Hello

My bot is a 0% luck bot btw case you haven't noticed ;) I always expand with 3v2 and have no luck buffer in my calculations. I have to admit that I don't even know exactly know how to calculate the luck factor anymore without reading stuff like the Probability theory article on wikipedia. In WarLight I always use the analysis tool. I also don't know how the rounding luck in WarLight is calculated. I guess in theaigames.com no rounding luck is involved so the 100% luck feels less painful than 75% luck weighted random in WarLight.

However someone who's more into maths should be able to give a formula of the kind "if the Luck factor is A% and you attack with B armies a stack of C armies then you have D% chance of getting a good outcome (= killing more opponent armies / breaking opponent bonus)". Then you can adjust your strategy to something like that you accept a 20% chance of the opponent breaking you with a full force attack. I guess the 100% luck in theaigames.com means the same as when you play classic risk where you throw dices.

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/5379a4274b5ab25857385396

turn 17. 16 unable to take 7.. How I hate this luck...

Wow, lots of new posts since I last checked...

Anyway, turns out I'm not going to have time to finish my bot. I'll post some of the design ideas:

- The Bot tries to capture first Australia, then South America, then Africa and then the rest of the world. Apart from Australia and SA, other bonuses are too easy to spoil.

- Picks are always: all in Australia, all in SA, all in Afr. That gives 6 picks.

- Capturing Australia is most important. Even if you lose all territories in SA&Afr, you can march from Australia to that area in a few turns. This I hard-coded into the AI. It turns out that programming the opponent AI prepare for a big army attacking from Asia is difficult. Therefore Australia is better than SA.

- Deployments are determined by priorities. Australian territories as well as SA territories receive high priority. Territories with an enemy bordering receive a quite high priority. Territories with only friendly neighbors receive a very low priority.

- Attacks only happen if 7:6 advantage or higher is to be expected, even after 5 extra deployed troops by enemy.

- Troops stuck in areas with only friendly neighbors will be transfered to better places. Partially I hard-coded this, like from other SA regions you always go to Brazil, from Brazil to North Africa and so on. If no hard-coding present, then a breadth-first search will find the nearest enemy territory and transfer to that direction.

- Deployments to areas that already have big troop stacks are preferred.

- Estimate opponent income at 5. If it's more than 10, then the game is lost anyway. Income estimation by other means too difficult.

- Superregion importance hierarchy: Aus SA Afr Eur NA Asia

These were some of the most important thoughts I had when designing AI strategy.

Strategy hardcoded for map can give results, but for my oppinion it will be not true AI. I propose to raise level of abstraction and invent AI which will perform good in any maps. At least take a try. Maby not for this finals, but as ambitious task for future. Or, as variant, to make some generic core, and all map specific stuff separate in plugable module. So that bot can play without it, but, when map module is enabled - power of game on specific map will increase.

Up to now I had absolutely no hard coded strategy in my bot. But today I added a little, do deal with a few annoying scenarios like people rushing for Europe.

Is that lame?
Yes.

I want to win this though, like everyone else, so I'll swallow my pride and just toggle it off again after the finals :)

By the way, good luck everyone. I'm on holidays now and will be throughout the finals, enjoying the sunshine in a beautiful place in France and trying not to think about functions and strategies :D

Is that lame?
Yes.

I want to win this though, like everyone else, so I'll swallow my pride and just toggle it off again after the finals :)

No judgment here. I've started hard-coding against certain annoyances as well... I've even named a couple functions after the offending players :D

Trogatog:
If memory serves, you're not allowed to have any opponent-specific behaviour. Please double check the rules and make sure you're not breaking them!

Trogatog:
If memory serves, you're not allowed to have any opponent-specific behaviour. Please double check the rules and make sure you're not breaking them!

This is impossible to know. The only information you're ever given about your opponent is that they might be "player1" or "player2"

Annoyances I code are behaviors that I see that screw me. They're not specific to a certain bot, but I see them more in certain bots that I've played a couple hundred times.

Edited 5/21/2014 02:56:18

Looks like first 6 places of ladder are almost equal in game power. So if nobody untill 25 of May will not invent some 'super weapon', then it will be very tough competition.

