The untitled strategy game is a probabilistic battle simulator, aiming to capture the uncertainty of traversing and engaging in combat on unknown territory against unknown enemies. The game mode is conquest, where two players compete for dominance over the objective tiles (dark grey dotted ones in the middle of the GUI picture) until either one has controlled them for a total of 100 turns with various types of units such as foot soldiers, tanks and snipers with different attributes such as damage, weight, size, range and health. These attributes determine the probabilities of a given unit being able to enter a given terrain and triumphing over another in battle.
To give the player some agency and a chance to show and develop their strategic competency as the commander of their troops, at the very core of the game is the idea of conditional actions consisting of primary and secondary actions and their respective targets. Each action target has an associated probability calculated based on the type of action and attributes of both the agent and the target. (These will be discussed in more detail in the algorithms section) The player may select any of their battle units by left clicking it with their mouse and choose a primary action for it from the dropdown menu on the right GUI pane, that gets highlighted in grey on the grid as shown in the picture below. This instantly prompts the player to choose a secondary action as well, which is highlighted in a light brown shade.
Both actions are by default “Move” but may be mixed and matched in any combination. Target selection for the primary action is highlighted in red and secondary target selection is highlighted in yellow. Once both actions and targets (coordinates next to selected actions) are selected, the “Set Action set” button can be clicked to save the action set for the selected battle unit. Once action sets are set for all desired units, “Play Turn” calculates the outcomes and updates the game state accordingly. Only if the primary action fails is the secondary action even attempted. It is entirely possible that both actions fail, whereas only one can ever succeed at once. Every unit can be assigned an action set during a turn so that with the default game launch configuration at most seven action sets will be executed at once.
Attacking an enemy battle unit always launches a duel where, based on the unit types, their experience and damage gradients (distance between), the loser suffers all the damage, whereas the winner stays unscathed. Attacking a terrain tile on the other hand degrades it so that its attributes change, making it easier or harder to traverse. If sufficient explosive damage is dealt to, for example, a rock, it will turn into gravel. The environment is therefore destructible. However, only tanks can degrade rocks. Moving simply places the battle unit in the new coordinates within its range. However, if these contain another battle unit, should the move be successful, the moving unit will ram them and be placed on top of the now destroyed enemy unit. Defend activates a temporary effect that reduces the damage taken by the defending battle unit to half in case it loses a battle while defending. The effect will persist until it moves or attacks something proactively.
The other two actions are Rest and Reload, replacing the supply chain mechanic, which was foregone due to lack of time and potentially resulting in overcrowding of the GUI. Rest restores a battle unit’s fuel to its maximum while staying still for one round and Reload restores its ammo to its maximum such that there is an aspect of resource management as well.
Selected actions are highlighted in the game map upon unit selection. First, only the primary action in light grey and after selecting its target, highlighted in red, the range of the secondary action is highlighted in light brown as well and its target is highlighted in yellow upon selection.
In the battle unit pane on the right, there are five labels on the top displaying the selected unit’s type, health, experience, ammo and fuel in that order. Ammo or fuel running out is highlighted in red. Primary and secondary actions are selected using the dropdowns with the second one becoming accessible only after primary action has been set. Their target coordinates are shown next to them and “Set action set” saves the current selection to the battle unit such that it can be overwritten any time by just selecting new actions and pressing it again. Changing between the action currently being selected can be done by clicking on the dropdowns with or without selecting a new action or by clicking the battle unit twice to reset the selections.
In the bottom pane, there is a “Play Turn” button that, upon clicking, processes all the set action sets and updates the GUI and game state. Next to it is a turn counter followed by both player’s current scores and their visualizations in the forms of bars filling up with the same color as their battle units. Below them are radio buttons whose states signal to the “AI” Player whether it is expected to move that player’s units. This means that the player may choose which units they want to control or if they just want to observe the AI Player play against itself. This also makes intervening possible at any point by simply unchecking one of them and continuing the game as normal.
The GUI is dynamically scalable when the map is sufficiently wider than it is tall. This is due to a very simplistic and quick implementation to mostly just scale up to larger monitors without considering scaling down. However, one visual bug that I did not have time to fix remains, where the health bar margins only get updated after pressing “Play Turn” instead of immediately upon rescaling. This is not much of an issue scaling up because they are just a bit off-center and will get fixed rather quickly but majorly scaling down, the too large lingering margins can cause the neighboring tiles to be pushed away due to overflow. This is also fixed within one turn but is significantly more disturbing than the other way around.
The game can be configured via a custom human readable launch configuration text file in "src/main/resources/launch-configuration/", which is structured such that the instructions for its safe modification are written on top and the actual space-separated configuration is parsed such that the first non-space character after the dashed line will be interpreted as the first character of the first map tile. This is then read one row at a time into a map with width equal to the number of words on the first line and height equal to the number of lines.
The launch configuration represents the map and initial placements of units in the game with units being specified on top their starting tiles, separated from them only by a comma (no spaces). It may be modified so that each continuous word representing a TerrainTile and a possible BattleUnit (_ or ,) is separated by at least one space character. The number of words in the first row gives the map width and the number of rows gives its height. Any incomplete rows will be padded with the top left type of tile. Units on the left belong to Player 1 and units on the right belong to Player 2. For standard heap memory size, maximum map size is approximately 18 * 11 with a total of 24 battleUnits, meaning that for safety, launch configuration should not contain much more than 220 elements. There must be more rows than columns and Each row must have the same length with its words each being one of the following:
- Grass
- Forest
- Rock
- Sand
- Dirt
- VegeDirt
- Gravel
- Objective (conquering of which will gain points towards winning)
A Battle unit can be placed on top of a Terrain tile by writing a comma after the latter and then writing one of the following:
- Soldiers
- Sniper
- Tank
The file is read out of a directory ("src/main/resources/launch-configuration/" by default) that is assumed to only ever contain a single file, so that the file’s name does not matter. The project is shipped with two launch-configuration files that are meant to be swapped in and out of the default folder for the game to be initialized with its contents. The configurations folder is meant for storage of custom launch configurations and launch-configuration is meant to host and use the currently active one. If the launch-configuration folder is empty or contains an illegally formatted file, the game defaults to the launch configuration defined in ConfigurationConstants.
Run the GUI class to run the game.
Read more about the implementation details in Strategy Game Final Report.
