If a player has less worms should they be allowed an action every turn?

Entelect Challenge 2019
1

If a player has less worms should they be allowed an action every turn? Shouldn’t the player with more worms have the advantage… when a player has 3 worms - then they can only shoot once every 3 rounds - while a player with 1 worm can shoot every round… that doesn’t seem right from a game development point of view to me…?

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Hi @Andre

We made it this way for various reasons. Here are some of the main ones:

  • The original worms game had the same mechanic. As your worms died, you continued cycling through the ones still alive.
  • The person with more worms already have an advantage of having three against one for example and it means that they are leading the game because they already killed two of their opponent’s worms.
  • It will also make the late game a bit more exciting because there is more action when two worms face off to be the last one standing.
6 Likes
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How about giving the choice of which worm is being activated each round? so every round I can use worm 1 if I want to?

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I think it would be too late for that. We’ve already pretty much built our bots for the June tournament… Can’t critically change the game mechanics at this point imho.

4 Likes
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I love the complexity this would introduce in the AI logic and therefore the additional competition. You would have to determine probability of which worm will be activated (because you cannot calculate it discretely).

Similar to the one weapon from original game that allowed you to do this a limited amount of times… which would be an enhancement to the original request IMHO.

1 Like
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Yes, from my testing, in any kind of three on three situation, it seems the player who first looses a worm almost always wins. This is because the other worms can shoot faster for their battles, while the victor from the first battle has to first move over to joint another battle. I guess a very smart AI can do a deliberate suicide to trigger this situation, but I did not want to go there.

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There’s a lot of variables at play. But one I can definitely say is choosing what worm to activate would be bad if I think about it. The scenario is very simple,

Lets assume a kill bot, All three worms hunts towards one of the opponent worms,

Enemy senses danger and desires to run with all his moves. Since the enemy is “fleeing” with all their might, In order to keep up you would likely need to only advance one worm, breaking “formation” and rendering any kill bot almost useless.

It also brings in 2 other problems…

A) It could become a 1 V 1 bot showdown.
B) It will be very hard to actually hit a worm if it moves out of range every time you have a clear shot.

This was my conclusion anyways.

With my tests the way the game is now it is quite well balanced. But I also built my bot with “Hopeful” power up drops in mind. And this will most definitely change everything. And I believe most contestants will almost completely rewrite their bots after that.

But I can only guess.

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@WillieTheron would your opinion change if the choice was limited to say 3 uses per game?

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I would not see the harm in 3 or so uses, Implementation would be a few lines.

But permanent choice of move will break everything, in my opinion.

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3 uses of what, not sure I’m following?

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This is what I am referring to