Edited 5/21/2014 11:43:13

If Herz was better programmed this bot would have by far the best chances ;) At present he doesen't even know how to move stacks to the border though.

Edited 5/21/2014 13:09:57

Looks like first 6 places of ladder are almost equal in game power. So if nobody untill 25 of May will not invent some 'super weapon', then it will be very tough competition.

I'm just hoping I get enough matches for you guys to help me correct behavior that doesn't function as expected.

Of course, now that those bots that kept crashing the queue are gone, hopefully we'll see a lot more matches complete

Think I found the "super weapon" GreenTea was talking about:



Too. Freaking. Often.

Also, funny game of the day:

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/537d67044b5ab2583f23cea4

JUST DIE ALREADY!!!

Edited 5/22/2014 02:57:36

"http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/537d67044b5ab2583f23cea4"

hahaha xD

Somebody stop pedrito. He goes too far.

Edited 5/22/2014 20:23:11

Somebody stop pedrito. He goes too far.

I know! What happened to being on vacation, sir? How will we ever knock you out of this competition???

My vacation start tonight, after 23:59 :)

Moment of truth is fast approaching! Good luck everyone!

Well, for my bot there are no any major updates to code in last days, just some fixes. And those fixed didn't improved win rate against previous version (probably because in fixes I had added new bugs). So good luck for everyone, and let the strongest win!

Edited 5/25/2014 22:25:36

Once it's all locked down, shoot me a pm and I'll invite you to Trogabot's git repo for some good laughs at my lack of cleaning up my code base :)

"Blender" here guys, good luck all :). It surely has been a lot of fun! Just wanted to invite people to chat (http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=theaigames) now that we are all free to share our methods (some people were obviously liberal about it, but I decided I needed a bit more secrecy given my specific "europe" strategy). Since I felt the tactic sometimes comes a bit short, I realized I should still invest in the whole SA/AU business (which when I was top 40 was nice to avoid, but in the end became very interesting). Roughly 47% of the games will be played as Europe!

I am really curious to hear more about specifics of the guys around here! Especially near the end, pedrito: what did you do to have so many wins at the end?! Trogabot also made big changes and GreenTea also became very solid overall.

Similar to GreenTea, I used the approach of simulations. I basically load the information for 2 million cases during the game. You give it your own income, the enemy's income, your troop count and enemy troop count, and it will give you the probability for a successful defense or attack.
I have this exact data for lower than 400 troops and up to 24 income. Beyond these values I use some pretty accurate approximation (off at most like 3 troops). As GreenTea tried to argue, your linear method (troop_count * 1.167 or something) actually scales quite terribly! I actually posted on Stackexchange: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/91814/probability-enemy-territory-captured-in-x-turns might be interesting to someone.

My goal was to basically both attack and defend with at least 70% successful chance, given constant attack. I use a probability transition matrix for deciding where to defend for example.
The place where a troop is most valuable is where it would be placed then. Though, without Norman's assigning values to territories I still had a lot of strategy to write to guide this.

Furthermore, I was forced to write as good of a "One enemy region able to attack 2 of my regions in an owned super region" as possible for playing Europe. Against some people, it really makes a difference.


I really love how SA/AU games have evolved, especially GreenTea, Trogabot and pedrito have delivered some interesting games and really have made me step up my game!
The latest additions was dealing with you guys playing AUS game and attacking from Asia to USA. GreenTea: I hope you're not going to attack me from Europe when you discover a stack on the Asian border; approaching from Europe is wide and open (same for pedrito)! Furthermore, I will now "hide" the bonus from you guys so I hope you won't rush me ;)

I have always been at awe with every game of Norman/Dalek; you can't see him make stupid moves (ok, just really few)! And no matter how much we have worked at it the last few days, he's still upthere. Though lately I have to admit it holds for others as well. My bot is still pretty stupid, and I had to hardcode a lot of strategy. I do think my europe tactic is almost there :) I actually felt like the more changes I made recently, the worse it became :/

It will be very interesting to see, but I'm so afraid for silly bugs that might appear ... Again, good luck everyone, I know I'll be watching many games on the edge of my seat!

Edited 5/25/2014 22:56:26