Skir

Skir is a play-alike version of a popular board game of global genocide. To play Skir, click here.

Technical Introduction

The bulk of the code is in Java 8. Skir has a message passing architecture using Mike Rettig's Jetlang library. Play is through a web UI that is based on a canvas object and some Javascript. Communication between the client and server is primarily achieved through web sockets. Skir's web components are provided by an embedded Jetty server.

Getting Started

To build and run the program follow these steps:

1. cd bin
2. ./deps.sh
3. ./build.sh
4. ./start.sh
5. Navigate your browswer to http://localhost:8010/skir

If you are using Windows (Cygwin) you need to set some environment variables JAVA_PATH_SEPARATOR=";" and CYGWIN_PREFIX="C:\cygwin64" (or wherever cygwin is installed for you).

Maven

If you prefer to use Maven rather than the home-brewed scripts do:

1. mvn install
2. java -cp target/classes:target/dependency/* ojplg.skir.play.Skir
3. Navigate your browswer to http://localhost:8010/skir

Heroku

There is a Procfile for Heroku.

Note to self:

git push heroku master

Javascript

The Javascript is pretty lame. I don't get Javascript. It does not require any libraries however, so at least there's that. Plenty of opportunity to make the GUI more beautiful and pleasant.

Rules

Skir is a play-alike version of a popular board game of global genocide, but the rules to Skir might be slightly different from what you are used to. Here are some of the differences.

• Initial placement of countries and forces is done randomly, not by picking.
• The value of exchanging cards starts at 2 and increases successively to 4, 6, 8, and then a maximum of 10.
• Fortification moves can only be to adjacent countries. Still only one per turn.

Computer Players

The game is always between six players. If fewer than 6 web clients are connected, the remaining player slots will be taken by AI players.

Skir was designed to make writing AIs fairly easy. There are a number of different personalities.

Wimpy

Never attempts to attack, just adds armies to owned countries evenly.

Bully

Attacks if and only if an owned country has more armies than its neighbor.

Massy

Puts all armies onto one country and attempts at most one attack per turn.

Grumpy

Always attempts to retake previously owned countries. Never attacks otherwise.

Grabby

Attempts to control continents.

Pokey

Attempts a plan of slow growth.

Tuney

A generic algorithm that allows its heuristic to be configured.

Writing an AI

To contribute your own AI, you must implement the interface ojplg.skir.ai.AutomatedPlayer. There are only three methods, and two of them are trivial.

• There is an optional initialize method. You can ignore it to start. The default implementation does nothing, and that's fine.
• The getPlayer method must return the Player object. This is trivial. When you register your AI in the AiFactory class, your class will be passed a Player object. Just return it.
• All of the work is in the generateOrder method. It receives two arguments: an Adjutant object and a Game object. The Adjutant describes the types of orders that are possible to issue. The Game object describes everything about the state of the game: what player owns what country and the level of forces in each country, etc.

Take a look at the class ojplg.skir.ai.Wimpy which is about the simplest possible implementation that can participate in a game.

Remember to register your AI in ojplg.skir.ai.AiFactory.

There is a collection of static methods in AiUtils that are useful for building an intelligent AI.

Modes

In addition to the default web mode, Skir supports some testing and tuning modes using the --bench and --evolve flags.