There isn’t really a big “update” or change to the game to talk about in this post, but I feel like I am committed to making a weekly post for GRF now. In my last post, I mentioned that the AI needed a lot of tweaks and that I was “beating them pretty badly.”
So, I started keeping track of my games against the single player AI, all while making slight tweaks to how the AI plays. I kept track of my score, the AI’s score, and the point differential. After 40 games and a week’s worth AI tweaking gave me the following results:
After 40 games, I won 24 times and lost or tied 16 times for a win rate of 60% of the time. The average point differential is 5.1 in my favor.
I also kept track of the point differential in chunks of 10 games, as I would often make bigger AI tweaks and then play 10 games in a row, while making minor changes during that 10 game chunk. As the week went on, you can see the point differential going down in each chunk of 10. It started at 7.7, and ended at 1.2. In the last chunk of 10, my win-loss-tie ratio was 5-3-2. So, the AI appears to be playing closer to my ability. That, or I am getting a lot worse somehow at the game. This seems good? Maybe not. I haven’t had anyone else try to play against the AI. It’s possible that a new player would get destroyed by this AI compared to me since I am very familiar with all the game mechanics and strategies while a new player would not be.
Next Steps…
Maybe I can figure out how to have “difficulty” settings for the AI. So if it is set to easy/hard I’d adjust the AI speed and other abilities. Also try and add some randomness to AI decisions, and make the “hard” AI more likely to make the right decision and the easy AI more likely not to? Right now, I do have “check rates” so certain checks (like should the AI pass) aren’t made every update/frame, but instead like every 10-20 frames. So, and easy AI could have longer times between those checks compared to the hard AI having much shorter times between checks. Idk, maybe?
Smell ya later nerds!