[rndmcnlly0]

Before you jump to evolutionary algorithms, note "The Problem with Evolution" section in the OP. This was written by a guy who knows what he's doing with evolution, and it's interesting to see him turning to MCTS given his previous success with evolution.

The gist is that games are fragile with respect to mutations (motivating the need for a search paradigm not based on gradualism). This fragility may not exhibit itself as strongly for the parameter tweaking involved in the balancing problem, but balancing quickly shades into general game design when you start to consider non-trivial tweaks.

[wtracy]

Thanks for pointing that out.

The project I was thinking of was going to be a tower defense game, and I wasn't planning on trying to develop any rules automatically. Rather, I was thinking in terms of using an evolutionary system to pick weapon and enemy strengths that lead to balanced gameplay.

So, I would probably get away with it, but I'm wide open to different ideas.