AoS Army Harmonizer

http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/forum-rules.39/

 

First off, I would like to make it clear that personal attacks are not allowed on the forum, being direct or indirect. I have sent a warning to those in question.

I expect that everyone behaves from now, else we will be forced to close the thread.

If you do not want to receive feedback, why did you create the post in the first place?

Moving back to the topic of the thread, creating a system that automatically balances board game armies is possible, with the technologies we have available. However, no company that creates board games wants to spend the money on developing this (to my knowledge).

By using "AI" (or more accurate, a set of rules) you can have the computer play millions of games while collecting data, and then tweak the army rules before doing it again. After a few times, you will get a balanced set of rules.

To do this, you will need the ability to simulate an actual board game, so the "AI" is able to play the game, which makes collecting data possible.

Secondly, you need to have the ability to pass along the rule set in such a way that it can easily handle changes or specific unique features an army might have.

In short, while it is possible it requires a large amount of work initially, and then after you have the cost of the processing power/hardware used while the "AI" plays/balances the game.

However, if you feel like giving it a try, I would strongly recommend basing the army rules in a language like Lua, and then have the main software import the rules into a base model according to the rule imported. If you don't go this direction, you will quickly have more models than you can easily manage, and for each army added, you will significantly increase the complexity of the software, making every change/refactor from that point a task no one wants to undertake.

 

Edit: sorry @The Red Devil our posts overlapped. You are the boss.

....and not only rule #1 to be honest.
The key part is to _try_ to not violate them.

We are not the police and we don't want to act like them. There is some leeway for everything.

I know you are joking, but just to help someone who would ask the same in earnest:

The rule mainly refers to real life stuff, but yeah.

Violence is more tolerated than pornography in most parts of the world (and in the Warhammer universe) so the threshold is a bit different, but yes, this is neither PornHub.com nor Rotten.com and we expect users to respect that.

So far this works pretty well most of the time and we would like to keep it that way.

 

A very disgusting one from way back, I didn't check if it still exists. Should probably not have mentioned it...

Edit: phew, seems it doesn't exist anymore, or something is blocking it.

 

I think that - by far - the hardest part to judge is positioning.
IMO movement is what separates the mediocre players from the very best ones.

Seraphon is a great example. If you look at the Saurus Oldblood on foot: if you play large units of Saurus his command ability can be anything between completely useless and game-winning.
Same for Skinks. How do you judge their "Wary Fighters" ability? If you know what you are doing it will win you games. It certainly has won games for me. In literally everything else Skinks are just bad, but this one makes them viable.

 

Eventually yes, that's the other end of the spectrum.
But in the beginning (and probably for a long time) the AI would most likely be spectacularly bad.

 

Another issue is that game is played via battleplans. So you not only have to teach the ai to play army vs army in a "realistic manner", but you also have to program all the battleplans.

 

I think you underestimate the power of machine learning, with the proper system in the back and "AI" can evolve quickly "skill" wise due to the fact it can learn as quick as you throw money at it (i.e. hardware). Basically as long as you just throw enough resources on it, it could play millions of games in a matter of days, and through that, you get data you can use to improve the army rule set for human players.

After all, we are not looking for someone to challenge a human player per say, but to optimize the game rules and make them as fair as possible.
Being able to run X model, Y army against Z over and over again would be faster to do with a system like this in place, than through traditional means. However, the initial cost would be massive, which is why it is not utilized.

This means there is a potential market for software like this, as long as it's modular enough to support other board games easily. However, the market is very niche, and the risk of not earning the investment back is higher than the chance for you earning on the software.

This all depends on what you allow the "AI" to do and know, it would be very simple to add a rule on a specific "AI" model where it randomly does a slight misplacement like a human player could do.

In the scenario/case we are discussing, this would be a rather trivial matter compared to the other parts. These should be created similar like army rules in Lua (or another side language/format), both to remove complexity away from the main software, but also to make it possible for someone with no knowledge of the actual software to add content for the simulations.