Quest deck testing with AI vs AI

[Rooger]

Hi everyone, I had an ideia about making a custom quest world based on Dragon Ball lore, i'm a huge fan of the series and thought it would be cool to "fight" against Freeza in Namek.

So I started by collecting some decks from the sub-forum and already have a few to work with. However, I would like to find a way to quickly test their strenght and AI vs AI seems to be the way to go. I'm using the Main World's quest decks as a base and after a couple of games against diferent levels I might end up with an estimated strenght of the deck and possible problematic cards it might have.

Now, the reason for this thread is to ask you if anyone has done such thing will trying to make custom worlds and if this is the best way to do so. If not what other alternatives do I have to achieve my goal? Also a couple of questions regarding ai vs ai play.

- Does forge store logs for games played? I've noticed the field in the preferences to set the verbosity for the log but i dont know if they are saved or just displayed when the game is runing. I just need to know how many games and matches my decks won against the quest decks.

- Is it possible to mirror the AI field? If 2 AIs are playing each other the one on the lower half of the screen will have the same layout as the one on the upper half i.e. a row with lands on top of a row with other permanents. It just looks weird with both players facing the same way.

Btw if you guys like DBZ and have any ideias for deck themes for the characters i'm open to suggestions

[daitokujibiko]

That Which Was Taken is kind of like a dragon ball. And it is a ball. Not sure about its power level as a card though.

[austinio7116]

Hi Rooger,

I have been testing AI decks vs each other with a custom test class I created in my copy of the codebase that allows you to define a list of Deck names and it will play a number of matches between each deck and finally output a matrix of results. Perhaps I could clean this up, check it in and make this available as a stand-alone executable program - or at least a runnable test class initially. There is already a stand alone command line tool in forge I think that you can use to run single games AI vs AI - the alternative would be for you to wrap that.

[austinio7116]

Using the existing feature is probably best:

Syntax: forge.exe sim -d <deck1[.dck]> ... <deckX[.dck]> -D [D] -n [N] -m [M] -t [T] -p [P] -f [F] -q
-sim - stands for simulation mode
-deck1 (or deck2,...,X) - constructed deck name or filename (has to be quoted when contains multiple words)
-deck is treated as file if it ends with a dot followed by three numbers or letters
-D - absolute directory to load decks from
-N - number of games, defaults to 1 (Ignores match setting)
-M - Play full match of X games, typically 1,3,5 games. (Optional, overrides N)
-T - Type of tournament to run with all provided decks (Bracket, RoundRobin, Swiss)
-P - Amount of players per match (used only with Tournaments, defaults to 2)
-F - format of games, defaults to constructed
-q - Quiet flag. Output just the game result, not the entire game log.

[austinio7116]

For example if you put some deck files in a test folder, you can run:

forge.exe sim -D "C:\Path\to\constructed\test" -n 3 -t RoundRobin -q

and you will get a final result like:

Modern Cluster 003 Vault Skirge - Signal Pest based deck 3 Wins(0 Byes)-0 Losses-0 Ties => 9 Points
Modern Cluster 001 Eldrazi Displacer - Thought-Knot Seer based deck 1 Wins(0 Byes)-2 Losses-0 Ties => 3 Points
Modern Cluster 002 Lingering Souls - Tarmogoyf based deck 1 Wins(0 Byes)-2 Losses-0 Ties => 3 Points
Modern Cluster 004 Liliana of the Veil - Inquisition of Kozilek based deck 1 Wins(0 Byes)-2 Losses-0 Ties => 3 Points

Should be able to run a tournament on your quest decks pretty quickly.

[Rooger]

Wow! This is great austinio7116! Thanks for sharing the information, it's just what I was asking for. I'll test it out now and see what I end up with.

That's a nice card daitokujibiko for the DB theme, Jugan, the Rising Star would be a great Shenron .

[austinio7116]

I'm thinking of writing a bash script to automatically run an AI competition on a set of quest decks and set the difficulty level according to final standings - I could then run that on my 20 or so generated quest worlds and make them better - currently they are randomly distributed across the levels. If I do I'll post it here.

[daitokujibiko]

This sounds extremely useful for letting me figure out which of my quest decks is medium, hard, etc. Unfortunately I don't get any output when I do this. Also, I notice each time I run the command I get a javaw.exe process in my task manager that seems to stay there forever and takes up a decent amount of CPU.

[austinio7116]

What commands are you running? What platform?

[daitokujibiko]

Ok. I figured it out. The output went into a forge.log file I found in my %appdata% directory, not onto my dos command prompt. And the javaw process is there for awhile because it turns out it takes longer than I expected to simulate a tournament of this size. Man this is useful.

[austinio7116]

The Swiss tournament is the fastest option if you just want to rank decks.

[austinio7116]

If you are playing a deck that the AI plays reasonably well, perhaps an aggro deck, I wonder if you could use this AI Vs AI tournament to tune a deck, by creating various alternative deck configurations and playing lots of games.

[Rooger]

It is the year 2046 and it seems the days of Magic: The Gathering played by humans are long forgotten. Kids now a days just brew some random decks into a machine and let computers do the rest. They even compete against each other in the form of tournaments were they just sit behind a screen fiddling around with letters, numbers and other strange characters and the best deck play by the ai wins. Sponsored by Forge. I just realized MTG as turned into Robot Wars...and that is freaking cool ahah

On a more serious note, this is actually a great way to test our quest decks and tweak them to be a bit better, the start is always a struggle to find good synergy.