Write advanced strategy guide

There are already a few strategy guides and tutorials posted on the website. 
However, the advanced strategy guide does not have anything in it. Want to 
write it? Grab this issue and away you go.

Here are some ideas:
  1. A bunch of orders can be represented by a sparse matrix. This representation allows the creation of meta-strategies. Suppose you have a few different strategies, each of which produces a sparse matrix as its output. Meta-strategies can be created by taking a linear combination of the sparse matrices.
  2. Adaptive meta-strategies. In point (1) we saw how a meta-strategy can be encoded as a fixed vector of real numbers. What if this strategy vector could change as a function of the game state? Think about a neural net that has inputs like "safety", "% of ships that are mine", "% of production that is mine", "travel time to the closest weak planet", and a bunch of other stuff. The outputs of the neural network would be how much weight to attach to each of the various strategies.
  3. A discussion of control. How does your strategy know which planets it controls, and how solid their control of certain planets really is? If there were some way to measure what % control you have over each planet, then you could retreat from planets where you've lost control, or attack planets that you don't yet own, but which you solidly control.
  4. Market-based strategy. The game of Galcon is a lot like building an optimal investment portfolio. Picture the objective of Galcon as achieving the maximum ship count. Ships can be "invested" into a number of different planets. Each planet has an estimated % return, a "risk of default", a volatility. Furthermore the fate of nearby planets may be correlated. Think about Galcon as a Quadratic Programming problem, just like finding an optimal portfolio.
  5. Other ideas. There are tons.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by cameron.jp@gmail.com on 12 Aug 2010 at 12:19
lamorric / ai-contest

Write advanced strategy guide #24
