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[WanderingWinder]

This recent topic sparked a lot of debate, and so I figured, hey, why not let the simulators figure it out? Also, I've been meaning to run a simulation tournament anyway. So, here's the challenge: make a bot using whatever the heck you want*, starting in an average case scenario (you can make it do different things based on how you start, but no special start state!), to beat all the others. Now, a few caveats. You only get to reference up to 5 different kingdom cards (plus whatever basics, colony, platinum, and potion), so that in any given matchup, a 10 card set can actually be made out of the clash from any two of these bots. Furthermore, I'm going to go ahead and ban vault, Bishop, torturer, young witch, and possession. Vault, Bishop, and torturer because it's really annoying for the opponent not to be able to make the 'correct' decision in response, as you can't do in the simulator, young witch because the bane is such a big deal and the opponent can't know what it is, and possession because, well, how do you know what you're doing with their deck if you have no idea what their deck is? I don't actually think any of these cards would be used in a winning submission, but I do regret having to prohibit them. If you want to lobby me with some great reason to allow them, here in the thread or via PM, I'm listening. Also if there's some other card that I've missed that I really oughta ban.

Specifics: Each person can submit up to three, that's 3, yes 3 different bots. You can't have any more than one card of your five overlapping between two sets; i.e. I can have herbalist in set A, secret chamber in set B, and both in set C, but I can't have secret chamber AND herbalist in two of my three sets. Submissions should be sent to me via PM no later than midnight GMT on the night of April 21st-22nd, 2012. I'll try to post the results sometime later that week. If I get too many entries, I may do some quick pruning of what seem to be weak bots before pitting them against each other in the finals. Hopefully it won't come to that, but I will at least look at and test every bot that comes in. The finals will be round-robin, starting with 10,000 game trial runs. Anything within 5% will get re-run at 100,000, and if it's within 1%, I'll rerun it to probably 300,000. Things that are exceptionally close (i.e. like a tenth of a percent after 300,000 runs) will just get called ties. All bots should be in Geronimoo's simulator.


I think that's everything, though I may update this post later with more info.

[WanderingWinder]

I won't be participating this time, since I'm running it, though I do have a few home-brew 3- and 4-card combos that are pretty strong. But as a word of note to all you guys, there's one built-in strategy in the sim that's about the toughest thing to beat that I've seen.....

[Tables]

I was thinking about this, actually. More specifically, about if everything is available, does every strategy have a suitable counter-strategy (something that beats it at least a majority of the time)? My intuition says, yes, probably. But I can't know for sure.

I might try and whip something up for this.

[blueblimp]

I feel like it will be very hard to make a lot of interesting engines work without custom play rules. For example, in the original thread, it was suggested that maybe KC/Goons/Masquerade would do well, but I'm pretty sure this is impossible to code in Geronimoo's simulator. (Not that I'm claiming this would actually do well. It's just an example.)

So I'd suggest maybe having a parallel tournament in Dominate, so that entrants can write for whichever simulator suits best. Dominate is missing some cards, and its default play rules are worse than Geronimoo's, but it is very customizable and should support all sorts of strategies.

(I'm biased here because I suspect that rush strategies will come out on top if custom play rules aren't possible, and I'm pretty bad at rushes.)

[Young Nick]

I will not be competing, but I must admit I am confused by Possession being prohibited. Sure, it is probably not useful in most solutions, but if someone can play it reliably (I'm thinking Golem, Scheme, and/or KC as enablers) then what's the big deal? If it slows down simulations a ton, I understand, but otherwise, there seems no reason to exclude it.

[blueblimp]

On second thought I'm not sure whether I'm up to tweaking Dominate play rules enough to actually do really crazy stuff there. So maybe ignore my suggestion of a parallel Dominate tournament.

[DStu]

Submissions should be sent to me via PM no later than midnight GMT on the night of 21st-22nd, 2012.

Nice you specify the year, but wouldn't the month be more important first
/scnr

Serious question: May/Should we assume Colonies?

