This looks really interesting. It would be a good project to test this against a general card-playing framework to easily test it on a variety of imperfect-information games based on playing cards.
What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases.
Do you, or somebody else, have any recommendations on how to handle this?
[0] Dominion, Homeworlds and the battle part of Eclipse iirc.
In my 2-player Splendor rules engine, the following actions are possible:
1. Purchase a holding. (90 possible actions, one for each holding)
2. If you do not have 3 reserved cards, reserve a card and take a gold chip if possible. (93 possible actions, one for each holding and one for each deck of facedown cards)
3. If there are 4 chips of the same color in a pile, take 2 chips of that color. (5 possible actions)
4. Take 3 chips of different colors, or 2 chips of different colors if only 2 are available, or 1 chip if only 1 is available. (25 possible actions)
5. If after any action you have at least 11 chips, return 1 chip. (6 possible actions which are never legal at the same time as any other actions)
This still doesn't correctly implement the rules though. In the actual game, you'd be allowed to spend gold chips when you don't need to, which would make purchasing holdings contain extra decisions after you pick which holding to purchase about which chips you'd like to keep.
(At the same time that probably makes it a good choice for a game implementation)
Thing is that for all my examples above I had a "good" reason to implement that specific game:
1. Dominion (shortly after it came out) To evaluate strategies to best my friends (obviously). 2. Eclipse Has a nice rock-paper-scissors type of ship combat, where you can counter every enemy build (if you have enough time and resources). Calculating the odds of winning would be interesting. 3. Homeworlds Seems to be a very fascinating game. But without any players to compete with [0] ... AI to the rescue ;-)
[0] I am aware of SDG where I could play online, but that site is in decay mode. Getting an account involved mailing the maintainer and those times I tried to start a game no players showed up.
I like the game for what it is. I'd say, surprisingly strategic.
That’s what I did when I applied RL to Dominion, because the complexity of the game depends heavily on the cards you include! See part 3 of https://ianwdavis.com/dominion.html
The key is to build a data-driven state machine, rather than writing logic with a bunch of 'if' statements.
I designed a language for solving this: http://www.adama-lang.org/
I get all the benefits of a data driven state machine with the simplicity of a language that supports asynchronously asking users for updates.
Something that I found amazing was inverting the flow control such that the server asks players questions with a list of possible choices simplifies the agent design tremendously. As I'm looking to retire to work on this project, I can generate the agent code and then hand-craft an AI. However, some AIs are soooo hard to even conceptualize.