Although there are many types of strategy games, there are subtle differences in

Question

Although there are many types of strategy games, there are subtle differences in many that add fresh ideas and differentiate gameplay from the competition. Our ability to customize the games that satisfy a player's particular type of gameplay is important in current game development.

Write a 1-2 page summary of your view on tasks and sub-tasks in a strategy game. Think about considerations of data-driven design in an open-ended game environment. Offer possible problems and solutions for extending customization to both designers and players.

Support your writing with at least one case or detail from an Internet search. First, try for the article "Creating All Humans: A Data-Driven AI Framework for Open Game Worlds" by John Krajewski. Find this case on the website of Gamasutra at http://www.gamasutra.com (On the site, search for John Krajewski, humans and be sure to read the full feature article by Krajewski.) If you are unable to find this article, try for another article, case, or detail from your reading.

Explanation / Answer

Strategy Game:

A strategy game or strategic game is a game (e.g. video or board game) in which the players' uncoerced, and often autonomous decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Almost all strategy games require internal decision tree style thinking, and typically very high situational awareness.

The strategy concept is sometimes (wrongly) confused with that of a move. A move is an action taken by a player at some point during the play of a game (e.g., in chess, moving white's Bishop a2 to b3). A strategy on the other hand is a complete algorithm for playing the game, telling a player what to do for every possible situation throughout the game.

A strategy game is any game where the outcome is determined by the choices a player makes. These games are won through tactics rather than force or technical proficiency. Chess and checkers are strategy games, as are other board games like Risk. Strategy games are one of the most popular genres of video games as well, encompassing several types of games.

One type of game is the real time strategy game, or “RTS.” Popular versions of this game include Starcraft, League of Legends, and Age of Empires, although there are hundreds of different games of this genre. These games will usually involve moving one or more characters across a map, utilizing resources and winning specific locations on the map. RTS games move quickly and are usually multi-player.

There are also turn based strategy games, or “TBS”s. These are similar in premise to the RTS, but instead of action occurring quickly in real time, the player formulates his moves while the game is on pause, then sees how the actions pan out. Games like Total War, Civilization, and Heroes of Might and Magic are based on a TBS engine.

The majority of the RTS and TBS games can be generally classified as “war games”: Players guide troops, engage in battle, conquer territories, and receive domination of a battlefield. Not all strategy games are war simulations, however, and in fact many of the best strategy games deal with domestic topics. Many female gamers who refuse to play shooters play strategy games.

Pure and mixed strategies:

A pure strategy provides a complete definition of how a player will play a game. In particular, it determines the move a player will make for any situation he or she could face. A player's strategy set is the set of pure strategies available to that player.

A mixed strategy is an assignment of a probability to each pure strategy. This allows for a player to randomly select a pure strategy. Since probabilities are continuous, there are infinitely many mixed strategies available to a player.

Of course, one can regard a pure strategy as a degenerate case of a mixed strategy, in which that particular pure strategy is selected with probability 1 and every other strategy with probability 0.

A totally mixed strategy is a mixed strategy in which the player assigns a strictly positive probability to every pure strategy.

A planning problem is defined as a collection of goals to

achieve, an initial situation or state of the world, and a

collection of operators. A well known difficulty of using

planning algorithms in real-world problems is in solving

planning problems efficiently. A solution to a planning

problem is a sequence of actions, called a plan, that fulfill

the goals of the problem relative to the state of the world.

GOAP advocates the use of domain-specific heuristics to

guide the plan generation process and highly efficient data

structures to represent the information needed during plan

generation (e.g.., the current situation, the operators, etc.).

GOAP has been successfully applied to control the

behavior of the AI opponents in the upcoming first-person

shooter game.

HTN Planning in Games

Hierarchical planning has been shown to be a promising

means to build computer opponents. AI, although no specific applications of

HTNs in games were provided.

The use of HTN representations to encode strategic teambased

behavior of game AI in modern FPS games.

Explanation Types

In Section 3 we identified the syntactic components of an explanation. In this section

we identify and describe the types of explanations that are of interest for a case-based

planning system in the context of RTS games. Thes e types of explanations are:

· Strategy selection

· Course of action outcome

· Game model update

· Prediction

Strategy selection refers to explanations for why a particular strategy is selected. In

the context of HTN case-based planning, strategies are captured in cases. As a result,

strategy selection indicates the conditions for retrieving a particular case. As an

example, consider a gaming task in Magnant such as taking a city, the AI program

can have several cases that are applicable for accomplishing this task. The

second case calls for a 3-stage strategy: capture all access roads to the city by a task

force (TF1), bombard the defenses until they are weakened using a bombarding force

(BF), and assault the city using another task force (TF3).

When observing the behavior of the computer opponent , a user may request an

explanation for why a particular strategy was selected to capture a city. In this

situation, the explanation consists of alternative cases, their preconditions and

preferences, and how they matched the current situation (e.g., which preconditions

and preferences are fulfilled in the state of the world where the choice was made).

The case matching all preconditions and with the highest number of preferences

fulfilled is the one selected. As an example, the second alternative may be selected if

the two task forces (TF1 and TF3) and the bombarding force (BF) are available and

are in the proximity of city X (even though both cases have all their preconditions

s atisfied). Strategy selection explanations are similar to the explanations for casebased

reasoning (CBR) systems that perform analysis tasks, particularly diagnosis

. Essentially, strategy selection explanations return the

selected case itself as the explanation. The main differences between strategy

selection and explanation in CBR systems that perform analysis tasks are that (1) the

explanation includes alternative cases with information on how they matched the

current situation and (2) strategy selection explanations are chained to the

explanations of each of its task’s subtasks and parent tasks. For example, one of the

alternative cases is selected to accomplish the task CaptureAccessRoads(X,TF1) .

This kind of explanation relates to retrieval because it explains why a case was selected.

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