[DG]

The bishop might be worth prohibiting as well. It again derails many strategies when it offers free trashing to the opponent.

[WanderingWinder]

blueblimp: I'm aware that custom play rules will make for much better results. Though a rush strategy, I assure you, will be required to win - you're just going to be rushing different things
Young Nick: the problem is not that that can't be strong or somehow isn't fair, it's that... great, so now I've possessed your deck. The problem is, I don't know what kind of deck you're running. So I'll do more or less exactly what you would do, which sometimes is great, but other times is terrible. For example, you're playing some wharf-based deck. This is pretty good for me, I buy lots of the colonies that you're going for. On the other hand, you're playing a goons-based deck. This is terrible, I'm basically giving you an extra turn of attacking me and accumulating VP chips. So, it does really wacky things based on matchups, having very little bearing in lots of cases on what would actually happen in a game.
DStu: Thanks for catching that, whoops. Secondly, yes, colonies always in play (part of every card) as implied here:

You only get to reference up to 5 different kingdom cards (plus whatever basics, colony, platinum, and potion)

DG: Bishop is gone, thanks.

[DStu]

as implied here:

Upps, sorry.

[Geronimoo]

This is cool... But please ban Ironworks as well...

[DStu]

This is cool... But please ban Ironworks as well...

?

[Geronimoo]

Ironworks is too much work and it's not defined as a terminal action, so Crossroads gets played after the Ironworks

[theory]

I would think Ironworks is a pretty important card here, though ...

[blueblimp]

Gotta keep Ironworks I'd think, but I empathize with difficulty getting turns to play correctly.

[DG]

Embargo might be worth prohibiting since it will produce unpredictable results. The effects will be purely determined by the opposition script : "will look through buy rules of opponents until it finds a card that is not yet Embargoed and isn’t present in its own buy rules, then puts an Embargo token on that card’s pile."

[blueblimp]

Embargo might be worth prohibiting since it will produce unpredictable results. The effects will be purely determined by the opposition script : "will look through buy rules of opponents until it finds a card that is not yet Embargoed and isn’t present in its own buy rules, then puts an Embargo token on that card’s pile."

Why is that a reason to ban Embargo? That's a reasonable approximation of how a human would play it.

[DG]

For one thing, it gets very difficult to make purchasing conditions when you don't know how many + and - points you get for buying a card. It also weighs very heavily in favour of card gaining and alternative vps.

[Geronimoo]

If you have Embargo in your buy rules, that means you'll only have 4 cards to build your deck, so I doubt the Embargo is going to be worth it very often.

[WanderingWinder]

On the other hand, in a real game, you can switch up your strategy to not buy those embargoed cards as often. Or not, if the curses aren't so big a deal. Also, if you're opening embargo, which is the thing that would make sense here, you may not know what your opponent is going for/be able to embargo the right thing. So I'm inclined to get rid of it. But as you say, Geronimoo, I doubt it's going to be important. So, I guess we'll go with banning it, just so people don't have to worry about it. But if somebody tries to tell me that embargo is critical to their strategy... by all means.
The ironworks thing... seriously Geronimoo? Can't get rid of ironworks. It's too important in too many different strategies. If you don't like the play priorities, you have to work to get around it. That it's in the simulator is part of the challenge, and the part that means this won't really answer the question in the thread I reference in the OP. Wait a a minute... Geronimoo? If YOU don't like the play priorities, change them!

[blueblimp]

My argument for retaining Embargo is that if you remove every card that an opponent might play sub-optimally against, you're left with almost nothing. (For example, in an engine, you have to decide on which type of village you want. If your opponent is doing some kind of Vineyards strategy and decides to mass the same type of village you chose, you're doomed. Does this mean villages should be banned?)

And furthermore, if it's usually bad, well then all the better if someone finds a way to use it well. I'm not currently using it, but earlier I found it useful for one of my bots.

Also, the worst possible damage that could be caused by Embargo is that you get some curses you weren't planning on. The same thing could happen if your opponent buys an IGG.

