Feedback and requests

[Cyril]

If you play with blue you might have drawn a lot of cards resulting in an empty library.
That is also a loss when drawing from it.

I don't think I decked myself in the games in question. But the good news is that there's been no similar incidents in Mad Wizard 4.2 or 4.3 so far. So if was a bug of some sort (and I'm not sure I was), it hasn't repeated in newer versions.

Also, it seems that 4.2 and above run more smoothly and is less demanding on processing power. On some machines I use, the fan would kick a few minutes after loading, and that doesn't seem to happen so quickly now. So I wondered if you have made the engine more efficient?

Haven't played 4.4 yet - looking forward to continuing my epic blue campaign using it!

[ubeefx]

So I wondered if you have made the engine more efficient?

The changes for the animated foil layers also seem to have improved efficiency a bit.

[Cyril]

I started a new Mad Wizard campaign with the new hybrid AI. I'm using the highest difficulty of 5 second thinking time. After 10 matches, the win-rate is 50%, which suggests that it might be more challenging than the old Minimax AI, but I can't be sure yet. This is a good thing in my view.

However, it's a big improvement having the guaranteed thinking time. A few matches with the old AI were very slow, often with a complex board state and usually with equipment in play: the AI would spend a lot of time each phase moving the equipment around from creature to creature. This is all now much quicker.

Thanks again for making this ever-improving game.

[ubeefx]

Hi Cyril, thanks for the feedback about the hybrid AI.
The main improvement is indeed the guaranteed thinking time.

The previous AI also had a concept of maximum thinking time, but that did not always work well.
It could also timeout and do a suboptimal move.

There are now three AI running at the same time each in a thread.
Running MiniMax single threaded has some advantages compared with multi-threaded in previous AI.
In most cases the best variant MiniMax 6 AI will be used, so that should give the same experience.
If it does not finish in time, a faster MiniMax 4 AI might provide the move if it finished.
The Vegas 4 AI doing the random simulations will provide the fallback move if needed.
That can still be decent as it will have used 2 or 5 seconds for running iterations.

[Cyril]

I have found a problematic card/interaction playing against the Random Black deck.

The card: the creature Viscid Lemures which has a 0-cost activated ability giving itself -1/-0 and swampwalk.

The problem: I used a removal spell to kill the Lemures, and the AI responded by triggering the ability. This was pointless given the game state (it was my turn), but then the AI continued to trigger the ability repeatedly, preventing the removal spell from resolving. It did this twenty times and eventually I had to quit the game as it was clear it would never stop!

Not sure that this is an actual bug. Might be the AI being too logical and trying to prevent itself from losing.

[ubeefx]

Activated abilities without a cost can be an issue because the AI can activate them endlessly.
When looking into the supported rules there are two cards that could have this problem, Hyalopterous Lemure and Viscid Lemures.
A way to solve this is to add a hint to the activated ability for the AI to not activate it more than once.

[Aswan jaguar]

And a full MTG list of cards ( 46 ) with : activation cost without a tap:
https://scryfall.com/search?q=oracle%3A ... me&as=text
Some of those pretty fun cards to play with and quite a challenge for AI.

[Cyril]

Thanks. I guess technically, there's no game rules being broken with the endless activations which is why the AI does it. Though I suspect a human trying it in a tournament would get a warning at least... It's encouraging that the AI 'cares' so much about not losing though - part of what makes it a good opponent.

[ubeefx]

Hi Bradley, I do not know what application you refer to. Android is not a supported platform.

[Huggybaby]

Hey ubeefx, Bradley was a robot. I just deleted it and its posts.