Finished 150 legend with rules based bot.
Main approach landed me in gold. The thing that got me to legend was actually watching @reCurse games and synthesizing his strategy into rules. Had no idea it was a NN at all.
Here was the simple bot I ended up with:
- seed on diagonals only, or distance 3 in a straight line. break ties by richness. nothing else for seeding
- don’t complete before day 12, after day 12 complete one tree a day. prefer the tree that is blocked next turn or blocks your own tree next turn
- only grow to size 3 if either it would block an opponents tree next turn or if it would unblock the tree you’re growing from your own tree next turn.
- if you have any grows < size 2 that would block or save your own tree from getting blocked next turn, do those
- otherwise grow the tallest tree
- some other stuff for endgame for day >= 20 too to make sure it’s not wasting energy
there were obviously a lot of other differences and behaviors that I didn’t capture from watching his strategy, but thought it was pretty decent for just being rules. For example sometimes reCurse bot would complete more than 1 tree in a turn but I didn’t figure out the condition for that. I think it also prioritized seeds very differently from what I did, and it’s endgame was different as well