[Geronimoo]

Does it matter if I beat a bot by 2% or by 20%?

[Geronimoo]

While testing the mirror match of one of my strongest bots, the game would very often end up with a pin where one player gets his hand reduced to 0 and 5 cards of his deck gone each turn. Totally not meant to do it, but still cool to see this happen.

[WanderingWinder]

Does it matter if I beat a bot by 2% or by 20%?

Nope. Just win, baby.

[DG]

I think my scripts will end up more complicated than WW's entries for the pairs, and that's even after making some very broad generalizations. There are just too many conditions to cover. Some suggestions for improving condition clauses will be going Geronimoo's way!

[Geronimoo]

I think my scripts will end up more complicated than WW's entries for the pairs, and that's even after making some very broad generalizations. There are just too many conditions to cover. Some suggestions for improving condition clauses will be going Geronimoo's way!

This probably means you're trying to win mirrors, which means you have a clear best deck, which means I should be tuning mine to death as well, which means I won't bother anymore.

[WanderingWinder]

I think my scripts will end up more complicated than WW's entries for the pairs, and that's even after making some very broad generalizations. There are just too many conditions to cover. Some suggestions for improving condition clauses will be going Geronimoo's way!

This probably means you're trying to win mirrors, which means you have a clear best deck, which means I should be tuning mine to death as well, which means I won't bother anymore.

Not necessarily. Lots of my tuning was to win the mirror, but lots of it was to win against different things that might come up (i.e. the fool's gold/wharf decks I expected, other things that scrambled for provinces, whatever). And here, there's lots of different things to tune against.

[DStu]

I think my scripts will end up more complicated than WW's entries for the pairs, and that's even after making some very broad generalizations. There are just too many conditions to cover. Some suggestions for improving condition clauses will be going Geronimoo's way!

This probably means you're trying to win mirrors, which means you have a clear best deck, which means I should be tuning mine to death as well, which means I won't bother anymore.

I'm not sure if that means it. I have a quite simple script which wins against everything I could imagine, but there are lots of situations I can imagine that it would not deal well with. I just can produce no bot that gets it into such a situation, but it might exist. Maybe some bot uses the same key cards, but an completely different approach. Anyway, it would be a good idea to defend against it. But every simple change will let me loose the mirror.
So not the mirror is the problem, but some unknown situations that may happen, and in order to win both I would have to bloat the bot.

[Geronimoo]

One thing that isn't clear yet: does the person who has the best average record for the 3 bots win, or the person with the 1 bot that beats the rest or something else?

[DStu]

One thing that isn't clear yet: does the person who has the best average record for the 3 bots win, or the person with the 1 bot that beats the rest or something else?

I don't even have an idea for a second bot...

[DG]

I've got too many ideas. I'm just going to have to take a punt on a couple of themes and develop them. Unfortunately you can't really get a measure of some decks without getting the vp purchasing/gaining right and that can be hideously complicated.

[WanderingWinder]

One thing that isn't clear yet: does the person who has the best average record for the 3 bots win, or the person with the 1 bot that beats the rest or something else?

Bots are judged individually. So if you enter three, you can get first, 5th, and 8th (assuming there are eight entries).
You also don't have to enter more than one.

Finally, if you guys want it enough, I might extend the deadline.

[blueblimp]

While testing the mirror match of one of my strongest bots, the game would very often end up with a pin where one player gets his hand reduced to 0 and 5 cards of his deck gone each turn. Totally not meant to do it, but still cool to see this happen.

Very cool, I'd love to see this bot once the submissions are in. I gave up on trying any strategy that intends to trash all non-actions because the play rules make it awkward.

[DG]

Is anyone else finding that some heavy swindler/jester/ambassador decks are impossible to run for a number of simulations? The hourglass comes up and win percentages clear but that's it. You can continue working in the simulator and open sample games but that simulation never completes. Maybe that's the key to making an unbeatable deck.

[Geronimoo]

that's weird. The simulations don't run on a separate thread so you shouldn't be able to do anything else while it's still running. Could you send me your script (pm)?

