Hello everyone back to Entelect Challenge, for the 10th anniversary of the challenge!
This thread is to be used for posting balancing issues - feel the game is just too easy, or you are struggling to get your bot even past the first few seconds of a game?
Or maybe it’s just gas clouds are barely even real - some say, they might not exist?
Let us know below!
Hi Team Entelect,
I have found that in some matches one of the bots can be seriously disadvantaged by a poor starting position --> Sometimes one of the bots have significantly less food and have plenty of gas clouds and astroid fields close by.
I was wondering if some simmetry would not be better for balancing? E.g. for 4 bots each quadrant will be a mirror or flipped mirror image.
Have a happy day
Kuifie
Hi Kuifie, thanks for reaching out regarding this.
With regards to the starting food, there is a set amount of food placed around each player to ensure a fair start for everyone, any food outside of this area is placed based on a seeded random generator. Could you please provide an example config and seed where this seemed quite unfair so that we may look into it?
On the second point with the gas clouds and asteroid fields, these are also placed based on a seeded random generator, we will look into tweaking the symmetry of these obstacles to have them not lean towards one side as much in certain scenarios.
Lastly, the bots are placed around the center point with an equal distance between them, all of the objects in the game are spawned to consider these positions when being generated.
I hope this answered some of your questions and will provide feedback on the gas cloud and asteroid field tweaks as soon as possible.
Please feel free to let me know if there are any other questions.
Thank you for the explenation.
See this example: My bot is the BLUE dot. Compare my food with the bot bottom left. Visually you can see much more food and less restrictions.
Seeds from the Complete.JSon:
{“TotalTicks”:342,“Players”:[{“Placement”:1,“Seed”:24156,“Score”:51,“Id”:“3a266715-aeb9-4a4f-92b9-462bf4b49bfe”,“Nickname”:“KuifieBot_V1”,“MatchPoints”:6},{“Placement”:2,“Seed”:2077,“Score”:39,“Id”:“c96cbeff-80f0-4ff2-9645-8689b004aac3”,“Nickname”:“BossBot2”,“MatchPoints”:4},{“Placement”:3,“Seed”:4721,“Score”:13,“Id”:“60f92b92-ee0c-44b3-aa68-2b3353c748c5”,“Nickname”:“BossBot2”,“MatchPoints”:2}],“WorldSeeds”:[47941],“WinningBot”:{“Id”:“3a266715-aeb9-4a4f-92b9-462bf4b49bfe”,“Size”:258,“Speed”:1,“GameObjectType”:1,“CurrentHeading”:235,“Position”:{“X”:-195,“Y”:-283}}}
Hi Kuifie,
Thanks for the information, we will get back to you with feedback as soon as possible.
Hi Kuifie,
Myself and the rest of the engine devs have had a discussion around this and will investigate possible changes to make this feel more balanced, I would just like to point out that while your bot and the one at the top left have seemingly less food nearby, they also have quicker access to
wormholes that opens up the map to them.
Just ensure that you’re using the latest version of the starter pack, 2021.1.1.
I have not read the team’s replies, but I did think that Wormholes could be a possible counter to a bad start.
Though I have not written any AI yet, i did notice some maps where one half of the map is mostly astroids and gas while the other half was pretty much promised Territory.
So I do think you might have a point.
Perhaps mirrored is not even needed, but maybe try and distribute astroids, food and gas more evenly across the map itself.
Here is another map:
The seed is {“TotalTicks”:536,“Players”:[{“Placement”:1,“Seed”:5001,“Score”:50,“Id”:“711271da-6f46-4146-bb17-bd0fb9398bb4”,“Nickname”:“BossBot2”,“MatchPoints”:8},{“Placement”:2,“Seed”:24763,“Score”:51,“Id”:“8360e0dd-5fb1-4d07-9734-a7b5ed0730ce”,“Nickname”:“JSNickName”,“MatchPoints”:6}],“WorldSeeds”:[48315],“WinningBot”:{“Id”:“711271da-6f46-4146-bb17-bd0fb9398bb4”,“Size”:43,“Speed”:4,“GameObjectType”:1,“CurrentHeading”:136,“Position”:{“X”:249,“Y”:-235}}}
Im uncertain how this world will change iof you added example 6 more bots (less random generations)
But it does seem that the East side of this map is much harder to play than West.
If we add more players I do feel this could balance out, But thought a second map might help.
One last point, Because of the maxSize tied to food I feel everyone has a fair chance to max out, So this also needs to be considered…
Hi @WillieTheron,
Thank you for your response and insight, I agree with the fact that wormholes could be used to your advantage if you have a less than optimal start and the maxSize for food consumption would ensure that any possible advantage of having more food in close proximity at the start is balanced out fairly quickly.
As mentioned we are looking into balancing out obstacle spawning and making adjustments where needed to take all of these factors into consideration.
How does one build a visualization map like this…? 
Anywhere you can point a noob in the right direction to get some help…?
Hi @UberGeoff, thanks for posting here and welcome to the Entelect Challenge.
Keep an eye on the starter pack, we have one on the way for everyone 
Each time you run a game there are 2 log files created in the logger-publish folder. _GameStateLog_xxxx.
Write a program that reads in that data and plot away. You may have to do some sizing alterations to make the big map fit onto the screen.
Ok. Cwel - will check it out…
I created a viewer tha t is avialable for anyone to use, see this thread.
Hi @UberGeoff, as well as @WillieTheron and @cairnswm
@cairnswm, Thanks for the visualiser you launched! I think the community has definitely been appreciating it!
@UberGeoff We have also launched our visualiser that we have been using internally. Please feel free to take a look and give it a whirl!
I think that the wormholes are not lasting long enough. The issue is due to both wormholes dropping when only one wormhole is outside the boundary.
But this makes sense to me…
Since one hole in dependent on the other… no so…?
So if one goes off the map - so the other should be waxed…
Yes. I just think that then they disappear as a result too quickly and don’t have that much of an impact.
I see…
We have to see what the “people in charge” have to say…?
