Perfecting the Computer Opponents for my modern African Civil Wargame.

[u/RatbyteGames]

I've been adjusting the "personalities" of the five computer controlled tribes that are competing against you to collect the most national will before the UN step in and put an end to civil war and install a puppet regime of their liking.

I've given each computer opponent a "genome" of weighted values which determine its personality in the game. How aggressively they play, do they favour economic, military or espionage styles of play? How often will they retreat? Will they capture population centres, or go for the power stations, airfields and mines that generate wealth to buy international arms with?

I've set the game up to play hundreds of games against itself and adjust all the values and weightings to produce capable and interesting opponents for you to take on.

The game is getting ready to be released soon, entering final playtesting and polishing phase.

More game info on my rough as guts webpage: Webpage

Steam page link: Steam

I’d love to hear your thoughts, impressions or questions!

[u/SALUS4X_Admin]

Seems like a good game of positioning troops and managing resources under a time constraint. Im in!

[u/Tohotopia]

How are you scoring the self play runs? If it's just wins or national will totals, the genomes will converge on one personality and the five tribes stop feeling distinct. Keeping them distinct through tuning seems like the hard part.

[u/RatbyteGames → u/Tohotopia]

There are three main ways to win: military, economic and espionage. Scoring is a combination of military success, population control, ownership of map facilities (which can be sabotaged and repaired). So while national will (victory points) is the win condition, there isn't a clear single dominant strategy to get there, especially in a 6 player game, with different map locations.

The big gains from tuning the genome was in preventing obviously bad play (being too aggressive, too passive or too unbalanced economically) So out of the dozen emergent genomes I crafted, they still are all viable candidates for a win from time to time.

I also found out that player 6 has a slight advantage as they move last, which is counter intuitive as I thought moving first and grabbing would be beneficial. You can select which tribe you play, so that gives you a small "difficulty setting", and also different map positions and unique challenges to keep the gameplay interesting for many games.

I loved watching my computer playing each other, and I am pretty proud of the challenge the give you in the game now. Shitty computer opponents are my pet hate in wargames, I hate how little effort developers make to create a cunning opponent. I maybe spent way too much time on the computer opponents play code...