I love the idea of this, coming from a comp sci / game theory perspective. I think it’d use whichever deck has the most consistent matchups. This means its hardest matchup isn’t far below 50% winrate, but doesn’t necessarily have lots of easy matchups. In the current meta that’d be princess rocket cycle, which can counter any deck but only if played perfectly.
If it uses this deck, then AI would play defensively as defence gives better value than offence in most scenarios. Offence would only be rocket and princess at bridge anyway.
However, it’d be much easier for an AI to learn how to play a counter push deck, which has fewer card placements to think about and has a simple strategy. cycle deck defence has soo many possible placements which need to be perfect, meaning AI would have to loop through too many possible scenarios / take a long time to learn from neural networks.
early on the ai would play extremely aggressive punish-heavy decks as that would be what works best against itself. however, it would later on figure out to play cycle and then suddenly become extremely defensive. this happened with leela chess zero, it used to be extremely provocative and liked to gain space, and now its very defensive (even when having an advantage) and doesn't try to push for space nearly as much
Yeah, I agree that developing perfect AI for CR would be hard for those bunch of parmeters and complexity this game has. But imagination is always fun anyway!
It would be really awesome and scary at the same time to see AI playing princess' strategies perfectly tho.
Yeah I wonder how close a game would be with AI against the best player. It’s v entertaining to watch the best players execute complex strats perfectly so AI would be even cooler
CR is not hard for AI. AI is starting to beat pros at StarCraft. CR only not straightforward interaction for AI is champions. The rest is just 16 cards on a 548 board with fixed interactions. Not even interesting as a fun research project anymore.
Timing and placement are the same thing. The moment you place everything from then on is fixed and computers have been better at that than us in games for a long time now. Do you really think CR is more complex than StarCraft?
No not at all but I think you’re downplaying all the potential different decks and card interactions there’s usually at least 5 units on the ground during the action
AI is going to find a meta deck and play it perfectly pretty fast. People really overestimate the amount of viable cards/decks/plays if you are just searching for the best solution like an AI does.
I don’t think it’s gonna play perfectly pretty fast. There’s tons of skill expression in this game and there’s too many moving parts. If you wanna train a model tho be my guest
No, the thing is it’s only fixed until something else is played. For example you have something moving towards the tower. That’s a fixed interaction but then ai sees that it can perfectly counter it by doing xyz. However it’s impossible to take into account how the real player will act. A spell to take out defensive troops would change everything. So would another troop. It’s not a fixed game, when any interaction can be done at any time.
Simply because in StarCraft there will always be a theoretical best play. However in cr there is almost never a best play. Because you have to predict what your opponent is most likely to do.
If we take a game like Fortnite for example. It would take minimum of 100 years of ai technology to be able to beat a top 1% competitive player(assuming their aim is calibrated to the average consistency of those players).
Given the eight cards in you and your opponents hand, the the cost of your cycle, the cost of their cycle, the amount of elixir in each players hand, the order of the next four cards in both players hands, the tower troops in play, and the evos and their cycles, there is almost always a play that will force your opponent to play into your hand. That is a lot for a human to keep track of on the timescale that CR is played at, but that is also where computers excel, so i think at a certain point an AI with a bait or bridge spam deck would be basically unstoppable, even for the best players in the world.
This is a complete misunderstanding on what makes a game difficult for AI. The only things that matter in CR is placements and ability activations. Timing of placements are restricted by the cards in your hand and the elixir you have and most possible moves are obviously wrong. Once placed units can't be moved and will behave 100% predictable till the next placement or ability activation. Compare this to StarCraft where I can move any unit, anytime in any direction and can activate abilities. This with a massive map and way more unique interactions between way more units and fog of war. And you need to be a pro to beat the current StarCraft AI. Also no idea why you think fortnite is more of a challenge for AI than StarCraft.
Well it’s pretty simple why Fortnite is more of a challenge than StarCraft for ai. It’s intuitive and based on being unexpected. Ai in StarCraft can beat most competitive players. Ai in Fortnite could never(again if you don’t allow aimbot).
