Campaigns and Bots

[squirezucco]

A note for Stef and the other developers:

As you're working on campaigns and bots, it occurs to me that building campaigns may help you build better bots. For example, you may have a campaign board with NV/bridge, and you may have the bot try Big money (so that the player can win with NV/bridge). But you might also have the bot do NV/bridge so that it's harder for the player. Once you've done that, it seems trivial to add to the bot a line of code that looks for NV/bridge in a kingdom, and pursues that strategy if it's there. When you have another board with worker's village/goons/WT, you might have the bot use that approach. You can then add the bot code to look for that combo. Depending on which combo is stronger, you can prioritize one or the other.

This thinking may not be limited to combos. When you build a board with torturer and trading post, you might teach the bot to gain the trading post and take curses willy-nilly. Then you might decide that the bot should *not* discard in games in which it's easy to trash, unless discarding helps his hand (draw to X, etc.). You can then selectively employ this intelligent thinking to make better and worse bots.

You might also be able to ask the community to build some campaign kingdoms for you. That would save you some effort, once you have the structure and UI set up.

Just a thought from a squire.