Yeah maybe. Though a perfectly good explanation would be:

You pick A B C D E F

He picks B C D E F A

You get picks 1,5,6
He gets 2,3,4

Hello
That's not how distribution in Warlight works. Not sure how it worked in this AI-Challenge.
Works just as in warlight. First give player A highest prio pick, then player B highest available prio pick, then player A second highest available prio pick,...
--> Rotating between the players is all you need to get the warlight behavior.

@Jim:
I don't know how you are gonna generate those random maps. Here are however some thoughts about a good map:

Big bonuses are more worthwile than small ones in terms of income territory ratio. For example
2 regions --> 1 income
3 regions --> 2 income
4 regions --> 3 income
5 regions --> 5 income


With your map design you can determine whether the games will be huge stacking games or games with crazy action. The more open the map is the more action we will see in the games.

Also when you make multiple relatively small bonuses instead of just a couple big bonuses you will get more action and more back and forth. With the current small earth map when one bot manages to break a bonus of another bot it's usually game over.

I only played this map once but I can't name a better map for competitive warlight play:
http://warlight.net/SinglePlayer?PreviewMap=34052
This map is of course to big but it has the right principles. With such a balanced map also automatic distribution is a possibility. I can't understand those guys keep playing the ordinary europe map with auto distribution.

@Jim
Are you going to keep the 100 turn limit with this new competition? Which would limit you to keeping the maps rather small, but this would be your opportunity to change that limit and have the AIs play on some larger maps. Also are you going to strictly use generated maps or have you considered using some of the currently existing maps in the pool? As there are many you could use.

"Works just as in warlight. First give player A highest prio pick, then player B highest available prio pick, then player A second highest available prio pick,...
--> Rotating between the players is all you need to get the warlight behavior."

Wrong.

Warlight does not distribute picks as you described.

It does: ABBAABBAAB, not ABABABABAB.

Specifically, the reverse picks are given reverses every round, so in s1v1 it is:

AB
BA
AB

Ah yes, you are right. Of course that's the way stuff works, the order is swaped.

Edited 7/20/2014 06:02:21

@Doushibag
I'm not sure yet what we're going to do with the turn limit. Some maps are definitely going to be larger than the current one, so we're either going to make the limit larger on all maps or somehow dynamically change it per map. And if the generated maps turn out the be awesome then we'll only use those. If not we're going to have to change the plan completely.

Thanks for your map suggestions guys :)

If I may suggest something, Europe and ME maps are cool, but I don't think they would work well when it comes to random map generator. I think, that if we're talking about AI challenge, some regular shapes would be the best choice. I would consider hexagons (like this one: http://warlight.net/Map?ID=6619 but much smaller). Then I would randomly add empty spots all around the map and randomly connect adjacent territories with groups of 6-2 territories
(6 = +5 bonus
...
2 = +1 bonus)

I think that's the easiest way to solve it. Both for you and for bot programmers.

@Pedrito

I love it! It's what I imagined happening in Warlight single player when the AI challenge was announced. Now all that it needs is anonymous bots with different strategies (Didn't 125ch209, Norman and Trogatog post their source code?) and you'll create a real challenge.

@Jim
Also please use all possible shapes of bonuses

i.e.
from:
O-O
| |
O-O

to:
O-O-O-O
second is harder to capture, and bots should take this into accout.

+ you can analyze how many neighbours in average has regions of popular warlight maps (already posted in this thread) and use same value as mean value of neighbours count.

versions of battle islands iv, turkey and medium earth would be nice (and are fairly known to warlight players since they were all used in the seasonal ladders).

like greentea was mentioning, there should be a balance in maps that have more linear (i.e. safer, with less connections, easier to defend) territories, and multiple borders. battle islands and medium earth has a mix of both, turkey is entirely the second. europe is known for the importance of the north islands because they are safer to hold then getting similar income areas in the center and south.

and i completely disagree with Latnox, using regular shapes would just be boring.

Now all that it needs is anonymous bots with different strategies (Didn't 125ch209, Norman and Trogatog post their source code?) and you'll create a real challenge.

Yeah that would be awesome :) But a lot more complicated as well. My own was easy because it's written in PHP and therefore doesn't need to be compiled or executed in order to make it run on a website.

But I still hope Fizzer will eventually incorporate one of the bots into Warlight.

Here's a little teaser for you guys. I've been working on the next Warlight AI competition and so far I'm really happy with how it's going. The image below are 4 screenshots of what the maps in the next competition will be like. They are randomly generated as promised :)

Keep in mind that it's still a work in progress, but let me know what you guys think.



Connections between the islands still have to be made somehow, that's my next step.

Hello Jim

OK, I have been thinking a couple minutes about those four maps and here are my thoughts:

- Aesthetics seems nice though not my field of expertise and I don't really care.

- The shapes of the bonuses / territories are very good so far. Some bonuses have a strategic advantage over other bonuses since they border multiple territories of the other bonus but not vice versa. I see the opportunity for trick moves where you stack against your opponent and then move your stack away to threaten another territory making the stack of your opponent useless.

- How the islands play out depends on how many connections you make between them and the other land masses. Looking just at a single island however it's not possible anymore to just sit the opponent out at a strategically strong position (North Africa at Small Earth map). However there still are strategically strong positions but holding such a position isn't a an automatic game winner anymore.

- I don't agree with the size of the bonuses. It seems like Asia in the Small Earth Map inspired you to make 11 territories maximum. However in the Small Earth map bonuses like the 9 territory North America only come into play when there is a stalemate. Since this time the maps seem to be more open I only expect some local stalemates when someone is holding a strong position but there shouldn't be any global stalemates anymore. With a global stalemate I mean a situation where both players can neither attack nor flank the other player. In this map the big bonuses will probably only come into play to cross them while it isn't worth fighting for them. This will take much of the action out of the game. In the Medium Earth map the biggest bonuses have 7 territories. If you cap the max territories per bonus at a lower level the games will play out completely different and much more interesting.

Jim, its Amazing!
Agree with Norman in all his thougths.

Additionally could say that big bonuses could be playable not only on maps with possible stalemates, but also on bigger maps. Actually this demo maps are very small. Normal map size is 90-150 regions. Above normal map size 150-200. And big maps is >200. I would expect maps with different sizes.

Small issue: bonus income is not currently displayed. Maby you can display it in some small circle inside bonus (somewhere in border of regions inside bonus)? Or it could be tooltip when hover mouse over any region of bonus (but it is not so clearly for human).

Also you can think about adding cyclic connections of bonuses, its when most left bonuses on map connected with most right, and most top bonuses connected with most bottom. It gives more freedom in piking, because without this connections picks in center of map would give more advantage, then picks in some corner (more space for expand -> more quick expand).

But currently very good job, keep on!

Edited 8/3/2014 15:22:32