[WanderingWinder]

Also, having received only one submission at this point, I'm going to extend the deadline... indefinitely at the moment. Person who submitted (you know who you are), feel free to tweak and resubmit. Everyone, let me know if you actually want to stick something in here, or whether your interest is theoretical at best.

[DG]

I'll submit some decks. The problem is that there are so many possible decks that you can't rule anything out and say a script is finished. The decks are also a bit extreme and put the simulator play rules under a lot of pressure. Finding the irregularities takes time too. I don't mind if the deadline remains at tomorrow.

[DStu]

Also, having received only one submission at this point, I'm going to extend the deadline... indefinitely at the moment. Person who submitted (you know who you are), feel free to tweak and resubmit. Everyone, let me know if you actually want to stick something in here, or whether your interest is theoretical at best.

I'll of of course let the others decide, but I'm not sure if extension is neccesary. If I wasn't quite sure that I have no time this evening and tomorrow to play with the script, I wouldn't have submitted it yet, although the main part was ready last week.
But as DG says, there's so much you can try and tweak, that there always can be some idea for an improvement, it was just that this morning it felt more likely to forget or have no time to submit than to improve, so I sent it.

But of course there is not much point in just having two scripts, so if no one else is this far, just extend it.

[Geronimoo]

I'd rather you keep the deadline. Some people will otherwise keep tweeking their bots to infinity and I'm not sure we're going to learn all that much from that. And there's only a handful of players who do these more complex simulations (it's not like a big money deck is going to win this) so I wouldn't expect many entries anyway.

[WanderingWinder]

Well, I say indefinitely now... but probably it would be ~ a week. If nobody suggests interest in submitting... well then it's moot. If people do, they should do it quickly (before tomorrow!), when I guess I'll make my decision.

[DG]

I think for this challenge anyone can have a go. Most decks will have an Achilles heel and it might be fun to find them.

[blueblimp]

I have 2 I'm going to submit. I was holding off on submitting until I made a 3rd and checked that they all work reasonably against each other.

[Galzria]

I thought about it. I love playing around in the simulator, but just the thought of not only producing a solid 5 card deck, with all contingent buy/play rules (well, play rules within the simulator's ability), but ALSO adding in code to account for the times when my opponent's bot may choose to share a card or two with me is just mind numbing. Assuming that you can gain more than 5 of any given card on a pre-created board of semi-strong cards (or at least high synergy) seems like a set-up to failure to me ... and some** of the strongest setups only work when amassing the card in question.

I'll be very interested in seeing the results once they're posted however, since the challenge was (is) very intriguing.

[blueblimp]

I love playing around in the simulator, but just the thought of not only producing a solid 5 card deck, with all contingent buy/play rules (well, play rules within the simulator's ability), but ALSO adding in code to account for the times when my opponent's bot may choose to share a card or two with me is just mind numbing.

Just don't worry about it. There are enough powerful cards that you will face some bots that you don't overlap with. I'm not too worried about fine optimization since it's just for fun anyway.

[WanderingWinder]

Okay, so since I've actually gotten a flood in today, I'm going to probably limit my extension to whenever I go to bed Sunday evening (about the time anyone in Europe might be waking up, if they're early risers, on Monday). Unless somebody really feels like begging...

[WanderingWinder]

Entries closed. I'll try to get results sometime around this coming weekend.

[WanderingWinder]

