Maximum number of planets and players?

[smhanov]

Is there a maximum number of planets and players in a single game?

I distrust this new-fangled "dynamic" memory allocation thing.

[proteus]

I'm confused by this, too. Is there a plan to increase the number of players during the competition? All of the games on the score board seem to be two-player.

[bswolf]

Not sure about the tournament itself, but it's possible to use the existing engine to run a three-player game. You have to make or edit a map to give player 3 a starting planet, and give the game engine a third bot argument.

[jeff.cameron]

When I was making the engine, I made it so it could handle more than two players. I think we will probably stick with two-player for the purposes of the online tournament though. Games with more than two players tend to stalemate really quickly, which is less exciting than a cut-throat aggressive 1V1 game.

[philipj]

What about the maximum number of planets and the maps in general? Will the contest run on the same maps that are distributed in the starter packs?

[jeff.cameron]

There is no set maximum to the number of planets. However, you can expect there to be roughly the same number of planets that you see in the maps in the starter packages. We aren't going to stress test your bot by playing it on a map with 500 planets or anything like that.

The online tournament will start out using the maps from the starter packages. However, we will probably start rotating new maps in regularly. We will keep track of statistics on all the maps to figure out which ones are "better", so that we get a better and better set of maps over time.

[gkisel]

Is it safe to make assumptions about the maximum size of the maps? I noticed that the map generator has a maximum radius of 12, but this isn't exactly noted in the rules anywhere. I could figure out the map size on the fly in my AI, but that would be pretty computationally expensive.

[elemeno]

Why would it be expensive?

You only need to work out the map size once, and it's easy to work out - it's just a box formed by the planets with the minimum and maximum x and y values.

[gkisel]

[SUA.khb]

ie,
max planet limit <500
max turns limit =200
(this information is very important and it will be used to strategy initialize)