- Blockade Card
Play only if enemy have a big stack (relative to own stack and income) and there is a chokepoint or will be kicked next turn from an area. Never play if AI believes it has more income and/or armies

- Emergency Blockade Card
Same logic as blockade, but don't require planning ahead.

- Diplomacy Card
Never play. For one it is hard to adapt it to Diplos of different length. (e.g can the AI really plan 10 turns ahead and still be efficient.) Also logically a D card is played on a stronger opponent. Thus AI may end up prolonging the game when it is lost. (So it is not fun to play again) In a team game it is irrelevant whether a human or AI plays the card.

- Bomb Card
Could be, bomb biggest enemy stack, if stack is bigger than own income (+/- rng)? Something simple ought to be doable.

- Gift Card (assume it's on a team)
General rules for gifting is hard, since it heavily depend on map + other settings. (Particularly considering that AI's don't coordinate their orders. So having them close is usually a bad thing)

Edited 3/10/2016 22:05:19

where are gui and szeweningen wall of text posts when you need them?

- Blockade Card
Play only if enemy have a big stack (relative to own stack and income) and there is a chokepoint or will be kicked next turn from an area. Never play if AI believes it has more income and/or armies

Blockading chokepoints is a double edged action. It can benefit your enemy. The only safe way to use blockade card is spoiling a bonus that we are not planning to defend.

- Diplomacy Card
Never play. For one it is hard to adapt it to Diplos of different length. (e.g can the AI really plan 10 turns ahead and still be efficient.) Also logically a D card is played on a stronger opponent. Thus AI may end up prolonging the game when it is lost. (So it is not fun to play again) In a team game it is irrelevant whether a human or AI plays the card.

You are assuming this is a 1v1. Diplo card is valuable when you have more than one enemy.
You do not need to adapt to different lengths. Just Diplo the guy who attacks you most. Not the stronger guy who peacefully stands still.
Prolonging is not an issue if the AI does not use this card 1v1.

- Bomb Card
Could be, bomb biggest enemy stack, if stack is bigger than own income (+/- rng)? Something simple ought to be doable.

No, I guess one income is not big enough to bomb it. Wait till it is twice the income.

- Gift Card (assume it's on a team)
General rules for gifting is hard, since it heavily depend on map + other settings. (Particularly considering that AI's don't coordinate their orders. So having them close is usually a bad thing)

Wrong! AIs can coordinate. There are teammatesOrders in the API and the bot developer can use them to coordinate.

Bombing depending on hard income differences make little to zero sense. The more a map is open the less big the stacks will get and you would tell your AI to let it's bonus get broken just because the opponent doesn't have double your income at one of it's borders.

I would implent the opportunity to "command" an AI for gift-cards
In form of a sending the AI an private Message with "gift *territory-link*"

Or give the AI an Button "Gift-Command" instead of what the players has as "Private Message" to open a window where you can link the territory u wanted your Teammate-AI gift u (something like the blockade-selection-window)

for gift card in a team game: if enemy has more than double the amount of armies the AI has on there border and a teammate isnt fighting anyone, gift a teamate a border (or right behind the border(your choice)

Since nobody has mentioned this yet:

If you're into machine learning, one thing you could try doing is looking at your database of games and extract features (income difference, value of nearby bonuses, number of neighbors of important spaces, etc.) and try a supervised learning approach to try to predict whether humans would play one of those cards in a given situation. To try to simulate what a "smart human" would do, you might look at only games with highly rated players, or players that won, or something similar. This approach would probably have the most potential for the blockade and gift cards, since those are probably the two most commonly used cards. The nice part about doing it this way is that you can have a fairly complex model for player behavior with relatively little computation time. The drawback is that it's hard to intuitively understand exactly what your program is doing.

No NO NO and NOOOOOOOOOO!!! AIs should not be allowed to use diplomacy cards! THEY WILL ABUSE THEM AND RUIN EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!

After more than 20 replies, I don't think you'll read this one. But still I want to give it a go. While this is in no way complete, I think it might help you classifying different situations.

Gift card
Case 1: All AIs in one team

Situation 1: One member has all territories in a bonus, except 1 which is occupied by team member. You could code it in such a way that in case of low army in that territory, you could make the AI attack that territory, but that would become too complicated.

