This assignment is to make an AI to play Empire, a real time strategy game. There are two major parts to this AI, exploring and combat. The first part of the assignment is exploring. The AI will get a points for exploring hidden tiles, it only has a limited number of turns to get the highest score.
In exploring there are two decisions that need to be made, what unit should be made and what direction should a unit travel. Since in this version of Empire, army units can travel on land and water. My AI will just make armies. There is a 5% chance that units on the water could take damage. Since armies only have 1 health, they would be killed. I find this small chance negligible though, since the AI will be as efficient as possible only making armies.
The way that I was thinking of implementing my movement was a modified dijkstra algorithm. A unit will find the magnitude of every hidden tile. Then it will move to the closest hidden tile. If there is an unoccupied city near a unit, that unit will capture the city. This way more army units can be made, and more tiles can be revealed.
While using these methods, adding in a combat portion will be easy. I would just have to change it so the units would move to an enemy if it is close enough and attack.