Okay. So some good news and bad news. Good news first. There are several quite different bots, and it's pretty darn interesting stuff. Nice variety, nice matchups, it's good. Yes. Huzzah.
Bad news. We've got some rules violations (I don't mean to imply that this was purposeful cheating - I'm sure they were oversights of some form or another). Of course, I missed them until I was most of the way through checking things. One competitor who submitted multiple entries did so specifying start states. I.e. he specifies getting a 4/3 split in one of his bots, specifies getting 5/2 in another. Second thing is that one of the competitors used two of the same cards in two of his different bots, i.e. he used both transmute and thief in bot A, and he used both transmute and scout in bot B. Third problem is that two of the matchups broke the simulator.
Now, the person who specified the start states- this is going to be a clear advantage. One of his bots was super super strong, and definitely is medalling (but not winning) if we allow it. But that doesn't really seem fair. Another one of his bots ticked what is otherwise the winning bot for its only loss. Also, this one is the one that has both matchups that are breaking the simulator.
What I could do is try to re-do these bots, to take out the start state restrictions, and re-run it. But that's going to probably push back the results be a week, apart from being a big pain for me personally. I also doubt it will solve the problem of the simulator breaking.
On the person with two bots using too many of the same cards - the thing is one of these two was one of the two worst bots in the contest, and the other was middle-of-the-pack. So I could toss them both out, toss the weaker one out, or leave them both in. I'm inclined to do the latest one, since it doesn't really make a difference, and this way I don't have to re-tabulate all the results, AGAIN. Also, it should be noted that, despite the presence of two of the same cards, the two bots play pretty differently.

Finally, there's a question of what to do about tiebreakers. Places, I had imagined, would go to whoever does best (i.e. wins the most matches) in the round robin. But how to break ties? There are a few ways I can think. Head-to-head matchup, or overall win% across games. Doesn't make much difference to me.


So, what do you guys want me to do here?

[DG]

I specified the start states. Just remove those and the good script should continue anyway with a 4/2 start. I'll withdraw the script that breaks the simulator if need be. The third one was only a curiosity anyway (although it would have been stronger if I'd submitted the version that I knew broke the simulator with the other one!).

[RaVeNLoRD]

This is all very interesting, Can't you post the bots in the mean time until you have the results?

[DStu]

At the moment, I'm more interested in the results than in fairness.

[blueblimp]

I'm mostly just interested to see what sorts of crazy bots people sent in, so just do whatever involves least effort, in my opinion.

[WanderingWinder]

Ok, since nobody seems to care that much about things, and since I don't have a lot of time to sink into re-doing everything soon, I'm just going to post the results. I've attached a file with all the bots that were submitted. Check out the bottom of the post.
Results, in alphabetical order:
Bot                                                                                            Record                      Overall percentage
CQMBWO By DG                                                                            9-2                           73.87
Dstu-Chapel/Quarry/GM/Highway/Outpost                                      6-5 (5-3)                     52.08 (54.11)
Drunk Marine Students 5                                                              2-9 (2-6)                     28.88 (36.81)
Go SMoKL by DG                                                                           6-5                            49.02
Goons/Governor/Quarry                                                               1-10 (1-7)                  19.49 (24.05)
Ill-Gotten Gains/Gardens/Council Room                                           3-8 (2-6)                     28.14 (30.64)
Ironworks Rush                                                                            10-1 (7-1)                   78.24 (78.83)
KC-Bridge with Wharf*                                                                  5-5 (5-3)                   52.69 (56.62)
SaW by DG**                                                                                5-4                             60.87
Wharf/Hamlet/Bridge                                                                    1-10 (1-7)                   10.95 (12.60)
blueblimp: Governor/Goons/Quarry/Masquerade/Fishing Village*        9-1 (8-0)                     84.08 (88.07)
blueblimp: Ironworks/GH/Island/Lighthouse/Silk Road                       7-4 (5-3)                    65.29 (66.57)

The * represent how many of the matchups of that bot couldn't be finished. Basically, there's something with the SaW bot that for some reason can smash the simulator up sometimes. Not sure what the deal is exactly.
The parentheses represent the records of what happened if you take DG's bots out - they used starting conditions, so are technically 'illegal' - well, I don't know how much of an impact that has; on one of them, a lot, but overall, I don't know that if it's that much.
Anyway, you can see who's won already, but I'm going to talk a bit about the top few bots here.

