Bug with bot & the Chapel card

[Twoowi]

Hi

The last two games I've played the AI is making very odd choices. They've both included the chapel and Lord Rattington has discarded all his coppers, leaving him with nothing:

Turn 3 - Lord Rattington
L plays a Chapel.
L trashes 2 Coppers and an Estate.
L plays a Goat. (+$1)
L draws 5 cards.

Turn 4 - Lord Rattington
L plays a Merchant.
L draws a card.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays 4 Coppers. (+$4)
L buys and gains a Merchant.
L shuffles their deck.
L draws 5 cards.

Turn 5 - Lord Rattington
L plays a Merchant.
L draws a card.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays a Chapel.
L trashes 4 Coppers.
L shuffles their deck.
L draws 5 cards.

Turn 6 - Lord Rattington
L plays a Merchant.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays a Merchant.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays a Chapel.
L trashes an Estate.
L plays a Goat. (+$1)
L shuffles their deck.
L draws 4 cards.

This means that he now only has four cards, so is just continuing to play this turn:

Turn 7 - Lord Rattington
L plays a Merchant.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays a Merchant.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays a Chapel.
L plays a Goat. (+$1)
L shuffles their deck.
L draws 4 cards.

[santamonica811]

Yes, Lord Rat sucks as an opponent in many situations.  He/She will, quite often, buy a crapload of one card (Counterfeit is a prime example), but never use that card properly.  And you've found another example--making a perfectly good buy of Chapel, and then "intentionally" using it as badly as humanly (robotically???) possible.  It does make the games with these cards/behavior no fun at all.  But pretty quickly, you will likely do what I do...I quickly resign when LR starts to self-destruct.  No fun at all playing a game that I cannot possibly lose.

My guess is (a) That Chapel is an exceptionally difficult card to code for, and (b) that fixing this is probably very low on the priority list.  I don't think it's a bug, per se.  It's just dreadful gameplay, and that is due to how some cards are programmed to work inside of LR's games.  (You will see LR buy a bunch of Banks, and then play the banks before playing any other Treasures...I've been hoping for that particular fix since forever.)  :(

[peterjaric]

Here's another case with this behaviour (the bot got down to 4 cards with Chapel and then does this every turn):

Turn 14 - Lord Rattington
L plays an Apothecary.
L gets +1 Action.
L plays a Chapel.
L plays a Copper. (+$1)
L plays a Potion.
L shuffles their deck.
L draws 4 cards.

As you can see I noticed it quite late :)

[GnomeDePlume]

This thread showed up in my search for the issues I just saw this morning.  I saw Lord Rattington trash down to 5 cards (Chapel, Merchant, Courtyard, and 2 Minions) and then get into an infinite loop like others mentioned above.

I feel like what I saw should be more fixable, though.  Every turn he played the Courtyard, even though there were no cards that he could possibly draw.  If Rattington deprioritized card draw when both draw and discard piles were empty, then he'd have next gotten to Minions for money and built a nice set of coins.

[Davio]

I recently encountered this in a game with Knights.
The bot generally disregards Knights altogether so it's pretty easy to get enough of them to trash his deck.

In my game, the bot got a lead with 4 quick Provinces, having Chapelled his Coppers and Estates away, but due to my Knights he eventually ended with a deck of just the 4 Provinces and his Chapel.

Each turn he would just do nothing, not even buying a Copper.

I think it would help the bots if they would consider at some point buying Coppers again.

[Ingix]

I'd hope that all those "stupid" mistakes of the bot could get corrected, but I have to confess my hopes aren't high.

AFAIK the bot AI is not any kind of AI that gets thrown around nowadays since machine learning took off and beats world class go players. It is very, very simple (no, much more simple than you think).  This allows it to be fast with potentially hundreds of games going on at the same time where it needs to act, but it will make lots of plays that are "boneheaded stupid". It would (likely) needed a much bigger effort to remove theses, than adding a few lines of code here and there.