Can anyone comment on general strategies that would be applicable to this game? Has anyone tried some kind of crazy machine learning stuff, or is it dominated by relatively simple algorithms?
This game is fully observable and determinist so that is not the hardest situation.
However there is still a lot of possible game states.
I've started an attempt to have a tree of all possible actions and using a minimax algorithm (with a score function + alpha-beta pruning) but this is not yet conclusive because I can't explore so much deep (was able to explore up to 20 next player decisions but that is just 5 moves of your hero).
I think this game is enough simple to try to have this approach but also challenging because there is still up to 5 possible actions per turn so it is a max of 5^1200 total of possible state for a game – a lot.
My current approach is now to try to have a minimax with pre-explored interesting path in the tree (e.g. all path which leads to tavern and mines), that is still a lot of computations.
When I saw the premise, I was expecting that the server would provide a line of sight for your hero each turn. You could even make the map initially undiscovered, and leave it up to the bot to "remember" what it discovers. I think that would make the game a lot more interesting, although also probably much more difficult to program bots for with standard techniques.
Best strategy I've seen from watching is to gain mines until you have a sizable portion, stay adjacent to a beer until you see someone you can kill, kill them, then go straight for a beer. If you are constantly using the beer you become invincible for only 2 gold per turn.
I've started an attempt to have a tree of all possible actions and using a minimax algorithm (with a score function + alpha-beta pruning) but this is not yet conclusive because I can't explore so much deep (was able to explore up to 20 next player decisions but that is just 5 moves of your hero).
I think this game is enough simple to try to have this approach but also challenging because there is still up to 5 possible actions per turn so it is a max of 5^1200 total of possible state for a game – a lot.
My current approach is now to try to have a minimax with pre-explored interesting path in the tree (e.g. all path which leads to tavern and mines), that is still a lot of computations.