Cartovore 2 ... again

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Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Feath » Mon Dec 15, 2008 3:05 pm

I don't suppose there's any chance of releasing version 1.15? Something that fixes the AI so enemies like Lilly Snowfeather play the training cards properly ... as well as Burning Helix and the Fire Ruby?

Although it's actually playable as it stands, most enemies become significantly more difficult with the AI playing the cards properly, which it doesn't at present.

I cannot quite figure out how/why the AI choses to play what cards it does. I could make it play some training cards by adding the 'character:' trait to them, but that doesn't work for all of them and even if the cards have the trait removed or are destroyed when played ... it still has slightly undesirable effects.

Any chance of figuring out how it would work?

Additionally ... The card 'Kalista' ... It adding the effect to cards Kalista eats doesn't work. Yet the same effect applied to Kalista as opposed to the characters Kalista eats seems to work ... yet from what I understand, it shouldn't work that way round :P
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Phoenixdemon » Mon Dec 15, 2008 4:36 pm

Good luck with that :lol:
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Feath » Mon Dec 15, 2008 5:44 pm

Well, I hope more than good luck! :)

I'm very much an advocate of developing the Cartomancer engine as opposed to specialising it. I have been working (off and on) with re-writing the rules it works by to produce a modification/variant that might appeal to those with less interest in Ishara and more generalised vore interests. It includes traits such as gender, species and gender- and species- preferences. Ohh, and size! Size and Strength and Stretchiness ... the Three S's of Vore ;)
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Feath » Mon Dec 15, 2008 5:47 pm

One might say the 'S'-ences of Vore ...
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Duamutef » Tue Dec 16, 2008 10:03 pm

I'd like to release a version with updated AI, but I have enough trouble keeping track of what the hell I'm doing without maintaining multiple versions.

Truth be told, I don't even know how to do that efficiently without completely losing track of what's what.

Regarding the AI...

Right now, the AI is retarded. It is retarded for one reason, and that is that it doesn't know what most of the cards do. Since Cartomancer is game-neutral, the AI has to figure out which cards to play on the fly. It does this via two mechanisms: "AILove" and targeting.

AILove is the term for how much priority the AI will put on playing the card. You can put specialized actions on cards that will tell the AI how to determine this using the "AILove" trigger (I think). You can also increase the priority of a card straight up by giving it the AILove trait and giving it a value (0 is no priority boost, 100 is high priority). If you don't, it will mostly go off of whether it can afford to play the card and whether there is a legal target in play.

There are some things in the game rules that increase the AILove trait for certain cards (such as characters). As for not playing leadership cards, that might indicate there's a bug somewhere. My guess is it's not giving any points for "owner" being a legal target, or it has more than 1 copy and thinks it can't pay for it. In any case, you can make it play any card (or try to) by just adding the AILOVE trait to it and setting it higher than 0.

Honestly, the AI needs to be redone. I just wasn't sure how to do it until recently. Right now the AI just throws whatever is legal at you because that's all I could think of at the time. The new idea is to make it proactive in finding it's own strategy; have it look at the victory and loss conditions in the rules file, analyze it's deck before the game begins to see what the cards do and how they would interact (probably by testing them against each other), and actually come up with a strategy for using them by finding ways to do what it wants while stopping you from doing things it doesn't want (i.e. it will look for card effects and combos that will kill your player card while protecting it's own). This would be similar to the way it works now, except that instead of just using cost and target legality, it would use any relevant card effects it could decipher (so if it wants to kill your player card and the only way to do that is to reduce it's HP to 0, it will look for cards that have "SUBTRAIT:HP" and so forth. This would extend not only to weapon cards but to characters and such as well; Since the default STRENGTH ability lowers HP, they would play character cards that had a strength of 1 or more) and ways to get particular cards into play (if they want character cards, they need gold, so they would look for cards that produced gold) and keep them active (if their characters are fainted, they won't use the attack action, so the AI will use healing). It would sort of string together a tech tree for it's deck, with the ultimate goal of killing you while protecting itself. At the same time, it would generate it's own general values and AILove triggers for each card that were unique to that deck according to how it interacted with other cards in the deck. For example, if it gave every single character a strength bonus or vice-versa, it would be very highly prioritized if there were a lot of characters out. And since it had a very high potential priority towards the main victory condition, the AI would try to get that combination out, meaning it would focus on spamming out characters and then bringing out the bonus givers. Finally, since those particular characters would be such a big part of whether the deck won or lost, it would place a very high priority on healing them--enough that it might value a healing spell more than it values other character cards, meaning it would save them until the powerful characters needed them.

Once the game began, it would do a pared down version of the same thing, using the cards you have in play vs. the ones it has in play. It would also maintain a small database of cards and combos that it hated--things that severely screwed up it's strategy--and try it's cards against them in different ways to see if it can stop them or minimize the damage (i.e. don't play your really important nuke character until you have killed their assassin, don't use healing wave until they have used fire storm, prioritize counterspells over attack spells, have all of your characters gang-beat their nuke character the second she comes out, etc). If it found such a way and it worked in battle, it would add those situations to it's strategy.

