[Chabsff]

> For example, you may have the cards to kill an enemy now - but it may be more beneficial to wait - either to increment the counter on a relic, or to draw a card that does an effect on a fatal hit.

How is this any different than chess?

Solving this using a LLM is novel and interesting, but I'd feel confident in claiming that writing an AI bot for STS using "classic" AI methods would be pretty easy, actually.

[aeturnum]

I believe chess evaluation functions are always the difference between your opponent and you - i.e. it's "the same" to take a piece or avoid them taking yours. You must simply find any path to check.

STS, on the other hand, is about accumulating some resources while spending others. Which resources you want to spend and which you want to accumulate depend a great deal on your character and build. Skillful play often involves recognizing which resources you would benefit from losing at the current stage of the game. Training is also made much more difficult by how long you need to go to determine if you are on a winnable path. Power spikes are non-linear and many deck compositions would optimally play in a 'losing' way for a certain period of time before getting the pieces they need.

[theptip]

The game tree is both broader and deeper in Slay, so much harder to do tree search. Also very irregular; in chess you have very few situational decisions (eg en passant, castling) whereas many decisions in Slay are one-off (events) that are quite hard to weigh the EV. Finally you don’t have perfect information in Slay, which makes things WAY harder.

You’d probably want to look at Go AI instead of Chess, but better would be the Dota / StarCraft AIs. Very different architecture.

[airstrike]

There's just a lot more variability due to the sheer number of "pieces" and the fact that you can combo moves... but maybe it's just a matter of scaling

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Much, much bigger decision tree than Chess or Go.

[z0r]

There are more possible moves to consider in STS than Go? I've dumped a hundred hours into the former and thousands into the latter and I wouldn't agree.

[raincole]

Almost all the games you play on PCs have much bigger state spaces than Go.

To give an intuitve example on why StS's state space is large, imaging these two situations: In both case you have the exact same map, same deck, same HP, same potions and same relics. The only difference is in one case you have 100 gold and in the other you have 101 gold.

They're still two different states. And all the following states are different.

The size of space state doesn't necessarily translate to how difficult the game feels. Foundamentally Go has zero randomness while StS is full of randomness, so it's a little apple to orange.

[lanternfish]

Absolutely. Assuming you don't crack the deck prng, you have to furcate the decision tree for every possible order of cards whenever you shuffle the deck - that quickly gets to a number of states larger than atoms in the observable universe.

This also actually modifies strategy - top player Jorbs notoriously builds massive spreadsheets to crack tough decisions on important runs and deck order is huge for that.

[cyrialize]

To echo the other commenters - yup, there are so many possible moves in the game.

For example, there is a relic that gives you the status "Intangible" every 6 turns, and then it resets. "Intangible" makes it so that every incoming damage is only 1 damage point. This relic has a counter and the number of turns it counts exists out of individual fights. So for example, you could be on your 1st turn in a fight, but to the relic it could be your 3rd.

At first, you might think to yourself that you should stall each fight long enough where you can end the fight on the relic counter being 5 - so that any next encounter you start will be your 6th turn to the relic - meaning you'll be intangible at the beginning of the fight.

But - there are situations where you might want the counter to be at 4, so that you will be intangible not on the 1st turn of a fight but the 2nd. For example, there are some enemies that don't do damage on turn 1, or do more damage on turn 2. There are situations where you want the counter to be at 3, 2, etc.

To add onto this - it can be VERY difficult to stall a fight such that you get the relic to the number you want and you kill the enemy you are facing on that turn.

There are so many decisions to be made surrounding this one relic. What I've described here doesn't really cover all the theory surrounding it.

You can find similar decision paths and theory around every card, relic, potion, enemy, boss, etc. in the game.

It's one of the many reasons why I love this game so, so much.