Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The following script defines our rushing strategy:
if(Defense < 3) ire(BuyD)
if(Factories < 2) ire(BuyF)
if(Defense > 5 + steps * 0.05 && random<0.2) ire(Attack)
if(Resources > 1) ire(BuyO)
This script puts far less priority on building factories and defenses. It buys two defenses
and then one factory and then starts producing offensive units. Initially it will try to
launch waves quickly, but as time progresses, it tries to save up for bigger assaults.
Note that, apart from the random factor used to time attacks, the scripts define very
consistent strategies. The artificial players will always follow the same strategy,
whether it is successful or not. Because their behavior is consistent, they are ideal to
determine which strategy is more effective, rushing or turtling. A thousand simulated
runs reveal that the turtling strategy is superior by far: It wins roughly 92% of the
time. What's more, a large proportion of the wins for the rushing player are the result
of the turtling player running out of resources—which doesn't occur very often.
NOTE
each row gives
the results from 1,000
runs, done automati-
cally. however, the
process of changing
the tweaks required
manually adjusting the
diagram.
Tweaking the balance
Clearly, turtling is too successful in our model of SimWar. To find a better balance,
we can try to tweak several values. We'll start with changing the production costs
for each unit type. You can find the results for 1,000 simulated runs for each tweak
in
Table 8.3
.
Surprisingly, these tests show us that increasing the cost for defensive units has little
impact on the balance between rushing and turtling strategies. Only when a defen-
sive unit costs more than an offensive unit, making it a really poor choice, does
the turtle strategy start to lose more frequently than the rushing strategy does. This
leads to the conclusion that the balance between rushing and turtling strategy is
mostly affected by the balance between production and offensive units and little by
the balance between offensive and defensive units. Also notice that increasing the
factory costs initially increases the average game length, but it stabilizes when a fac-
tory costs eight or more units. This can be explained by the fact that increasing the
factory cost slows the game down because it takes more time to build up produc-
tion capacity. At the same time, a very high factory cost favors the rushing strategy,
which tends to win faster than the turtling strategy. At high factory costs, the sec-
ond effect dominates the first effect.
