bug?? Bank, as played by Lord Rat

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santamonica811

I win most of my games against the bot.  But at least some of them are due to puzzling "decisions" made by your algorithms.  One that really has me bemused is that, in games with Bank, Lord Rat played the Bank card first, before any other coins.  Even more annoyingly (if one wants a fair game), the bot sometimes has 2 Banks, and will play one first, then a coin, and then a second Bank, and then more coins.  Or played the 2 Banks first and second.  This, obviously has a huge impact on the money Lord Rat has to buy on that turn.  LR ends up with much less money, and therefore, can't but Prov/Colonies when she should be able to, if Bank(s) had been played last.

It should be an easy re-coding to say, "Lord Rat will always play Bank(s) last, after all other coins have been."  99% of the time, that would be the correct play, right?  There might be some edge cases when one would not play Bank last, but those are pretty rare, I think.  (Just off the top of my head: If you have Counterfeit, then I could see not playing Bank last, if that would mean doubling-then-trashing if Bank were played directly after Counterfeit.  And maybe there are a few other examples that more-experienced players can easily think of.)

But even if there are a handful of cases where playing Bank last is bad strategy; doesn't it make more sense to have this as the default, so that Lord Rat plays it correctly in the vast majority of games?

Martin plays Piano

Hi, Josh,
I also win over 95% of my bot games - and because Lord Rattington is exclusively focused on Big Money, he usually only wins if he gets his Council Rooms earlier or buys Envoys with a bit of luck.
Compared to some of my engines I'm surprised how 1-2 action cards plus 3 golds and some silvers could be enough to win - but as a rule the bot mostly runs out of air at the end...

The bug with the bank is well known - here is the link to the "Known Bot Issues" - if you look at it, you will know all these bugs from your own bot games - you can be 100% sure that the bot won't stand a chance against you at bank, counterfeit, apothecary, tournaments or travellers etc.
http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1218.0

I think our big feedback last month to Stef has shown how urgent it is to improve the AI, and it would indeed be very helpful if the worst 3-5 mistakes of Lord Rattington could be eliminated - that would in fact mean a good step forward, so that maybe you could only win 90% of your games against him.

Have fun
Rachmaninoff