How did you resolve 1v1 combat?

[McLeopold]

I never implemented this, but I thought of a few things to try.

If a lone enemy ant is near your hill, wouldn't it be best to just suicide into it and prevent multiple ants from being distracted?

If a lone enemy ant is near your ant out gathering food, wouldn't you just want to jockey for position and keep your ant alive for more food gathering?

At the beginning of the game, wouldn't each ant be worth a lot more, so your economy can grow, and towards the end, wouldn't it be worth less so that you can suicide to overwhelm an enemy hill?

I'm curious as to how people valued their ants and what worked well.

[Parasprites]

The value I use is very simple. My ants are 1. Most of the time, enemy ants are .5
If an enemy is at least as close to a hill as the closest possible enemy, then it's bounty is increased by 1/(dist+1). This means that my bot will do 1x1 suicides against potential enemies at a distance of 1 or less from my hill.

Finally, there is a check for dominated enemy hills. If I have A ants within attack range of an enemy hill, and E enemies within double the attack range where A>E, then the enemy bounties within attack range of the hill are increased to at least (A-1)/E. This is to ensure that in the case where I have 2 ants next to the hill with 1 defender, I'll be willing to suicide one to clear the way for the other.


Anyway, I was planning to try estimating the relative strength of the enemy and adjusting values based on that, but I never got around to it.

[analyst74]

I skipped 1v1 situation too, the ant will just move around enemy toward "better" locations indicated by influence map.

When enemy ant is near my hill, they become desirable source so my ants will gather "around" them, until there are more than 1 of my ant near them, in which case, the combat algorithm takes over.

[codetiger]