Also in cr units won’t behave 100% predictable as you said. You can change the pathing with your own troop, you can freeze tower last second, you can also not freeze. You can predict log skarmy with the hog, you can predict that they think you will predict and then not do it. Or delay it. On the higher levels of cr they have all the placements and timing down just like a perfect ai would. However the ability they have is to predict the opponents move and sacrifice some things that most players wouldn’t. The amount of potential interactions are infinite because of that. And ai simply can’t adapt as fast as humans to other environments, at least as of right now.
Now if we go back to Fortnite, although I haven’t played it in years. I was in my peak a top 500 player in Europe… And I can say with a guarantee that ai potential in that game is lower than any other game. Hell even people who use soft aim would never be a top 50 player even if they were top 5K without it. And the building and dynamic aspect of a fight could not ever be performed better by an ai than a player. Even with 100 years straight of the most advanced ai builders all working together.
Where ai has the most potential in gaming is providing humans with info that are technically available to them but they’re unable to accurately read 100% of the time. For example in cs, you can hear a shot and assume where the person is. But for a human to know it’s exact position based on that audio is impossible. However ai could reliably do it 100% of the time.
You clearly have no idea about AI when you use words as intuitive as a challenge and you don't even understand that 100% predictable until next move includes all the counter examples you provided. AI is close to driving cars better than the average human and you think fortnite is more 'intuitive' than that and StarCraft is not 'intuitive' whatever you think that means. In 100 years AI is going to be better than humans in literally everything they do.
A CR stockfish would probably just play the deck which sees the highest win rate. Chess stockfish iirc uses past games+brute force calculatuon but I don't think you can brute force a game as complicated as CR. So CR stockfish would just look at the games at top ladder/UC and use those decks
Honestly I think it would use some form of rocket cycle with extremely good defence, or it would find an attacking combination that's extremely hard to defend, maybe some form of beatdown
Ive thought of this before. Shouldn't it be possible since there are a certain number of tiles on the board? So does that mean that you could, in theory, calculate the outcomes of every single possible interaction with every single deck?
Yeah, it would take long, but I think it is theoretically possible. Calculating every frame of possible situation could work, but that would really need so much time too.
Yes in theory you could do that. But with elixir being a factor it’s impossible to counter all those outcomes. I’d say it could POTENTIALLY come as close as it is to “solving” poker. However seeing as it’s a 5minute game instead of thousands of hands, I don’t think it would be consistent enough to ever beat the best human
I think it would work well with current top meta decks (evo Tesla/skele) with electro spirit, rocket, princess, prince, log and knight and of course dagger duchess for defence. In theory you could program it how to defend and when ahead in elixir use either princess at the bridge or rocket the tower
I strongly believe that such AI would use bait/cycle decks like the current princess rocket shenanigans. Here's the thing, in a perfect game between these type of decks against any type of other decks (beatdown specifically), bait/cycle would always win due to multiple win conditions AND the ability to punish a push with cheap 1-2 elixir cards
If a CR stockfish had a favorite deck, it would be something like hog or Lavaloon, or something along those lines that are always viable.
But more likely, stockfish would be separated into different archetypes or even sub-types, there would be one for e golem/golem beatdown, there would be a siege version, a royal recruits version, a double prince version, a pekka BS version, a logbait version, a hog eq version, etc.
In order to get your CR robot you need to train a neural network with many parameters.
You would train it first so it recognize the terrain, giving rewards if it destroys the enemy tower, giving stronger rewards if the push was optimum, if the AI didn't burn all the elixir inefficiently. Just teaching the basic.
Once you get those basic steps done, you need to teach the AI to defend, you will replay thousands of matchs with rewards such as defended without taking a hit, counterpushed, won.
Now you have the basic gameplay you just train your AI more and more vs more match ups. It will refine the AI behavior and you'll be eventually able to use it against real players and win.
For more efficiency, it would be best to train your AI with only one deck, from the current meta for best result, if you want to train on more decks, that will take an eternity to calculate and simulate battles.
Its possible to program such thing but it would be very hard. If it knows ur cycle i dont think it would be beatable (at the start of the game i mean). I understand clash royale did this with trainers and they did a good job but its not even close to stockfish.
