Dear Admins, I would like the following features added:
IMPORTANT: The starting state of the game should be entirely symmetric. This means that the map is symmetric, the production zones are symmetric and the location of starting bots also symmetric. This is very important, because otherwise there is too much randomness in the results. I have a top 10 bot, but I can easily lose to a bot ranked ~70 if the starting state favours the opponent. For example, if they can reach a lot of production zones early then it is very hard to compete with them.
In the Leaderboard show people’s country and affiliation
Have a Leaderboard for countries and possibly for affiliation
In debug mode show more prominently where new bots are spawned. Currently this is really hard to see
Allow one to show the replay in full screen
In Last Battles show who is involved in the battle and their rating. Otherwise one has to click on each individual replay to find this information
Cool! But have you seen that you played two games against the same players on the same map? So there is a kind of symmetry.
However, I want add :
Increase the maximum size for code submission (50k => ~ 75-100k)
Allow people to switch between spawn side N°1 or N°2 in the IDE (currently the map data (distribution, platinum, seed, map …) are identical for the 2 battles, so we always spawn in the same place in the IDE).
Edit : I just found we can do it when we swap the thumbnail. But it’s not friendly…
Nice. I didn’t realise that we play two games for each starting state. However, I still feel that this solution is not perfect:
When we have 3 players we will need to play 3!=6 games and 24 games for 4 players to cover all permutations. This is not really feasible
If a starting state is too biased towards one side then playing two games won’t really help. Each player will get a win and a loss (even if they have vastly different rankings) and we gain no information about their relative strengths. With my proposal, every starting state will give us a fair battle.
This solution worked really well in the last two Google AI Challenges.
I came to ask for a “swap sides” button for test matches, but SaiksyApo beat me to it! As for the perfect balance, I’ve said before I think it would numb the games a little.
I agree that there are many draws, but maybe there could be a blacklist of random seeds that produce very imbalanced games, or a whitelist of seeds that produce “not too imbalanced” games ? Say, a map is imbalanced if a 40+ player systematically loses to ~37 players from one side .
Also, the swiftness of victory on mirror games may be a good clue to relative strength of AIs…
Otherwise I agree with your feature requests, especially for info in the last battles, and showing spawns in debug mode. I’d also like a way to jump between mirror battles in the replays, or ideally, show them side-by-side, linking the replays.
Your important point is interesting, and we’ll maybe add an option in the initialisation parameters making the distribution and starting zones symetrics. But I can’t tell you if it will be used on “official matchs”. As SaiksyApo was saying, the permutations should avoid the problems related to “non symetric distributions”.
I don’t get the two last points (Allow people to vote for the next rule, Allow people to vote for the next map). Isn’t it already the case in the forum?
For the rest, the changes you’re asking are complicated to integrate quickly, but your propositions are interesting and we’ll see what we can do about it.
Thanks for the response cup_of_tea. I still believe that the permutations don’t avoid the problems. There are actually very few balanced games at the moment - most of the games are one sided where one side dominates. I can only measure the strength of my bot on balanced games, as the other games provide me with very little information. If you implement my important idea then every game will be balanced and ratings will be more accurate.
You can ignore my last two points - I didn’t realise that we could vote through the forum.
I have one more feature request. Each time I play a game in “Last Battles” it resets the speed to 5x. It would be nice if it used the previous setting.
I want to suggest a feature, maybe too late for PR2, but still most likely useful for other future contests.
When I start a battle in code editor in addition to console output I want a link which points to file with all input data my bot received in that match. So I could download that file and run my bot(with minor #ifdef modifications) in local debugger and see why exactly it does all these stupid things
Of course any debugging could be done with outputs to error stream but almost always it takes too much time for all add-yet-another-pritnf iterations to find a deeply buried bug.
It’s really misleading, when viewing battles, that I can see the enemy’s visible fields - it’s hard to tell what my bot is doing exaclty. Please add an option to display fields only visible to one player.
We’ve had this request before and we plan on finding a moment to incorporate this. Probably in local storage.
That is an interesting feature that we will definitely take into consideration. Thanks.
We thought of that but it just wasn’t practical to stitch such a feature onto an existing + changing contest as it required a few modifications to the IDE. But rest assured that future challenges will incorporate similar settings if we deem it pertinent. Thank you for your feedback.
Come to think of it, since the game is in its final state, it is indeed possible that we implement player-specific fog of war before the contest is over.
Great! By the way, I think the current state of the fog of war display is the same kind of misinterpretation of the rules that caused the enemy’s fields and pod counts be visible to the player just after the release of this week’s rule. It’s kind of inconsistent that the in-game visibility has changed, but not the IDE representation of the visibility.
We apologize for the mix up in rules during the beginning of fog of war. We wanted players to have 0 information on hidden tiles whether they were captured or not, but we did not want to change the input protocol in a way that would crash codes from previous versions of Platinum Rift.
The feature is now available.
You can toggle between player 1 vision, player 2 vision, combined vision and no fog of war.
Note that this is not compatible with replays of games played before right now.
