CodeRuler Tournament ^^

This isn't a required entry for the class, but I thought it'd be fun to run a CodeRuler tournament including my CodeRuler, especially since my submission didn't show up in class.

My basic strategy didn't change too much - instantly charge towards the nearest castle, and pray you don't get wiped out. Peasants use a 1-square lookahead to determine the best square to move to, prioritizing enemy land first, then unclaimed. It works great against the bots, but aside from that... thats what I'm about to find out ^^

So I decided to run three tournaments:

1) Run 1 vs. 1 against each other person's bot (7 total: Ben, Shaoxuan, Kevin, Randy, Paul, Brian, and Laura/Lisa who I'll refer to as LL for the rest of this entry). Rank based on ratio of final scores (my score divided by opponent's score)

2) Using the seedings from tournament 1, run a 4-way free-for-all. Winner is removed, next person is put in.

3) Same as #2, but 6-way.


Results, with my score always listed first:

Tournament 1: (with commentary as I recall)

LL: 36-817. This ruler did the best against mine, interestingly. I'm not sure what it is - although it might be because it always has at least one castle producing knights, and my strategy is probably weak to that.

Ben: 42-913. I pondered doing as many lookaheads in my own code, but didn't want my ruler to time out.

Shaoxuan: 59-902. IMO this strategy was the most similar to mine, although I think mine wasn't as well-refined.

Kevin: 452-552. This was actually a pretty close match, and I tried replaying the match to remember what it was that gave you the edge here, but I kept winning afterwards :-(

Randy: 608-296. I honestly thought this ruler would give me the most trouble since the troops stayed back on defense for the first half of the game - and it was true, but at least my castle could keep producing knights. And once the troops started sweeping, my knights would go in for the capture. (If you stalled till 80% of the battle, though, it might've been different)

Paul: 799-82. My knights met a fair amount of opposition before capturing the castle.

Brian: 806-74. Same idea as Kevin's match, except now every time I try to figure out how I won, I keep losing ^^


Tournament 2: (4-way free-for-alls)

Seeded order from 1: LL, Ben, Shaoxuan, Kevin, Andrew, Randy, Paul, Brian
Results: Shaoxuan, LL, Andrew (!), Ben, Brian, Kevin, Paul, Randy

Tournament 3: (6 way free-for-alls)

Result: Shaoxuan, LL, Andrew (!!), Ben, Brian, Paul, Kevin, Randy

I honestly don't know why my ruler does better in free-for-all matches rather than 1 vs 1, but thats really... interesting.


I'll finish up with my overall impression of each ruler:

Shaoxuan: ... wow. Your ruler is just... yea. I can't describe it with words.
LL: I was amazed how it managed to wipe me out so quickly. (I think it was the knights)
Ben: Your ruler is a good example of move look-ahead. I should've done more of that ^^
Brian: Basically its a smarter version of split-up ruler. And... its actually pretty smart ^^
Kevin: I liked the idea of having various 'tactics' (as assigned by batallion) assigned to groups of knights. Its like those real-time strategy games that I could never seem to get good at.
Paul: Your strategy is nice and simple.
Randy: Well... So maybe it doesn't win matches, but I think this is the most aesthetically pleasing ruler of them all. The 'sweep' is probably one of the funniest things to watch in this game, and winning isn't necessarily everything...