Having just published Slay Tutorial three, making the Onslaught game play well as a computer opponent(well up to 8 of them)  has been weighing on my mind. I have played the original Slay perhaps a couple of thousand times, so I’m reasonably familiar with strategy.

There’s almost 500 games on the Slay game chooser screen shown with four different sizes of islands; the four boxes. Usually by the time I’ve played through all games here (probably taking 18 months to two years) , I can start again and have forgotten what it was like. Plus I think it randomises the starting positions so you get a lot of replay value.

In the first Slay Tutorial I published a map of the tutorials and so far am sticking to it. Tutorial seven is the one for the game AI and its on my mind. I play all the Slay games at the same top intelligence level and even it sometimes makes stupid mistakes like leaving an area vulnerable to splitting and losing all units due to starvation.

The main aim of any player is to expand their territory at the expense of other players. Joining territories can be one tactic as its lets you support the bigger units. The 2 point unit is a Peasant then there’s Spearmen (6 points) , Knights (18 point) and Baron (54 points).  Getting a Knight early on gives you a big advantage as it can defeat castles and too often I’ve seen a territory with one or two spearmen get trapped by castles and destroyed in a few turns.

Likewise putting a castle down early on can secure a territory for a while. Or if you have a larger area, a couple of castles can shield your flanks so you can focus yoyr troops against one enemy and not worry about other players moving in.

Self Playing

In Slay once you are eliminated the games plays through until one player beats everyone else. But self-playing can also be a useful way to have computer players learn. One possibility is to try and implement a “matchbox” AI. This was done with Tic-Tac-Toe (noughts and crosses for us Brits) with Menace, Now it may be that Onslaught is too complex to implement that but there’s a lot of RAM available, so if I can limit the number of setups that it recognises then maybe?

Anyway there’s a fair bit of time and Tutorials 4-6 to do before I get to Tutorial seven.

PS

If you move the mouse over the About Me, you’ll see a link to a page that has short cut links to all blog posts along with the title of each.  It’s a quicker way of navigating.