Scoring Query & Balance - Some observations and questions

Entelect Challenge 2024 Rules
1

Im wondering about scoring balance,

For example, the rules state example:
(example : 25 tiles <= 1 times. 50 tiles <= 1.5 times. 75 tiles <= 2 times etc).

I noticed that the leaderboard currently returns:

Bot ID + percentage of the map the player controls,
Does this mean that regardless of what happened in the game, the player with the most Territory in the end wins?

If that is the case then rewarding players for taking more risk is meaningless.
I think it would be better to use an overall score at the end,

An Alternative thought is to maybe give users score every 10 ticks for all land the control.
So that endgame score is measured throughout the whole match.

I just noticed that the score does not seem to really have any weight,
This could be my own oversight as well.

I think three ways to go about this:
A) The player who controls most of the land in the end wins.
Pros: Players will push for territory.
Cons: Theres no benefit to risk, so strategy could fall flat somewhat.

  • There can be victory snatching.

B) The Player who controls most land on average through the game wins,
Pros: Its more evenly spread, and no victory snatching would occur.

  • One could even introduce a scoring system where all territory is “Harvesting”, So every 10 rounds you own a tile you can harvest from it, gaining points, bit if you lose it, it resets to zero, you get no points,
    Cons: Theres no Benefits to risk, which could cause strategy to fall flat

C) Players can be rewarded for score as:
25 tiles <= 1 times. 50 tiles <= 1.5 times. 75 tiles <= 2 times etc

Pros: It adds massive Risk Reward challenges
Cons: It could undermine the value of holding lands, So a player could essentially win with a smaller amount of land control.

So my question is:
How does the engine determine the winner at this moment?
And is that fixed for the first event?

Will you use the first event to possibly assess win condition issues?

That first event is close and from the rules and my observations,
Its not immediately clear what the Win Condition is.

2

Hi @WillieTheron , you are correct, it might seem confusing. We are looking at rewording the rules a bit to make this more clear.

The scoring in non-linear increments for the number of tiles claimed which you mention above is not actually part of the regular scoring. Those are for tie-breaking points which come into play only if two or more bots are tied at the end of the game. I’ve actually been reworking that a little bit over the weekend as well and we will soon roll out a new release with the correct rules for tie-breaking points.

As for regular scoring, there’s really not much to it. The bot with the largest territory when the game ends, wins. The tie breaking scoring above only comes into play in the (probably very unlikely) event of two or more bots owning exactly the same amount of territory when the game ends.

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3

Thank you,

This simplifies my own tasks a lot, and the objective is pretty clear, I can understand it better now.

I know all hell is going to break loose when my bot starts fighting for control.

Pay close attention to the first event incase a re-balancing is in order.

4

Yeah, we didn’t want to implement any particularly complex rules for scoring simply because we don’t want to incentivise bots to adopt any particular strategy. When it comes to being adventurous or conservative, aggressive or defensive, opportunistic or premeditated, etc. we want the bots to devise their own strategies and establish which work best.

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