A New Pseudo Real-time Single-action Game Challenge and Competition for AI

Abstract

This work presents TotalBotWar, a new pseudo real-time single-action challenge for game AI for mobile devices, as well as some initial experiments that benchmark the framework with different agents. The game is based on the real-time battles of the popular TotalWar games series where players manage an army to defeat the opponents one. In the proposed game, a turn consists of an order to control one of your units. One interesting feature of the game is that if a particular unit does not receive an order in a turn, it will continue performing the action specified in a previous turn. The turnwise branching factor becomes overwhelming for traditional algorithms and the partial observability of the game state makes the proposed game an interesting platform to test modern AI algorithms. It should be added that it is not necessary to know about programming to play, also the manual game mechanics have been implemented in which you can control your troops with the mouse. Finally, for reasons that will be explained in the following chapters, the structure of the developed system is not the conventional one, but a Cloud Gaming [26] style structure has been necessary.