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.

c# Timed Out error is back :( can't test anything else this evening :(

Timeout happens only for C# bots?

yes, afaik

Yup, it had something to do with them running two queues.

C# bots take a split second longer to load up due to the hooks into the GAC, but when some other bots that are running at the same time are requiring a lot more processing power, it caused that load-up to take more than 2 seconds. If you could see the output for the C# bots when they crashed, the preferred starting armies gets a null value set, then the first command sent to the game host for place armies is the actual string that was supposed to be the preferred starting regions move.

Frustrating when you're trying to figure out what new bugs you've introduced into your code and even the test match crashes :(

-cringe-

Yeah it's painful to watch. And it doesn't help very much when trying to determine if a loss is because the other bot played better or because he got luckier.

At least the problem with C# bots should be solved now, the time limit for picking starts is up to 10 seconds.

i also sometimes get "Timed out" error messages ruining the game mid game (without occuring on the first round).

getting harder to measure the results of recent changes. hope this gets fixed soon.

Trogatog, is that an actual game that you had? This is clearly going wrong somehow. Can you send me the link?

But on a very different note:

I'd really like your guys' help. You're probably fully aware that the finals are really close now and we are already working on new competitions. But we want to start working on a new Warlight AI Challenge as well. This time with different game settings though.

That's why I'm asking you all for suggestions now, because you know the game better than most. A lot better than me at least. The idea was to have the next competitions with more than 2 bots on the same map, probably 4-6 and then do a Free For All game. Fizzer suggested adding wastelands, which seems like a really good idea to me. But we also need a new (more balanced!) map.

So do you guys have any suggestions for new game settings and maps? All help would be most welcome.

i would like to see the same bot getting tested on different random maps, not just with wastelands.

so that the bots would be forced to calculate the strategy based on the initial map layout information instead of being hardcoded strategic guidelines. there will be a higher learning curve for new folks ofcourse, but i would also hope that the folks who worked on bots for this tournament would open source them, or atleast provide improved base bots for others to work with in the future. how many people are re-implementing A* path finding for example? these kind of well known algorithms and functions shouldn't be such of a timewaster for folks who want to focus on the strategic side of things. if folks like 125ch (who didn't have much prior coding experience) can pull off decent bots as it is, imagine what they could do if they didn't have to spend so much time coding the grunt work.

i dont like FFA myself, and real warlight FFA isn't actually much about expansion strategy itself but more about being able to form alliances and stabbing people in the back without getting yourself remembered as such (for future games), which with bots is much harder to accomplish unless you also implement a messaging system standard (public chat or private message) where they can message each other some instructions and the receiving bot is left to decide to use that information or ignore it. and/or persistent memory, to know who usually stabs you in the back and who usually keeps it honorable. although there is not much fun in being honorable when there can only be one, some FFA's in warlight usually end with vote to end, so the guys who got wiped out get a loss, and the ones who voted to end don't. while a win is always more precious.

Edited 5/9/2014 09:22:01

FFAs have a bad reptutation with the community. They were quickly removed from the real time ladder by popular demand. They are much less about playing strategy. Paradoxically most FFAs end up being decided by the worst player rather than the best. Bad players either get kicked from the game or play terribly giving those near them a game winning advantage.

If you want to put lots of bots on a map then maybe you should try team games with 2 teams. They could be decided by 'who gets the least bad teammate?' but that will always be a problem when you put more than 2 bots on a map together. You could try team games but each team is made up of bots all written by the same person. 3v3 Europe is often played between 2 players in that manner and is very dynamic.

Try the strategic 1v1 template! That way I wont have to work so hard writing a bot.

You say you want a more balanced map. I don't think balance is what you mean because any template you use will be balanced because both players start the game with the same things. Imbalanced implies one side has an advantage.