Tactics Game

[enker]

I'm in the planning fase of a very simple tactics game. So far I have made many games, but every one was for two players (no AI), so I want this one to have it. (When you are all alone you aren't going to play a two player game!!! )

This tactics game is composed by an army of 8 robots en each side. Every side have a boss. Once the boss is defeated the game is over. Every robot has its own abilities and techs. Take in count that there are map bonuses (water places, etc..).

I know that I'll have to take in count some laberint algorithms, and find the way to select strategically every robot.

Well I'm very new at this AI game programming, so any (and absolutely ANY) idea will be ok!

[Harry Hunt]

Hey, sounds like a cool idea. Kinda like a cyberpunk version of chess :lol:

You're definitely going to need a path-finding routine. Now there are a whole bunch of path-finding routines, each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. There's the A* algorithm which is very fast and is fairly easy to implement. You might also want to take a look at Dijkstra's algorithm which is not normally referred to as a path-finding algorithm but I've used it for exactly that purpose before. Probably the easiest path-finding algorithm (and maybe also the least effective one) is the so called depth-first search algorithm. Just type any of these keywords into google and it will spit out a whole bunch of results.

As for robot-AI, that all depends on the rules of your game which haven't become quite clear from your post...

[WILL]

I have found this tutorial written by Fupster to be quite an excellent concept and could lead to a more complex and capable AI should enough time be put into it. It incorporates the use of Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithmns together. I have managed to start writing a mostly functional AI unit based on this concept, but I have also seen someone else get the clone of the example written by Fupster to work quite well. All the code in the tutorial is in C unfortunately, but you can make most of it out well enough(the Delphi made example hosted on the site does not work and is not the example I mentioned just now).

http://www.ai-junkie.com/

[enker]

Thanks for your posts! and sorry for answering so late (exams season in the university). Well I read the AI Tutorial WILL suggested, and I found it very interesting (thought it will take me years to implement it in my game ). The A* Algorithm seems pretty interesting too!

Well I guess you could give me more ideas if I explain more about the battle engine:

The game is turn based. The robot with the greater speed acts first, and can move, use technique or do nothing. Every technique has a range, and an explosion range. Teh techniques also have effects on his target (lower defense, etc...).

That are the basis of the game. Any other idea will make it!

[WILL]

Years? Naw man. Just patience. And of course some code helps too!

Try this site, I have released my AI Unit for Delphi(should work in other versions of Pascal, but not confirmed though!) The AI Unit is included in the demos I made(aiunit.pas).

AI Workshop

The Analog Neural Nets do not work properly, but thubs up to you if you can fix them. The digital ones however work very well. Just be creative and this type of fuctionality can be quite useful in your game.

Good luck!

[enker]

Ok WILL, I'll give it a shot!!