Situation 2: Member with low army count is against enemy AI, while other member is free with high army count (For coding purposes- how about 2:1 ratio, with difference of armies more than 10). As long as bonus is not being sacrificed, then gift card can be used. It is important that army deployment in that region should be high, if it is next to enemy AI.

Situation 3: Member battling enemy on two fronts while team member is free. one battlefront territory can be gifted with high army to take advantage. This one is a bit dodgy as the situation of it happening is less.

Case 2: AI + Human in one team

Give the human full discretion, including receiving AI territory as gifts

Diplomacy Card

Situation 1: Low army count going against high army count

Situation 2: While battling two enemies simultaneously, and losing 2 successive territories (It is an indication that the AI is unable to cope a 2 on 1 attack)

Blockade Card

Blockade cards are used mostly to close choke points or make one. The important thing to note is that the blockade card is to be used when the player is at a position of disadvantage. To determine this situation of advantage, the following criteria can be used

1) Army count - 2:1 ratio of army count in favor of enemy and player holds a choke point
2) Single territory army strength - If the player is assured of losing a choke point based on current army strength (let us assume the standing army (>10) near the choke point is equal the players army count), then blockade card should be used
3) Multiple fight points against multiple opponents

Choke point can be defined as any territory that is connected to only two territories(and these are not connected to each other). The connecting two territories can also be labelled as choke points


Priority of Card Use

When multiple cards can be used in a situation, it is important to determine priority of use. I would recommend the following list

1) Gift card
2) Diplomacy card
3) Blockade card

The reasoning is based on how the card affects game-play, especially during combat scenario. Gift card allows it, diplomacy stalls it and blockade outright stops it at that moment

I hope this has helped you in any way. I wanted to ask you, how exactly are you coding the algorithms? Which language are you using?

Thanks for all the suggestions -- I read them all.

I have implemented a very basic algorithm for the Diplomacy, Blockade, Bomb, and Sanctions cards. If you want to see the source, it's in the github repo (https://github.com/FizzerWL/WarLight.AI)

If anyone wants to do further work on these, I encourage you to try out your own implementations! See https://www.warlight.net/blog/index.php/2016/02/the-warlight-ai-goes-open-source/ for info on how to get started.

yes

I second that yes

^^^ make that a third

this is not about the cards but i think it would be amazing if you could make diplomacy AI's

In regards to Diplos, I was thinking about this. If we can send a flag to the AI telling it "This is a Diplo" then all it would really need to do is play purely defensive and never attack anyone, I think that would be the best "cure-all" as really that's all Diplos need, an AI to protect whichever region the player was booted/surrendered from.

@fleecy
Yeah, that would be great

If we can send a flag to the AI telling it "This is a Diplo"

It is natural to set this flag in 'a personal message to associate with this game'.
But WarLight.AI.GameSettings are missing such an important feature as well as the luck settings.

Bots never know the game title or the personal message from the host. This misfeature does not allow to modify their behavior if the words 'This is a Diplo' are included in the personal message.

Bots never know is it a SR 0% luck settings or some kind of gambling settings. New bots may fail in a WR 16% luck template.
Test game https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=10747964 . Bot attacks 3v2 failing to capture a bonus on turn 2 and again on turn 4 and it wastes an army in a 1v8 attack on turn 6.

(re: a hypothetical AI which never attacks)

That sounds awfully boring... and could lead to horrible situations where a game can't end.

Edited 3/15/2016 17:22:05

Yeah, I'm missing also a couple of features however I haven't checked in all details if they are truly not there.

- Ability for the bot to surrender / vote to end.
- Ability for the bot to use the chat (not necesarily to read but at least to print something there)

As for the luck modifier a quick search in the C# code shows that the bot has this information.

Edit: If the bot could read the team chat then I could quite easily make my bot capable to listen to simple commands / hints like "Wunderwaffe, opponent XYZ owns bonus Antartica" or "Wunderwaffe, break Antartica". This would then just mean for my bot that he multiplies the value of the plan to break Antartica with a certain factor.

Edited 3/15/2016 17:45:38

Poir, that sums up diplos very well ;)

Seriously though that's all a Diplo needs, the idea would be to just ignore that area, or take it if you want it, but it won't just spam attacks all over the place and ruin the game...

Norman, that would be nice, I was thinking about that too, but that may be tricky. Also in that regard an AI could learn and store info by writting it into chat... It might be more complicated than Fizzer wants, though I don't deny the benefits that would have :)