CQMBWO: This bot is really really long. I actually had to get DG to resend the end of it, because it got cut off. Anyway, the cards it uses are quarry, worker's village, chapel, menagerie, and bridge. The idea is to build an engine capable of going mega pretty quickly, while looking to pile the game out if it can with a win at any point along the way. Interestingly, even though there are so many conditions, I'm guessing it's missing a LOT from how a human player would see it, in terms of piling out with a win. It's very hard to check everything, there are so many conditions. Of course, in the real matchups, your opponent is much more likely to pile out on you, too! This did use starting conditions, but given that it's 4/3, and that it wants a chapel pretty early anyway, I don't think this had a huge huge impact.

Ironworks Rush: A nice bot from the simulator-writer himself, Geronimoo. It's actually quite simple, quite possibly the simplest of all the bots I've seen in a long while for anything remotely competitive on the stupidly-powerful level. All it does is chapel down, gain lots of ironworks, then great halls, then islands, running piles super fast. I can't help but wonder if it would have been better if you could come up with a better 5th card than peddler. But anyway, it's extremely strong as is.

blueblimp: Governor/Goons/Quarry/Masquerade/Fishing Village: The winner, and well-deserved. Also fairly simple. The idea is to draw your whole deck with governor, play a goons, buy something, rinse and repeat, buying more FVs, Governors and Goons along the way, to achieve massive scores. Now, this deck benefits A LOT from being able to play goons into masquerade, which in the sim is going to mean stealing good cards, but them's the shakes - totally legal by the rules here.


I also want to mention Dstu's bot for a second - it is pretty cool, and of course quite strong, but it loses just over 20% of its games to everyone, and I don't just mean here. I mean, throw it up against a BM bot, it loses that much. What's the deal? Over-aggressive chapel trashing. I think this is fixable too, sadly? Someone want to explain how? Anyway, I don't think it's going to actually swing that many matchups in this tournament, but it's definitely something that made it look like it's a lot weaker than it is.



Also, only a handful of match-ups went to 100,000 games before getting a clear enough winner, and only one was close enough after that to call for more looks - Go SMoKL against KC-bridge with Wharf. Finally, these sims took tons more time than the stuff I normally simulate. All those buy rules were having me go over half a minute for several of the 10k sim matchups, whereas normally I'm in the ballpark of 10 seconds. You guys really know how to complicate things up

[DStu]

I also want to mention Dstu's bot for a second - it is pretty cool, and of course quite strong, but it loses just over 20% of its games to everyone, and I don't just mean here. I mean, throw it up against a BM bot, it loses that much. What's the deal? Over-aggressive chapel trashing. I think this is fixable too, sadly? Someone want to explain how? Anyway, I don't think it's going to actually swing that many matchups in this tournament, but it's definitely something that made it look like it's a lot weaker than it is.

Easiest fix would be to get Geronimoo's to change $-treshold for agressive trashing from 4 to 5 .

I spotted that problem, but this bots wins against its clone with standard trashing, so I took this one. One of the problems is that Quarry counts as $3 for this treshold, and as I only have actions cards costing $5 or more, and Quarry, you often get stucked with Highway/Chapel/Quarry. I didn't find a way out of this without losing the mirror, so I figured I should better try to win the other 80% as good as possible, as the rush is probably lost anyway once I get to this state.

It actually does better than 80% when attacked early, because it can't trash that agressively in this cases.

[WanderingWinder]

I also want to mention Dstu's bot for a second - it is pretty cool, and of course quite strong, but it loses just over 20% of its games to everyone, and I don't just mean here. I mean, throw it up against a BM bot, it loses that much. What's the deal? Over-aggressive chapel trashing. I think this is fixable too, sadly? Someone want to explain how? Anyway, I don't think it's going to actually swing that many matchups in this tournament, but it's definitely something that made it look like it's a lot weaker than it is.

Easiest fix would be to get Geronimoo's to change $-treshold for agressive trashing from 4 to 5 .

I spotted that problem, but this bots wins against its clone with standard trashing, so I took this one. One of the problems is that Quarry counts as $3 for this treshold, and as I only have actions cards costing $5 or more, and Quarry, you often get stucked with Highway/Chapel/Quarry. I didn't find a way out of this without losing the mirror, so I figured I should better try to win the other 80% as good as possible, as the rush is probably lost anyway once I get to this state.

