Trogabot vs psWarlighter:
http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/536746814b5ab235189fc2cd
Turn 4: An 8v2 neutrals attack should happen before an irrelevant transfer move.
Turn 10: Same problem with psWarlighter doing his transfers first and then attacking the neutrals. Didn't have any effect though.
--> Trogabot lost because of his turn 4 mistake.

Actually, it was a logic bug on turn 3 that was introduced yesterday :-/

Some of the glaringly obvious mistakes with Trogabot surprised me that others didn't take advantage of them. Stalemates are going to slowly go away (I've still got a little time!) now that I've started looking for extra income to use for expanding

Round 28: Estimated Opponent Income: 5

Round 28: Potentially 1 armies available on Argentina for seeking new income

Round 28: Potentially 4 armies available on EastAfrica for seeking new income

Stalemates are just an eyesore when I'm sitting in Africa alone....

Edited 5/5/2014 18:24:49

Most games up there are decided by luck IMO.

No, I disagree -- most aren't. Once in a while, sure. Then again, sometimes you just have to shake your had at the RNG:

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/536634a64b5ab235189faaca

i do wish the attack randomness wasn't so wide ranged. some of these games you just don't have a chance regardless if you do everything "right" or not.

Opinions are divided on the subject of luck. Good!

was thinking my bot was finally robust, but i seem to still lose against those folks who focus on SA and then stack on north africa while slowly expanding into north america. Even if i expand into asia it's usually too late. So i guess maybe it's time to rethink the idea that australia is safer.

Also noticed that some bots go for triple pick in europe when available, which i feel might be too risky, you will need to be able to defend double border against northafrica for a couple of turns, but somehow they manage to pull it off, i'm divided if they've just been lucky or what.

Hi All! I wonder, how many bots are writen only for this map, and will not work on other maps?
For me I can say that only hardcode connected with map is to select first 2 picks in Australia ( It's given 70% of wins against older version)

Edited 5/6/2014 12:50:10

Hello

I was probably to fast with anouncing my next generation bot. I don't have enough time at present. What I wanted to do is to add labels to each region allowing me to distinguish far more situations and giving my bot a better map understanding. For example he could tell quite precise when a stalemate situation occured.

@GreenTea:
It depends on how you define that the bot only works on this map. In my opinion there are three different map types:
- Huge expanding maps (Big Europe map, Eastern Asia)
- Balanced expanding / fighting maps (Medium Earth, Europe map)
- Fighting maps (Small Earth)

The more the map is foccused on fighting the better my bot works. The heuristic never to expand into two bonuses at the same time isn't good for all maps. Also I have a heuristic about when to use armies to expand into a bonus depending on whether I'm losing or winning and how much regions are still to take. Although this isn't hard coded this heuristic doesen't make sense on all maps. When I lose connection to the opponent then at present I walk strong into his direction. This works very fine on this small map. On a bigger map like medium earth you can't just build a big stack and march towards the opponent.

Hi, I understand and generally agree.

"The heuristic never to expand into two bonuses at the same time isn't good for all maps."
but if you implement some rule, when to expand on one, and when for more bonuses - then bot will be more map indepented.

"When I lose connection to the opponent then at present I walk strong into his direction." The same , could be possible to define whether it is needed to go to enemy with big stack or not.

But yes, probably this map is not require such checks and some strategies optimal for it could be hardcoded.

I didn't test bot on another maps, but it would be interesting. Small earth is too.. small :)

Norman your bot would do better on strat 1v1 than you think. Never expand in 2 bonuses and when you lose connection with your opponent walk strong into his direction are pieces of advice many players need to start following in their strat 1v1 games.

I agree with Norman. I tried to code my bot as map-independent as possible, but some of the rules that it follows just scale very bad with map size.
For example, my bot only considers bonuses for taking if no smaller bonuses are available (either because they are already owned or because they are disputed). This works well on small earth, but on any other map it's a recipe for disaster because I might simply not have any "smallest non disputed bonus" within reach, so the bot would not expand in this situation.

I sent Fizzer en email to see if we could maybe access the map data from some of the popular WL maps. If he agrees, it shouldn't be hard to feed them into the conquest engine and run our bots on some other maps for fun.

WOOOO!!! Thanks pedrito!

i know mine would require some changes to be more generic, but would definetely be cool to test it on other maps and keep working on it as an open source project :)

So interesting to know what generic features are implemented in your bots, and compare with mine. But lets wait untill finals. Competition should be fair.

lol, win by running away until the opponent's bot breaks down :D
http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/536a4af44b5ab23518a001fb

my bot ran out of expansion targets (since all superregions had already been taken atleast once) and that made it crash with an index out of range :D

fixed on v77 :)

Yeah, once the finals are on their way we can all have a laugh and pass around bots and beer bottles. But until then... no truce! :)

Regarding map data, Fizzer has pointed me here:

http://wiki.warlight.net/index.php/Query_game_API

With the help of this tool we can easily extract all the information needed to set up games on any map!

edit:
The Small Earth map seems to be hardcoded into the conquest engine in RunGame.java
makeInitMap() would need to be modified in a way it could parse a file in this format:
http://elsocio.es/maps/europe.txt
Ideally in a way that the map to be used could be specified from the command line the way you can specify the bots.
I have no experience with java, but I can probably get it done with enough time and persistence. As said before, it's no priority though until the finals start. And if any of you guys with plenty of java knowledge (Norman, GreenTea) is up for doing it I wouldn't complain either ;)



Also the game ps posted:
http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/536a4af44b5ab23518a001fb

Funniest game so far :)

Edited 5/7/2014 16:30:43

"http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/536a4af44b5ab23518a001fb"
It looks something like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUOe_hLg7Bo
xDD

Those are the best games, what do you mean?

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/5364f85f4b5ab235189f8ea1

unless it happens to you...

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/5368f2814b5ab235189fe812

Also the game ps posted:

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/536a4af44b5ab23518a001fb
Watching this game while playing "Yakety-Sax" just totally made my day :)

Edited 5/7/2014 20:28:23

http://elsocio.es/maps/europe.txt
its is json format which can be easily parsed on java.

So it should be no problem to convert it to model of the game. I see just 1 problem with some maps of warlight, that they support many bonuses per 1 region. In current game model region realated only to 1 bonus.