It sucks that it's announced so late and without any notice.. Its far to late to learn to program right now..

There are so meny great players who don't know how to program..

Edit: i see the few bots which were created early are already playing.. That means the later entries will enter with score handicap . Thats counterproductive as well..

Edited 3/18/2014 09:20:40

It sucks that it's announced so late

This is the very first contest, and it's still two months away. Plus there will be more contests after this one is over. It's just getting started -- it's not too late at all.

i see the few bots which were created early are already playing

The site's been in development for over a year. I don't know why it took so long, but it's received very little traffic/attention until now. As Piggy noted, most of the bots suck. I'm pretty sure it's not too late at all :)

That means the later entries will enter with score handicap

Right now it's just in the learning/experimenting mode. When the actual competition starts, it will be a tournament-style competition from scratch. The scores that you see now are just for improving your bot and won't impact the finals.

Edited 3/18/2014 09:30:54

Interesting.

I see one of the bots is already up to version 332, so I suppose they have been playing for a while :) I'd have guessed it was far too late too, but I saw the best bot in action and it did play important parts of the game at 5 income needlessly, so there's certainly room for much better bots. Question is of course whether anyone here at WL can make a better one in five weeks than these guys have done in a year. If finals were in October or something, I would have given it a go, but since they're right around the corner I don't think I'll have time for meaningful participation.

Do you think other bots than the standard AI will ever be allowed on WarLight?

Also: Is it played at 100% luck?

Edited 3/18/2014 09:46:40

If anyone can code and wants to split the money i will write you pseudo code in english. Im sure we will absolutely clean up.

I will keep it nice and simple. I read some posts in their forum from coders trying to win and I understand why their bots are so bad, none of them can actually play for shit. They are writing about the importance of scouting when most of their bots dont realise that if they can see all the territories of a bonus the no1 priority is completing that bonus. That is warlight 101.

Uh, mail me.

Question is of course whether anyone here at WL can make a better one in five weeks

The finals were recently pushed out - they aren't until the end of May. There might be a reference still on the site for the earlier date but if there is, it's wrong.

I'd bet that the winner of this competition will be a WarLight player, just because you guys understand the game better. But we'll see :)

I see one of the bots is already up to version 332, so I suppose they have been playing for a while

While bots can be tested locally, I think most people are just uploading their code to the server after every change. And even if your code doesn't build or has a significant bug, it still increments the version. As anyone who codes knows, it doesn't take much to get to 332 builds of an app when you're rapidly iterator. One could easily get this high in an hour or two. So a high version doesn't necessarily mean that it's been in progress for a while.

Edited 3/18/2014 10:14:59

i and some friends have read a bit and i cant find out how we can test our bots in privat. can you help me?

i cant find out how we can test our bots in privat.

I think most people are just uploading their bots to the server and testing them there. Also, you can copy/paste a game log into your local console to test a specific game against your bot locally.

But if you really want to run complete games from scratch on your own PC, you can download their build engine code and run it locally. See this post: http://theaigames.com/discussions/warlight-ai-challenge/52f4a5d65d203c41298b456b/conquest-engine-source-code/1/show

This can be useful if you want to run different versions of your bot against each other.

Edited 3/18/2014 10:45:16

Thanks :D

There is no fee to enter and the site has no ads. Where is this prize money coming from?

If I knew how to write an AI that were on par with top human warlight players, I would be a millionaire, probably even a billionaire. It's much more complex a task than what you would think.

That aside, writing an AI that can beat other AI's is much easier.

What exactly is the template theyre using? I am trying to create one but i cant work out:

Is it multiattack?
can we attack by %
can we transfer or attack only?
how is move order determined each turn?
the fog is "normal" right?
its played on an exact copy of "small earth" right?
the distribution mode is a custom distribution with 2 warlods per continent or "superbonus" as they call them?
3 starting picks with 2 armies on each with 5 base income per turn?
the luck is 75% weighted random?

I cant find out how to run my bot privately, I trying this on my MAC. I dont know what to do when I'm supposed to run the file. I tried to download the Conquest-engine but I dont know how to run it, help!

No multi-attack, no attack by percentage, no attack/transfer only, random move order, normal fog, no luck modifier (i.e. 100%), map is an exact copy of Small Earth, 2 starting armies on every territory with 5 base income, 3 picks for each player.

The distribution is a tricky one though, since it's essentially double random warlords (two random territories in each bonus.) This can't be done in WarLight exactly. You can either make a few custom scenario for a specific set-ups and test those, or you can just use full distribution or warlords to approximate it.

Also, terminology differs: a WarLight "territory" is called a "region", a "bonus" is called a "super region", and a "turn" is called a "round"

Edited 3/18/2014 12:57:39

I tried to download the Conquest-engine but I dont know how to run it, help!

EDIT: See this post http://theaigames.com/discussions/warlight-ai-challenge/531d912a5d203c346d8b45a4/compiling-java-source/1/show

Edited 3/18/2014 11:28:26

This looks like a brilliant idea, I can't wait to give this my best shot in C#. Thanks for the shout out to the contest on the home page Fizzer. Also, if anyone needs any help in C# feel free to ask me, but if you're learning the basics it would be best to Google "c# tutorials", or some similar concept, and start from there.

Hello, as bananashake asked. We got the answer on how to run the AI local. My only question is how do we run it? I am new to java :P

cool.

no mention of deadlines though.

I believe finals begin at the end of May. I think there will be more competitions after that, too, probably with different settings.

Edited 3/18/2014 12:38:48

If anyone is curious how well WarLight's AI would fare in this competition, the answer is... really badly.

But I uploaded it anyway, just for fun, with just one modification. You can see it play here: http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/game-log/crappybot/

The only modification I made was to make it prefer smaller bonuses. This helped, but its preference to expand over fight still causes it to lose a lot. It ends up wasting armies on neutrals when it should be defending/attacking the opponent.

This AI wasn't written to be competitive in a 1v1, so I knew it would perform badly. Thus, it's named crappybot. I may change it again in the future, so this post is only accurate as of v11.

i'm divided in several points: trying something with c# or asking for javascript. doing procedural, functional or implementing a behavior tree model. and if i have enough free time to do any of it properly. had been talking with dead piggy to do a collaboration, which would definitely help on the strategic value, but still wonder what might be the best technical approach. i did a few procedural ai's in the past, i know their limitations when it comes to higher complexity. i'm a bit rusty on functional programming, but it would be the best to translate real scenario strategy into an algorythm imho. and i been working with behavior trees a lot, but am not quite sure they are the best for strategic kind of ai's and how easy i can get my gui with a behavior tree lib for one of those languages supported working, a behavior tree might grow in complexity very fast. decisions decisions.

Edited 3/18/2014 13:17:24