It actually does better than 80% when attacked early, because it can't trash that agressively in this cases.

I think you can stipulate that you should buy copper if you have fewer than $3 in your deck, or fewer than $5 in your deck with at least one quarry, or fewer than $7 in your deck with 2 quarries. I *think* this stops it from trashing your copper down too far. I also want to say that one of the other competitors had this in their bot somewhere...

[DG]

I suspect my CQWMBO script might be better in play with an ironworks but the simulator trashes more with the quarry so I used that instead.

Geronimoo let me know that he'd found the fault with duration cards in play at end of game not always being cleared up between games. I specifically found this happening against swindlers, jesters, etc. Maybe we can have a look at these again after another patch.

[DStu]

Now that I had some time to look over the other bots, congrats to everyone. I'm really impressed how strongly and fast you can explode, given you have something like 9-10 turns or so. Especially bluellimps winning bot.

[DG]

Yep congratulations to Blueblimp. Goons + masquerade assembled quickly enough to beat the rush decks. The only way to stop it seemingly was to dismantle it entirely and put it all in the trash!

[Geronimoo]

Finally had a chance to look at these bots in detail. I was especially interested in DG's creations because he's always pushing the boundaries of what the simulator can do and he did not disappoint! Just go and watch a sample game of the Menagerie/Bridge bot, it's beautiful and I'm happy to see the simulator's play rules for Menagerie turned out working so well (although not with Ironworks... which would make the bot even more powerful). The Saboteur strategy is a lot of fun and the Golem Mountebank should cause a lot more mayhem once some fixes.

Dstu's Grand Market bot is extremely fast, but Chapel will trash the deck's economy completely at times (caused by Quarry which the simulator thinks = Gold). There's probably an easy fix for this.

Congrats to blueblimp of course for winning!!! When I was working on my bots I never even considered using Governor because I thought the simulator couldn't really play it... apparently I was wrong and the extremely simple play rules for Governor I implemented were good enough to create the winning bot. Nicely done!

And big thanks to WW for running this. It was a lot of fun creating these powerful bots.

I wonder if we can get some useful information out of this tournament for the general Dominion playing public? Or are 5-card combos too rare to matter?

[blueblimp]

Haven't gone through the bots yet, but I'm interested to see how Chapel was used effectively. I gave up on Chapel because of not being able to fine-tune the trashing. (My Ironworks bot originally bought a Chapel, but removing it actually improved the bot!) Masquerade is a nice way to get some trashing while causing problems for the opponent bot.

I got some luck that the simulator plays the Governor/Goons/Masquerade sequence very well. The play rules for Governor will almost always take +3 cards with this deck, which is exactly what I want. Also, it's good that Masquerade gets played after Goons.

A big strength of this bot is that once the engine is running, it essentially forces the other bot to play each turn with a 2-card hand (since games are so short that the bot doesn't run out of coppers and estates to send over). In principle this can be countered with Lighthouse, but LH takes up a valuable kingdom slot and is pretty awful if your opponent isn't attacking.

I originally designed this bot to not buy any green at all, but that was a bit too slow against Ironworks. Luckily the engine is strong enough to support Colony buys pretty early.

Geronimoo let me know that he'd found the fault with duration cards in play at end of game not always being cleared up between games. I specifically found this happening against swindlers, jesters, etc. Maybe we can have a look at these again after another patch.

Does this mean that Fishing Villages in play at the end of game could contribute money to the first turn of the next game?

[DG]

I was especially interested in DG's creations because he's always pushing the boundaries of what the simulator can do and he did not disappoint! Just go and watch a sample game of the Menagerie/Bridge bot, it's beautiful and I'm happy to see the simulator's play rules for Menagerie turned out working so well (although not with Ironworks... which would make the bot even more powerful).

