Some questions about the CIG competition

[Pablo García Sánchez]

Hi guys!

We are planning to send an agent to the CIG competition, but we have a couple of questions:

- Tutorial [1] says that tasks can be simulated using POGame.Process, but I think the correct function is POGame.Simulate, as the former is the one that first clones the current state, and then executes "Process" to the clone (so the game is not modified).

- Also, current version of the AbstractAgent in the repo does not have List<PlayerTask> GetMove, function, but PlayerTask GetMove instead (returns a Task, not a List). Is it because the current version has been updated?

 - I realized that "Arcane Blast" do not decrease minion's health (comparing a minion before and after calling Simulate), while "Blizzard" does. Also, attacking with a weapon sometimes launchs an exception in Simulate (therefore, returning null). Mostly when removing the weapon after the attack. Does anybody else has the same issues? (testing the agent with RenoKazakusMage deck)

- Is there any way to setup the Mulligan phase using AbstractAgent implementations?

Thanks in advance, and hope to see you all in the game arena soon! :)

[1] https://dockhorn.antares.uberspace.de/wordpress/tutorial/

[dockhorn....@gmail.com]

Hi,

thanks for your interest in our competition. In the last weeks we already had many submissions and also some error reports. We added a few changes to make the game more stable. Therefore, the information on the tutorial might not be up-to-date, but I can give you a short overview.

- the Process function performed poorly, because it generated a lot of errors. We added the Simulate function, which is much more stable and should be used instead. For each option it will calculate a separate future state and return it to the player if successful. Please check for null values, because the removed weapon bug is persistent and couldn't be fixed yet.

- Abstract Agent was changes to return a single move instead of a list of moves. Players who calculate a whole turn in advance can still do so, buy storing the calculated list of moves in the agent object. However, it is adviced to check if an option is still available before returning it to the POGameHandler. Due to some random actions it can happen, that an option is not available anymore, e.g. a spell hitting a random enemy kills a minion, therefore, no more attacks targeting that minion are available

- the arcane blast problem was not known yet. Can you sent us your code for checking this? If this card is currently bugged we will remove it from the deck list, but such behavior was not reported yet. We would love to check if it works correctly.

- mulligan is deactivated for this years competition. In theory it is available in the framework, but we decided to skip this face to make the first development of a bot a bit easier. The competition will be held again in the next years and we will increase the difficulty by adding new game elements step by step.

I am looking forward to your submission.

Regards,

Alex