Game Of Drones multiplayer challenge discussion

AI Battles
#1

Feel free to discuss about Game Of Drones’s challenge!

What did you think about the subject ?

#2

Hi @FredTreg!

Are there any tools which can help me with debugging?
My neat Dump extension method in C# was already setup, but unlike in puzzles writing to .Error does not anything.

As i understood it was from the very beginning and is on all contests?

Thanks you for a masterpiece site!

#3

Hi,
The size of stderr message is too small on game of drones. It is truncated very short !

#4

Hi,

I just tested some simple logic on this game, and I was surprised how easy it is to beat half of the players. My idea was this trivial logic:

At the beginning of the game:
    For each of my drones -> d:
        select a zone -> z randomly
        assign z to d
In each turn:
    For each of my drones:
        print coordinates of the previously assigned zone

This is the most trivial solution I can think of. (And I believe it is very similar to the “Default AI”) And it gave me the following results:

655 out of 2124 players - 22.80 score (at 2017.02.27.) :open_mouth: :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

Just wanted to say a quick thank you to the CG developers for going back to older competitions and adding links to postmortems and programming techniques, and nice descriptions. It is a huge help, and I have learned a lot. It’s a lot of effort to keep the old stuff maintained so nicely. Thank you so much!

7 Likes
#8

I woke up one morning with a notification that I’ve reached Bronze :slight_smile:
Judging by my code, the game didn’t grab my attention at first, as I was just assigning drones in order (not even the closest zone). So I did that and got me to even worst result - right at the bottom of Bronze. It turns out, that opponents around me are doing exactly the same thing and we just stood there, gaining equal points the whole game :slight_smile:
I’ve added simple checks for zones that I control but there is no point in just standing there and zones that I don’t control and will be difficult to capture, so I’ve treated these drones as ‘free’ and seek zones that are not in anyone’s control or weak zones that I can capture easily. That bumped me 1000 places :slight_smile:

So, my implementation try-outs sort of drag me towards “Ghost in the cell” - like checking for incoming, getting there faster, and such, but I don’t really have time at the moment and I really like to wait for a boss and then continue.

#10

This game is a nice addition for those that liked Fantastic Bits, Coders Trike Back, Coders of the Caribbean, and even Spring Challenge. This is about 2d map, distances, angles.

Tho not much talked about, the game is really fun. A nice adittion would be identifying the name of the players at the board, and being able to verbose things (“say”) at the board.

Basically to get to the leagues you will nead:

  • Wood to bronze > Just move drones to the nearest zone and sit there.
  • Bronze to silver > Reposition drones after a zone is captured
  • Silver to gold > An anti-stuck stragy will be needed, and be more selective where to go
  • Gold to legend?
1 Like
#11

You know, that game was released by march 2014 so it’s a little late to ask for improvements… :wink:

2 Likes
#12

I am trying to reach legend in any bot competition to finish my quest map. And this is very frustrating to see that I am better than some legends but cannot go there because the boss is so harder than them.

Last 16 “legends” crash on first turn…
And I am stuck at 49/909 place in gold with a score superior to the score of the 8th place in legend.
I am not sure I am right to compare scores in different leagues but this is frustrating.

How can I finish my quest map? Knowing I am not available 24h/24 during competition weeks.

#13

The scores don’t translate properly across leagues. Also the bottom legend bots are probably not the bots they got into legend with. To get to legend, reread the post competition thread, (there are links in the discussions tab when first opening the challenge) there are usually commonalities between the best bots and everyone else, then critically look at your bot and pick some feature to improve.

For me there is usually something I am putting off as I know it is hard, probably requires significant rework/refactoring and maybe I am not sure exactly how to proceed, so I fluff around at the edges making tiny gains.

Another other thing to consider would be to do some parameter tuning as this might be enough to push you over the edge. This is something most of the top bots do and it can make a big difference if you have lots of parameters, which Ithink botg was lots of heuristics.

#14

I don’t how to start coding for this game
any reference would be really helpful