Combining AI Methods for Learning Bots in a Real-Time Strategy Game

We describe an approach for simulating human game-play in strategy games using a variety of AI techniques, including simulated annealing, decision tree learning, and case-based reasoning. We have implemented an AI-bot that uses these techniques to form a novel approach for planning fleet movements and attacks in DEFCON, a nuclear war simulation strategy game released in 2006 by Introversion Software Ltd. The AI-bot retrieves plans from a case-base of recorded games, then uses these to generate a new plan using a method based on decision tree learning. In addition, we have implemented more sophisticated control over low-level actions that enable the AI-bot to synchronize bombing runs, and used a simulated annealing approach for assigning bombing targets to planes and opponent cities to missiles. We describe how our AI-bot operates, and the experimentation we have performed in order to determine an optimal configuration for it. With this configuration, our AI-bot beats Introversion’s finite state machine automated player in 76.7% of 150 matches played. We briefly introduce the notion of ability versus enjoyability and discuss initial results of a survey we conducted with human players.