I don’t know if it has already been discussed, but i think it would be both fun and useful to be able to play as a human against your AI (or even others AI).
It would be fun because, if your bot beats you, you would feel how good it actually is and you’d be proud to have written it That and the fact that games are just fun to play anyway.
It would also be useful, because you could try some specific moves against your AI to test its behavior in specific situations, that would make debugging easier.
Somes games might be not too well suited for it (games where user input would be inconvenient/slow), but for games such as Wondev Woman if you could click on the cells to chose a move it would be easy and would not slow the games down too much.
In a similar fashion, it could be interesting to “expose” the winning AI of contests/multi and make it available for human to play against (for games where it’s applicable obviously).
I think that it would help the promotion of CG, by demonstrating even to non-developers the quality of the AIs which are produced there.
With the latest games being quite close to “boardgames”, it could even motivate some game publishers to sponsor contests, so that they can have a little extra selling argument to differentiate in this crowded market.
So instead of having “Splendor-like” and “Santorini-like”, we could build AIs on the real games like Patchwork, Star Realms, 7 Wonders Duel… (just some random ideas)
I just thought about the same and started to write similar post.
I would like to play against my or other bot by myself.
I would like to be able to expose my bot publicly under a link and send this link to my friends to ask them to play against my bot - it would be a good promotion of CG
PS
I know it’s archeology, but I think this idea is worth digging.
Agree with that, Iast year I create a playable version of Tron vs my bot and it was pretty fun to play, and rewarding.
It would be very interesting for contests and would require less server CPU to test strategies, as realtime play is way slower than bot vs bot.
That and the fact that games are just fun to play anyway.