Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#41

Post by j2kun » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

Just curious: have you watched any of these games to see what kinds of mistakes the AI makes for various settings of the parameters in your scoring functions?

Also, I'd be interested in doing offline learning. For example, if you have some formal way to record the actions taken in a game, you could ask pro players to submit their games. Of course, this would require Blizzard to allow a replay mechanism like it does for starcraft. But it would make the AI design process much more interesting than exploring game trees (without perfect information) or greedily picking the best single move.

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#42

Post by Kurtz79 » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

gavanwoolery wrote: post #29

In order to balance the game I am working on, I am planning to use a somewhat similar automated system (although its good to note, you can get a very interesting statistical analysis by ignoring the AI and just playing random cards/skills/whatever you are testing against each other). This of course works best if you are selecting two discrete subsets of one superset and playing with card variance (random decks, contr…

I agree with most of your comments, but I really think Heartstone is Free to Play done right (not to the extent of DOTA2 or Path of Exile, but almost).

After more than a hundred of hours on it, to date I haven't spent a dime of real money (I'll happily buy the single player expansion, though).

Just do daily quests in Ranking and spend the coins on Arena,which doesn’t depend at all on real money spent, and you'll get a lot of mileage (also considering that for an Arena run you get a pack of cards, so you'll get better at Ranking).

BTW, to the OP: thanks for ruining my plans for the weekend :)

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#43

Post by oyachai » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

TheMakeA wrote: post #32

oyachai wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I'm up to about 100 cards at this time, working on the basic cards first. Besides the cards, there needs to be more work on the AI modeling... currently, it won't handle any card with elements of randomness to it. I think I have an idea on how to treat it (without the AI cheating), so that implementation is coming up... soon.

Are you implementing each card by hand? I was going to make something like this and was just going to regex match all of the cards (from HearthPwn). It seemed like there were few enough variations to make something like that possible. Curious if you already tried automating it.

A lot of the cards are more or less automatically generated in the sense that they don't actually extend any functionality of the parent class. Variations in the special effects ("text" effects) are big enough that for those, I find implementing them one by one much easier.

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#44

Post by matchu » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

dirtyaura wrote: post #35

gavanwoolery wrote: post #29

In order to balance the game I am working on, I am planning to use a somewhat similar automated system (although its good to note, you can get a very interesting statistical analysis by ignoring the AI and just playing random cards/skills/whatever you are testing against each other). This of course works best if you are selecting two discrete subsets of one superset and playing with card variance (random decks, contr…

To me Hearthstone didn't feel grindy at all compared to almost any other top IAP game available in App Store. I think Hearthstone hit a pretty good balance for freemium IAP model, I never felt that I had to pay to be able to play, unlike in most of the other freemium IAP games. I agree that classing causes a bit too predicable deck strategies, MtG felt more balanced on this aspect. What Hearthstone got right was the…

I suspect that MtG's big advantage here is having a ton more cards. Hearthstone's meta is pretty straightforward because there are only a handful of cards to work with right now, but the upcoming Naxxramus mini-expansion should make things more interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing what'll happen when they finally produce a full expansion.

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#45

Post by oyachai » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:03 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #36

oyachai wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good suggestion, let me think about that.

If I may, I would suggest thinking about things in a way very similar to how Magic: The Gathering does, which is as a "state-based effect" or "triggered effect". This models very well into programming as event handlers watching state-changes and acting appropriately. For instance, the most common state-based effect in MTG is death from damage. This is perhaps even easier to model in Hearthstone, as damage is persiste…

The event/listener paradigm is an interesting way of going about this, and I considered doing it that way at the beginning. But, after some thinking and experimenting, I found the "card use -> modify BoardState" way more straight forward, especially since it leads to a nice recursive tree structure for the game AI engine. The primary goal of this simulator is to do statistical analysis on deck performance, so I think it's a decent way of going about it. On the other hand, if my goal were to create an actual playable game clone, I probably would have taken the event/listener approach.

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#46

Post by chacham15 » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

gavanwoolery wrote: post #29

In order to balance the game I am working on, I am planning to use a somewhat similar automated system (although its good to note, you can get a very interesting statistical analysis by ignoring the AI and just playing random cards/skills/whatever you are testing against each other). This of course works best if you are selecting two discrete subsets of one superset and playing with card variance (random decks, contr…

The #1 reason I stopped playing the game is because I would do fairly well at the game, get matched with stronger opponents, and subsequently lose because I dont even have the full set of Mage cards while my opponent is pulling legendaries. That kind of a game just isnt fun for me and it happens over and over.

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#47

Post by rcthompson » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

ntaso wrote: post #2

HearthSim is a generic Hearthstone game simulator and AI, designed to run large numbers of simulated AI vs AI games in order to test and understand the values of various game mechanics and cards. Then I read an article about The Coin on OP's blog: http://buddypanda.com/?p=65 and I don't think that the simulator is that useful. Maybe I'm too dumb to understand this, but my intuitive idea is that a card like The Coin g…

Player 1 gets the coin, but the table is listing Player 0's win percentage. So when you give the coin to Player 1, Player 0's win percentage goes down. So yes, the coin is a massive advantage. In other words, the player wins more 20% games when the opponent doesn't get the coin, all else being equal.

If you want some real-world stats about going first vs. second, try the stats from Arena Mastery[1], which more or less match what Bilzzard has said anecdotally: with the second player getting the coin, going first is still a slight advantage.

[1] http://arenamastery.com/sitewide.php

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#48

Post by oyachai » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #41

Just curious: have you watched any of these games to see what kinds of mistakes the AI makes for various settings of the parameters in your scoring functions? Also, I'd be interested in doing offline learning. For example, if you have some formal way to record the actions taken in a game, you could ask pro players to submit their games. Of course, this would require Blizzard to allow a replay mechanism like it does f…

I have informally looked at what the AI does. Turns out, as far as I can see, the AI does a pretty good job... with a BIG CAVEAT. The decks that I have used so far consist solely of minions and one other special card, so there really isn't any "mistakes" the AI can make. The decks are just so simplistic at this point. As more interesting cards are implemented, I'm sure there will be situations where the AI will make interesting mistakes that we can learn from. It is something I'm really looking forward to exploring.

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#49

Post by slapresta » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:10 PM UTC

oyachai wrote: post #21

z131 wrote: post #20

Dear god thank you for not writing this in javascript.

Simulation speed is of primary concern here (though javascript isn't too shabby)! I actually have a C++ version too, but I thought Java might be more accessible to more people...

How can simulation speed be a concern in a turn-based card game?

Re: Show HN: HearthSim, an AI and game simulator for Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

#50

Post by infiniteri » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

chacham15 wrote: post #46

gavanwoolery wrote: post #29

In order to balance the game I am working on, I am planning to use a somewhat similar automated system (although its good to note, you can get a very interesting statistical analysis by ignoring the AI and just playing random cards/skills/whatever you are testing against each other). This of course works best if you are selecting two discrete subsets of one superset and playing with card variance (random decks, contr…

The #1 reason I stopped playing the game is because I would do fairly well at the game, get matched with stronger opponents, and subsequently lose because I dont even have the full set of Mage cards while my opponent is pulling legendaries. That kind of a game just isnt fun for me and it happens over and over.

It's definitely a bit of an issue, but less of one than people tend to believe. There are many decks that people bring to Legend rank that cost very little in terms of dust.