Open GoogleCodeExporter opened 9 years ago
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I think the point of Earl is to be a "buy only treasure/victory cards", not
necessarily an optimal minimum-action AI. That is, the "Earl" strategy is
identical in every single Kingdom, and against a number of beginner strategies
(such as the "buy the most expensive card I can currently afford, play every
action I can in my hand, preferring the most expensive" that almost every
beginner starts by trying) tends to be consistently stronger across numerous
Kingdoms.
I tend to use it as a sort of baseline comparison for strategies - if my
strategy can be beaten by Earl, then it's obviously suboptimal, because Earl
uses the exact same strategy on every single Kingdom, and thus can *always* be
implemented.
A new AI which implements more-optimal minimum-purchase strategies appears to
have been checked in to the DA branch as "Patrick", which seems to be what
you're looking for, so I would recommend against changing the Earl AI.
Original comment by Nicholas...@gmail.com
on 15 Oct 2012 at 2:00
Original comment by tkdenni...@gmail.com
on 21 Oct 2012 at 5:52
Earl is definitely not exclusively "Big Money" (a strategy that buys only money
and victory cards). Earl will buy Witch, Library, Gardens, Moneylender, and I
think Adventurer. On many boards this will be reasonably competitive (2-Witch
and 2-3 Library especially so), though in general Earl is not a particularly
strong AI -- a good player ought to beat Earl >90% of the time in 2p full
random sets. See enhancement 127,
http://code.google.com/p/androminion/issues/detail?id=127, for a simple AI that
would probably beat most players most of the time.
As for the suggestions above:
1. Chapel, while extremely strong, is a fairly mediocre addition to an AI that
buys almost entirely money and victory cards. The reason is that it first takes
you a few turns to trash out the coppers and estates; on these turns you're not
buying anything so your deck is actually getting worse. Then, once you have a
bunch of golds and silvers, buying victory cards quickly dilutes your deck and
makes it hard to hit $8 again. Plus, if you split the Provinces, you lose to
the player who didn't trash all his Estates.
2. In general trashing cards are insufficient to keep up with Curse-giving
cards. Chapel and Masquerade are the two exceptions that come to mind, and
there are a few other more specific examples, like Lookout v. Sea Hag, but in
general a deck with a couple of Cursers will beat a deck with a couple of
trashers. Play a friend where one of you is allowed to buy a Steward or a
Bishop, for example, and the other is allowed to buy any Curser, and see who
wins a best of 5.
3. Not buying copper is a fine idea, but I'm pretty sure Earl already doesn't
buy Copper (even in cases where he should, like if he has a bunch of Gardens
and draws a hand of $1). There are only a few cases where I'd buy Copper, and
Coppersmith by itself or Chancellor/Pawn by themselves aren't one of them.
4. I think Earl already prefers Gold to Duchies until a set number of rounds
has passed. A better strategy would be to prefer Gold to Duchies until a set
number of Provinces have been bought (3-4 in a 2p game).
Original comment by wesc...@gmail.com
on 5 Nov 2012 at 7:24
Original issue reported on code.google.com by
A.R.Brid...@googlemail.com
on 20 Sep 2012 at 4:04