[chongli]

I feel like a traditional expert system would work a lot better in Slay the Spire at this stage. The choices you make in the game are all highly interrelated so I'm not sure they can be broken down into separate agents like that.

For example, when deciding what cards to play you often need to take into account what is coming up next on the map; it is not sufficient to consider only how to win the current fight. Relics such as incense burner carry over their turn counters between fights and so it's a strong strategy to delay the end of the current fight in order to set up an optimal incense burner number for the next fight. What number that counter should be is highly dependent on which enemies/elites/bosses you'll be facing in the next fight.

An expert system would have a database of every opponent in the game and when they are likely/guaranteed to appear and then seek to optimize the various conditions at the end of the current fight so that the next fight goes as smoothly as possible. I don't see how this could be accomplished with separate agents each attempting to play a different component of the game in isolation.

[Buttons840]

Your may be right, but that's a lot of boring work I didn't want to do. It was much more fun to hook up a neural net and watch it learn at least a few things. The combat agent does know where it is on the map, but it was only rewarded for minimizing damage taken in fights, so it would probably never learn to set up pen nib.