That's the theory, anyway. Implementing it may be trickier. Hell, the whole crafting/equipment/location system is stupidly simple in theory and I've been slamming my head against it for months.

(Ironically, though, I've often found that the complicated stuff is easy for me to implement and the simple stuff is usually hard...in fact, looking back over the stuff I've been working on, that has held true almost universally...)
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Feath » Wed Dec 17, 2008 2:39 am

Thanks for explaining how it works :)

I knew about the AIREQ trait for determining when to play specific cards, but I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't play the training cards at all. It played them as I said in 2.12, but not in 2.14.

Anyway the proposed ideas of getting the AI to work ... Sounds rather difficult to get to work! Best of luck with that.
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Duamutef » Wed Dec 17, 2008 8:27 pm

Well, sometimes seems sound more difficult than they are. If I explained the way it tests for card legality I'd sound crazy for even trying it, but it's one of the only parts of the game I'm sure is bug-free. (That's partially because it's complexity required that I do every part of it perfectly before it would even work...)
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Aleph-Null » Wed Dec 17, 2008 8:41 pm

I've had enemies target weapons on their own cards and at least one buff (haste) on my cards.
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Allie » Thu Dec 18, 2008 1:40 am

The haste thing has happened to me multiple times... I think it's a bug with the card itself. I've also noticed that the opponents will target their own characters with swallow cards, even if there's a target on my side... It seems to go by lowest health for the "pay X to swallow" cards, but I can see a pattern for "swallow fainted."
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Feath » Thu Dec 18, 2008 3:29 am

The picking of target choice admittedly is slightly faulty. AIREQENEMY is present on a lot of cards to make sure the AI does target the enemy, but perversely seems to overlook that if it can't find a valid target in enemy ranks and then finds one in its own ranks :P Only putting in the trait 'REQENEMY' will stop that, but there are times you DO want to eat your own girls! (I mean for a tactical reason, that is!)

I wonder ... is it actually useful to create an 'AI' card, like the rulescard and the costcard? Something that could allow the modification of how it plays certain cards?
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Aleph-Null » Thu Dec 18, 2008 8:47 pm

Feath wrote:but there are times you DO want to eat your own girls! (I mean for a tactical reason, that is!)


I actually made three decks which centered around eating my own cards. One was Gurglemeister with Chennelle(sp?), I used three of that vorarephile card that heals anyone she is in the stomach with to keep everyone alive (and keep Chennelle healed up). The other two used all morsel cards and were built around rapid buffing of my player card (forget the names but one was the Demoness who grants Demons strength and has reduced fire spell cost, the other was the Steelstomach char with 18 digestion.
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Duamutef » Fri Dec 19, 2008 10:10 pm

Yeah, I found that centering your strategy on having your leader eat her own clanmates is presently the only way to make a genuinely scary Gurglemeister deck. Mine ran three copies of Strength Absorption and a few strength boosting cards that I would put on people just before she ate them. Strength Absorption stacks, so if you've played it on your leader three times, she'll get triple strength from everybody she absorbs. I would end up with 30-50 strength in a typical game, which--at around 200 damage per attack and growing, thanks to the fact that they're now eating enemies too--made my leader capable of soloing the entire enemy army. (The hard part is living for the 3-6 turns it takes to draw and play 3 copies of strength absorption and swallow a few girls)

The problem is, that's the only Gurglemeister strategy I've found that works. They suck at everything else right now; their motley assortment of vorephile abilities don't translate into any focused or cohesive ways to attack your opponent.
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby SammiRei » Sun Dec 21, 2008 1:07 pm

My Gurglemeister strategy generally revolves around the wall of enemies approach. I've got 3 copies of almost every character in there, and sooner or later I'm going to outnumber the opponent.
Not that it does me much good against everyone...especially since Fayzee keeps jumping down her own throat. >.<
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Feath » Wed Jan 21, 2009 7:30 pm

It might be a little slow but I can't get the property AILOVe to actually work the way you describe :(

I do know that between versions 1.12 and 1.14, it broke somewhere. In 1.12 it played the cards correctly, but fails to do so in 1.14.

Improved AI would really help the game be more challenging, certainly! I can only wonder how the AI in Magic The Gathering got to play its cards so smartly.
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Re: Cartovore 2 ... again

Postby Duamutef » Thu Jan 29, 2009 1:43 am

Yeah...I make pretty drastic changes between versions sometimes, so I wouldn't be surprised if the thing is all kinds of busted right now.

The next one may be even worse, as it will probably have a new AI and that will have it's own slew of bugs to fix...or it may work perfectly. Who the hell knows. But I can't really work on it right now anyway so the point is rather moot.
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