Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The Computer Doesn't Mulligan and Why It Doesn't Matter - Part 1

The computer never mulligans. Truthfully I think I could program the computer to mulligan but I didn't think that it would greatly improve the AI.

When a player is deciding whether he should take a mulligan or not many factors flow through his head such as "Do I have the lands that I need to support this hand?", "Is this deck slow or fast?" and "Can I win the game with this hand?". I can't code any of that stuff so the computer would have to follow a few basic rules such as to mulligan if he had only one land.

MTG Forge has an option called "Stack AI Land" which can be turned on or off. When this option is on it stacks the AI's library so that he will draw a few lands to begin with and the rest of the lands are put on the bottom of the deck.

Theoretically this should give the AI a boost in longer games since you would occasionally draw a land while it will be drawing nothing but spells. The "Stack AI Land" option presumes a two color deck, so if the AI is playing a 3, 4, or 5 color deck you should turn this option off.

10 comments:

Shing said...

I've wondered why the AI refuses to play many spells like Lava Spike and seemingly randomly uses others. It's hard to build decks for the AI when it doesn't use half the cards in the deck. I suppose you'll "teach" the AI to use the mana pool as well at some point in time.

Xuelynom said...

It's a strange choice... it means that some spells will never be played by the IA?...

Augustoaag said...

I love this game, but the first thing I would add is an OK button at the end of the turn of the computer player. So many activated habilitys and bounce spells are crippled by this.

Shing said...

Also, I would like to be able to cast spells when choosing blockers so that i can cast flash creatures and use other abilities.

Chris H. said...

> I've wondered why the AI refuses to
> play many spells

The answer can be somewhat complicated. There is a lot of information related to creating AI decks which have been posted on the Forums.

Some people have had success in creating AI decks and some of these can be found in the 100 deck archive and are included in the quest mode.

Forge said...

"I've wondered why the AI refuses to play many spells like Lava Spike and seemingly randomly uses others."

Sorry, that is as good as it gets right now. The AI is random and it is hard to make decks that it can use well. The decks that the AI can use well are simple decks that don't use combos. The AI is good with aggro.

The AI isn't really good with burn spells since it just looks at each card individually.

Forge said...

Not that it is a secret but yes the AI doesn't play a few spells or abilities like Hex, Counterspell, Merfolk Looter and a few hard to evaluate spells. I should probably make up a full listing.

Forge said...

"I love this game, but the first thing I would add is an OK button at the end of the turn of the computer player."

Look in the menu, it will let you stop at the end of the computer's turn. I need to add another phase stop after declaring attackers but I haven't yet.

Shing said...

Thanks for the response, I wonder how the programmers managed to program the AI to do all those things in the PC and xbox360 games. I haven't tried Wagic on the PSP but I'll test it out soon and see. http://wololo.net/wagic/

Shing said...

looks like Wagic is also for windows..