a loan.

What’s the effect of this all?

The first point why this is important is to have a means to transport wares between the cities, that does not solely rely on the human player. Up until this point all cities consumed wares and produced some, but with no real trade between the cities there would be a time when the cities only have those wares that they produce themselves and the ones that are not consumed. And even some of the wares that are produced but need other wares as input that is not produced by the city as well will then eventually run out (if they are consumed in the city). So this is a means to have a more even distribution of the wares within the whole ecosystem. This in turn allows for a real gameplay. That is also the reason why the software is no longer labeled ‚prealpha‘, but ‚alpha‘.

Another reason that might be more important from the players perspective is that there is now some competition. While at the moment this competition is still very limited, it is a start non the less.

Another effect, or side effect if you will, is that when you are now sailing on the map you may encounter other ships that are also displayed on the map if they are in visual range.

Is there anything else?

Actually there is load of stuff. The most prominent however (because it is visible) are the added new cities:

Map with 24 cities

OpenPatrician now also has it’s own font, which is based on the previously used one, therefore there should not be any visual changes there, only now we can display italic and bold fonts through the font itself.

You might also check out the feature overview on YouTube:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq5e9ErMyrc[/youtube]

As well as the release itself: https://sourceforge.net/projects/openpatrician/files/OpenPatrician%200.7.0/