Game Data Feed

WarLight can now provide an xml feed of data about a specific game. This allows for the more technical users to write a program that can analyze information about games.

This initial release of the feed should be considered an “alpha” experimental project. If this proves useful, it can be expanded to include more information. Currently, the feed is only available for finished ladder and tournament games and is only available for WarLight members.

Being able to consume this data via an API allows for broader analysis of many games at once, which can answer questions such as:

– How often does a player know one or more of an opponent’s picks?
– How often does the person who definitively knows his opponents starting spots win?
– Does early 3v2 luck affect winning percentage?
– Does getting first pick affect winning percentage?
– Does first move affect winning percentage?

There’s nothing the feed can see that isn’t already available through the game’s normal interface. This is just a way to write custom analyzers which allows for a broader analysis across games.

To access the data, use a URL like this:
http://warlight.net/GameFeed.aspx?GameID=1212978

This will present you with a large XML blob describing everything about the game. To help understand the data, let’s first define some terminology:

– A “standing” is the state of the board at any given point in time. This contains one entry per territory that contains the number of armies on that territory, who controls it, and the fog level.
– A “turn” is just a collection of orders. This includes all the orders each player submitted, mixed together in the sequence they played out.
– An “order” is obviously one order that a player submitted. But it can also include other things, such notifications when a player gets eliminated, or when cards are received, etc. Essentially, this represents what you see in the “Orders” panel on the right side of a game when viewing history.

In the xml blob, you’ll find:

– The players in the game (their names, color, their state, etc.)
– All of the details of the map (it’s name, all of its territories and what they connect to, all of its bonuses and what territories are in each bonus)
– The “distribution standing”: This is what the map looked like when it was time to pick the territories you started with. This is only present for manual distribution games.
– The picks: This tells you which territories each player picked, and in what order. Like the distribution standing, this is only present for manual distribution games.
– Standing 0: This tells you what the map looked like at the beginning of the game.
– Turn 0: This is all of the orders that played out on the first turn of the game.
– Standing x/turn x: Standings and turns then alternate for each turn of the game, all the way until the final standing.

If there is something you’d like to see included that isn’t currently included, I’d like to hear about it.