BotArena Sealed Deck mode?

by **RumbleBBU** » 21 Aug 2012, 11:38

With current Manalink's Sealed Deck support being a bit unpredictable, I'm looking for alternatives, i.e., computerized versions that let me play Sealed Deck against the computer A.I.
With its impressive selection of cards, BotArena looks like a possibility. I'm also impressed by the ability to choose the exact starter packs and booster packs you want to use to build your sealed deck.

However, two questions:

1) How do I play Sealed Deck against the computer? Apparently I need to pick a playdeck for the computer. Do I need to manually build a sealed deck and then assign the computer to play with that deck? That would sort take away from the fun because then I would know what the computer has got in its deck...
Any way to make the computer AI generate a new deck for its use based on the sealed cards it receives, is there?

2) A slightly more serious problem. More often than not, when I have made my pack choices, the game announces that "This sealed deck is corrupted. You will not be able to save changes to this deck." Not nice.

What is causing this, and how to prevent it?

Thank you for your help.

by **FranAvalon** » 21 Aug 2012, 17:45

RumbleBBU wrote:1) How do I play Sealed Deck against the computer? Apparently I need to pick a playdeck for the computer. Do I need to manually build a sealed deck and then assign the computer to play with that deck? That would sort take away from the fun because then I would know what the computer has got in its deck...
Any way to make the computer AI generate a new deck for its use based on the sealed cards it receives, is there?

We are sorry, but for now, BA doesn't build its own sealed decks. So if you want play vs AI you (or other members) must do the decks.

RumbleBBU wrote:2) A slightly more serious problem. More often than not, when I have made my pack choices, the game announces that "This sealed deck is corrupted. You will not be able to save changes to this deck." Not nice.
What is causing this, and how to prevent it?

Thank you for your help.

Sealed was designed to play vs other real players. To avoid to do cheats, BA uses a seed, which must be deteminated by the players. Somehow, the check of the seed is bugged, and now it says that the file is corrupted.
For now, don't use the seed. Battlestar coded that, and he left the project a couple of years ago, and I don't have enough skills to fix it. Sorry.

Of course, all this things could be done if we have more coders working on the project. #-o

by **RumbleBBU** » 21 Aug 2012, 18:27

Thank you for your reply.
Ok, maybe that's not too bad. I'll just whip up a couple of quick decks with the same Sealed sets and try to forget them before I let the computer play them.

As for the seed issue - how and where do I disable the seed?

by **FranAvalon** » 21 Aug 2012, 19:47

The seed is a blank textbox under the product menu on sealed. When you get the corrupted message, did you wrote something on that box? :?:

In case that the bug persist, you can open the deck using notepad and remove the first four lines. Their would have this structure.

#SEAL_CHECKSUM {.......................}
#SEAL_COMPUTER .........................
#SEAL_CREATE_DATE .......................
#SEAL_MODIFY_DATE .............................

BTW, I usually play a fun random format: Booster deck. The decks are one booster plus ten basic lands (2 of each basic land), so the decks are 25 card size. Of course you must add a line to do it "legal" for BA.

#NO_CARD_LIMIT

Also, I set the players life to 12. So the games are fast and very interesting. I've attached a buch of Zendikar booster decks if you want try their. You can check the file to see the lines that I put on the top of the file
#NO_CARD_LIMIT
#LIFE 12

by **RumbleBBU** » 22 Aug 2012, 07:26

I never entered anything in that box...but still get the 'corrupted' error message.

But the manual seed removal workaround works just fine. Thank you for the tip! (And the other suggestions as well.)

If I have the time, I could try to construct a Sealed Deck-building strategy proposal for the A.I. (Pseudocode first, because I don't have a Windows compiler that would work for BotArena.) But right now I'm too busy playing

(...and with real work).

by **FranAvalon** » 22 Aug 2012, 07:56

I am glad to see that remove the lines worked for you.
We know that the UI is the worst part of BA, I fixed some parts but i dont have enough skill to redone the whole UI.
BA is writen in C++, and I am using VS2010 to code and compile it. Would be nice that someone improve some aspects of BA's UI. If you want try and join to us (when you want rest a bit from playing ...and of course of RL work), just tell me