Team Formation with Heterogeneous Agents in Computer Games

Forming teams using heterogeneous agents that perform well together to accomplish a task in a game can be a challenging problem. There can often be an enormous amount of combinations to look through, and having an agent that is really good at a particular task is no guarantee that agent will perform well on a team with members with different abilities. Picking a good team is important, as changing teams is often not allowed midway through a task. Using Roles to Create Teams Roles can help simplify the search for the best team. As an example, a hockey coach might not put his best six players on the ice, especially if none of his top six players is a goalie. The concept of a goalie simplifies the search since it limits the criteria for the selection of that player to the abilities that are important for someone who is playing in that position. The concept of roles is explained in (Lu 2005), where agents are classified by the capabilities they can offer. To help simplify a selection process, roles will be used to guide search; first the roles that appear in the best teams will be determined, and then best character types to fill those roles will be found. Some character types are more effective than others at certain roles, and some can play more roles than others. The ‘Defender’, ‘Striker’, ‘Leader’, and ‘Controller’ roles (D, S, L, and C) are described in (Schwalb 2009) and explain the roles different characters are best at in the Neverwinter Nights (NWN) game. NWN is a role-playing game, but has also been used as a teaching tool. NWN allows a player to choose from many options when making each character, allowing millions of combinations of unique teams, making it a good tool for this research. The characters have different Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. abilities, and based on their strengths we can classify them in different roles. Characters in the ‘Defender’ role are tough and can take a lot of physical damage. ‘Strikers’ are good at dishing out damage, even from a distance. ‘Leaders’ can make their teammates more effective. ‘Controllers’ can damage many enemies simultaneously.