Battlecode is a real-time strategy game, for which we write an AI player over the course of January. In Battlecode, two teams of virtual robots roam the screen managing resources and executing different offensive strategies against each other. Our AI player strategically manage our robot army and controls how our robots work together to defeat the enemy team. We implemented artificial intelligence, pathfinding,and distributed algorithms to make our bot the best we could in the one month time period.
The turn-based game consisted of two planets, Earth and Mars. The player starts on Earth and must mine and use the only resource, karbonite, to build factories, to then build units and defeat the enemy team. The win condition revolved around destroying all enemy units, then if not done by turn 1000, the total unit cost, then by total karbonite. After turn 750, earth floods, killing all units, while play continues on Mars until turn 1000.
Our team was new to this competition and in coding competitions in general. Our official placement was Top 48-64 out of hundreds of teams. Our highest unofficial rank was Top 10 during the scrimmaging and testing period. We took a different approach to other teams, and we tried to not follow the meta of all rangers and healers. We wanted to utilize our favorite unit type, the Knight, as the majority, alongside a few healers and rangers. In doing so we placed relatively high with our different strategy. We were one of very few in the top finishers, who used majority knights.
For more detailed information and to see the API and all the source code they gave us that was too big to store, visit Battlecode.org