Um, well actually against Blueblimp's bot it typically either discarded the menagerie when goons was played or passed it on the masquerade so it almost worked! Perhaps the discard is worth a coding change. On the whole though the play rules are good. To return the compliment I thought Geronimoo would have some green card script that would be faster than my CQWMBO script and indeed that was true, just. The average game length between them was 10.0 turns, always emptying 3 piles.

Congrats to blueblimp of course for winning!!! When I was working on my bots I never even considered using Governor because I thought the simulator couldn't really play it... apparently I was wrong and the extremely simple play rules for Governor I implemented were good enough to create the winning bot.

Same here, although I did know that governors were a problem for the chapel decks. They can donate silvers that are never trashed and will clog up a deck, especially a menagerie/chapel deck. The chapel engines generally can generally draw through the deck too so the extra cards are worthless. In that respect I'm not surprised that two of my scripts can at least give the Blueblimp script a fight since they can survive as a big mess.

If anyone wants some fun they can try my mountebank deck but with swindlers instead. In one way this works much better since the simulator always plays the swindler after the golem but unfortunately it swindles so much that the game goes completely out of control. You can also replace the saboteurs in my third deck with bridges, mountebanks, coppersmiths, whatever.

[Schneau]

I'd love to see a table of the round-robin matchups between all the different bots. I submitted three of the worst bots (Drunk Marine Students 5, Goons/Governor/Quarry, and Ill-Gotten Gains/Gardens/Council Room). I didn't have much time to optimize these, but it thought it would still be fun to see how they would do, and they all managed to win at least one matchup. Even beyond my bots, it would be interesting to see which strategies beat which others.

[Geronimoo]

Does this mean that Fishing Villages in play at the end of game could contribute money to the first turn of the next game?

The problem is with King's Court+Duration cards. The rules of the game say that King's Court will be set apart with the duration it tripled. I coded it so the duration is linked to the King's Court, but sometimes this link will not be cleaned up at the end of the game, causing null-pointer exceptions in the next game (pretty much crashing the simulator).

[Geronimoo]

I'd love to see a table of the round-robin matchups between all the different bots. I submitted three of the worst bots (Drunk Marine Students 5, Goons/Governor/Quarry, and Ill-Gotten Gains/Gardens/Council Room). I didn't have much time to optimize these, but it thought it would still be fun to see how they would do, and they all managed to win at least one matchup. Even beyond my bots, it would be interesting to see which strategies beat which others.

You can easily run these yourself. Just "load players" with the xml WW added as an attachment.

[Schneau]

I'd love to see a table of the round-robin matchups between all the different bots. I submitted three of the worst bots (Drunk Marine Students 5, Goons/Governor/Quarry, and Ill-Gotten Gains/Gardens/Council Room). I didn't have much time to optimize these, but it thought it would still be fun to see how they would do, and they all managed to win at least one matchup. Even beyond my bots, it would be interesting to see which strategies beat which others.

You can easily run these yourself. Just "load players" with the xml WW added as an attachment.

Sure, but if WW has a table with the results, its a lot easier and faster than me running 12*11=132 simulations by hand. Or is there a way to play a round robin tournament with the simulator that I'm not seeing?

[DG]

Load them up. It's fun to see how these scripts win and lose as well.

[Schneau]

It looks like the Wharf/Hamlet/Bridge bot is missing from the xml file.

[WanderingWinder]

I'd love to see a table of the round-robin matchups between all the different bots. I submitted three of the worst bots (Drunk Marine Students 5, Goons/Governor/Quarry, and Ill-Gotten Gains/Gardens/Council Room). I didn't have much time to optimize these, but it thought it would still be fun to see how they would do, and they all managed to win at least one matchup. Even beyond my bots, it would be interesting to see which strategies beat which others.

You can easily run these yourself. Just "load players" with the xml WW added as an attachment.

Sure, but if WW has a table with the results, its a lot easier and faster than me running 12*11=132 simulations by hand. Or is there a way to play a round robin tournament with the simulator that I'm not seeing?

I have a table. It's on a piece of paper.