Impact of Randomness on a Game Bot Workings within a Real-time Strategy Game Engine Spring

Abstract

From the artificial intelligence perspective the bot is an autonomous agent that makes intelligent decisions. In real-time strategy games bots are sometimes referred to as generals or even computer operated fictitious opponents of the human player. Bots have to deal with imperfect game information, the complexities of hundreds of variables and they must strive to perform as humans would. The complexity of developing a game bot is even greater because the game engine's operation includes randomness. This can be a very difficult challenge for bot developers to crack, as the algorithms behind game bots are often programmed with the presumption that the game engine environment information output is deterministic. In this article, we have analysed what kind of impact game engine randomness has on a game bot’s gameplay. In order to do so, we constructed experiments for measuring the random effects that a Spring game’s engine has on a game bot whilst the bot is conducting unit movement scenarios and simple battle tactics.