GreenTea: You basically describe what I did :-). And yea, my main issue was that I was afraid it wouldn't work and therefore I also coded SA strategy, which in my case was not as good as you guys' solution. Btw, it would be nice if your bot would lose some and let me be first for a bit so I'm first in both Poker and Warlight ;D

The thing that made Europe work in the end was choosing a region in SA. That really slows you down. I added this a day before final, but I hadn't anticipated that it would mean my troops would arrive quickly on North Africa, and then either run into your big stack that was used for capturing SA, or my troops would even run away if encountering an uncaptured brazil (none of this happened in my earlier version where I did not choose a dummy region in SA. the issue with a dummy in SA was that Dalek was coming for me from Australia at a high speed. at that time I still tried to capture Brazil rather than just settle for North Africa. The correct order is: north africa->indonesia->brazil->greenland)! I now fixed that simply and it's working great.

I chose the name Ikalgo here as it is the name of an octopus in a show that I like. I see the Europe strategy as an octopus; Europe is the body, it extends his tentacles to NorthAfrica/Brazil, Australia and to North America ;) It has to mainly protect his body, but also the endings of his tentacle haha.

Main struggles:

- Protecting Europe TwoVOne (I now implemented something that tries to counter you guys)
- Expanding in Europe

Edited 2014-06-20 20:49:34

Already looking forward to season 2... random maps should be great fun!

Now you guys can feel my pain. Will it blend, YES!




PS. someone update their bot to pick Europe spots plskthx.

Yea, it's funny that I haven't seen a Europe bot in the whole competition... Kewakareban is the closest to it; he sometimes captured Europe quite fast.

It's a great day for me -- first time in warlight on #1, and at the same time Poker #1 :)

Edited 2014-06-22 11:18:06

I seem to remember getting beat early in the qualifiers by SunTzu with a Europe strategy, he didn't do it half as well though and failed to climb in the ranks. Gave me some early loses though before I climbed out of his range. Then I got paired up with Blender twice and had no chance. And now he's refined it to dominate everyone until someone can update to counter-pick him and toss him out of his comfort zone. Not sure what he does when others take a spot in Europe. He's dominating right now though. Currently has a 15 win streak.

The point is that people can take a region in Europe, I will fallback to my old SA tactics (if I own less than 2 regions in Europe). It would certainly be an upgrade in odds, but that would also mean that those who counter-pick will have less chance against ALL other bots, since why would you want your choice to be in Europe against other bots, if not playing Europe yourself?

There are better ways to deal with Europe :-)

Edited 2014-06-22 15:22:04

Europe is a weak strategy that doesen't need to be explicitely countered since it should always lose when the opponent plays proper warlight gameplay ;)

The problem is that at present there aren't any bots with a next generation map understanding. However when the opponent bot takes Australia and he sees you not deploying in South America then he needs to find out under which circumstances he will lose. North America / Asia will give him an auto win. Also Africa is worse than his position if he takes South America. So to not lose this won position he has to go strong into North Africa before fighting in South America / taking South America. This seem to be to difficult to implement without hardcoding but I don't really think so. Even without exploiting this special map you need to realise that this is a small fighting map and have to write your code accordingly. Without stalemate situations you aren't supposed to expand at all and you need to crush the opponent instead of building your own empire.

I agree that it can be countered. That's why I chose to play 50-50 SA/EU tactics in the first place, since I wasn't trusting EU anymore (seems like that was a mistake for now). Considering that next-gen won't be around the corner (especially for the majority of bots), it might make sense to explicitly look for a counter to it, though. But hey, I'm not complaining :P

Edited 2014-06-22 19:39:27

"It's a great day for me -- first time in warlight on #1, and at the same time Poker #1 :) "
congratz :)
Its a pity that poker thematics not interesting to me..

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a7abda4b5ab20b4222821d

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a79d5a4b5ab20b42228103

Gadzbot to the rescue, dominated!

GreenTea too: http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a7b25e4b5ab20b422282a9

Think that's why I'm so weak against the Europe strategy. Seemed a weak strategy and didn't give it much thought, but it dominates when you're not prepared to counter it.

Edited 2014-06-23 05:16:21

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a9e1e54b5ab20b4222a7f4

What can I say, I laughed :)

There are better ways to deal with Europe :-)

I agree:

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a953454b5ab20b42229f3f

Although in this particular game my bot decided to check North America first, then keep on keepin' on.

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a953454b5ab20b42229f3f
haha. here is hardcode nature at the glance.

http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a953454b5ab20b42229f3f
haha. here is hardcode nature at the glance.

Nope -- my bot was trying to find the other player given I only knew 1 region he had and not 2 picks in obvious locations (best super regions).

The algorithm sought out the regions in the engine's pickable starting regions given that I expected to have more income than the other bot on turn 3 (finishing SA wasn't a priority).

Although, there was a flaw there in that it didn't check Africa first, but it still worked out :)

@Trogtog: I don't think GreenTea meant your bot.

Anyhow, here you got crushed by a really hardcoded bot:
http://theaigames.com/competitions/heads-up-omaha/games/53ab7eeb4b5ab20b4222c400
He is called OneLiner since he only consists of one line of code (apart from the engine stuff). I never played poker in my life, don't know the poker rules and have little intention in learning them.

>> I don't think GreenTea meant your bot.
Yes. Im about Blender, when he come to North Africa with 20 army and then just stop after not seeing enemy..

Yes. Im about Blender, when he come to North Africa with 20 army and then just stop after not seeing enemy..

Ahhh, gotcha. My mistake! :)

Anyhow, here you got crushed by a really hardcoded bot:

Yes, my bot is not smart by any means. I just programmed enough to (mostly) beat the starter bots that are in the queue right now.

Edited 2014-06-26 16:42:53

Norman, there are currently 4 exact same bots like your "OneLiner" bot in that competition :P

On the contrary, having learned from this competition (thanks guys!) I wrote my bot in the most general way with some opponent modelling and it really works well!

Edited 2014-06-26 20:45:51

Hello

I just uploaded my bot at github:
https://github.com/Norman1/SupremeDalek

You can use my code to write your own bot or improve your bot. The code should be relatively easy to understand and I wrote lot's of comments.

Those who followed the AI challenge might have noticed that I stopped updating my bot long before the finals. It was to time consuming for me. However I'm still interested in designing a warlight AI capable of beating an average human player. For me it's about the beauty of seeing my bot play not primarily about the competition. If you wrote a hardcoded bot your bot does exactly as you tell him. However SupremeDalek consists of lot's of small heuristics and when working together they result in smart warlight play capable of solving situations that I haven't thought about when writing my bot.

https://github.com/Norman1/SupremeDalek/blob/master/src/model/MapModel.java
method calculateEnemySuperRegionsFromDeploymentInput
nice for loops xD

https://github.com/Norman1/SupremeDalek/blob/master/src/basicAlgorithms/DistanceToOpponentBorderCalculator.java

Much easy to implement this functionality using general breadth-first search with passing callback which will be triggered on every visited region (pattern visitor).