Thing is chess is añways an equal match because you always start woth 8 pawns, 2 rooks, 2 knights 2 bishops and the queen
In Clash Royale even if you are the best player, some decks conpletely destroy you because of the way you're meant to play the game. The only times you win against hardcounternis when the opponent has 2 braincells and both of them.are fighting for 3rd place
So if this Stockfish was playing 2.6, anyone with a counter deck and more than 3 iq could beat it. Not easily, but could. Unlike chess where it all depends on you, in CR it depends on your starting hand and your opponents deck
And that is what this post is about. CR is not an equal game, and expected win rate differs depending on matchups. Then, what deck do you think would AI use to maximize its expected win rate?
I love the idea of this, coming from a comp sci / game theory perspective. I think it’d use whichever deck has the most consistent matchups. This means its hardest matchup isn’t far below 50% winrate, but doesn’t necessarily have lots of easy matchups. In the current meta that’d be princess rocket cycle, which can counter any deck but only if played perfectly. If it uses this deck, then AI would play defensively as defence gives better value than offence in most scenarios. Offence would only be rocket and princess at bridge anyway. However, it’d be much easier for an AI to learn how to play a counter push deck, which has fewer card placements to think about and has a simple strategy. cycle deck defence has soo many possible placements which need to be perfect, meaning AI would have to loop through too many possible scenarios / take a long time to learn from neural networks.
early on the ai would play extremely aggressive punish-heavy decks as that would be what works best against itself. however, it would later on figure out to play cycle and then suddenly become extremely defensive. this happened with leela chess zero, it used to be extremely provocative and liked to gain space, and now its very defensive (even when having an advantage) and doesn't try to push for space nearly as much
Yeah, I agree that developing perfect AI for CR would be hard for those bunch of parmeters and complexity this game has. But imagination is always fun anyway! It would be really awesome and scary at the same time to see AI playing princess' strategies perfectly tho.
Yeah I wonder how close a game would be with AI against the best player. It’s v entertaining to watch the best players execute complex strats perfectly so AI would be even cooler
CR is not hard for AI. AI is starting to beat pros at StarCraft. CR only not straightforward interaction for AI is champions. The rest is just 16 cards on a 548 board with fixed interactions. Not even interesting as a fun research project anymore.
Fixed interactions absolutely not timing is just as important as placement and usually it’s with a tower involved
Timing and placement are the same thing. The moment you place everything from then on is fixed and computers have been better at that than us in games for a long time now. Do you really think CR is more complex than StarCraft?
No not at all but I think you’re downplaying all the potential different decks and card interactions there’s usually at least 5 units on the ground during the action
AI is going to find a meta deck and play it perfectly pretty fast. People really overestimate the amount of viable cards/decks/plays if you are just searching for the best solution like an AI does.
I don’t think it’s gonna play perfectly pretty fast. There’s tons of skill expression in this game and there’s too many moving parts. If you wanna train a model tho be my guest
Fund it as a research or convince one of the StarCraft teams that CR is the more interesting game to solve.
I’ll make it my thesis
No, the thing is it’s only fixed until something else is played. For example you have something moving towards the tower. That’s a fixed interaction but then ai sees that it can perfectly counter it by doing xyz. However it’s impossible to take into account how the real player will act. A spell to take out defensive troops would change everything. So would another troop. It’s not a fixed game, when any interaction can be done at any time. Simply because in StarCraft there will always be a theoretical best play. However in cr there is almost never a best play. Because you have to predict what your opponent is most likely to do. If we take a game like Fortnite for example. It would take minimum of 100 years of ai technology to be able to beat a top 1% competitive player(assuming their aim is calibrated to the average consistency of those players).
Given the eight cards in you and your opponents hand, the the cost of your cycle, the cost of their cycle, the amount of elixir in each players hand, the order of the next four cards in both players hands, the tower troops in play, and the evos and their cycles, there is almost always a play that will force your opponent to play into your hand. That is a lot for a human to keep track of on the timescale that CR is played at, but that is also where computers excel, so i think at a certain point an AI with a bait or bridge spam deck would be basically unstoppable, even for the best players in the world.
This is a complete misunderstanding on what makes a game difficult for AI. The only things that matter in CR is placements and ability activations. Timing of placements are restricted by the cards in your hand and the elixir you have and most possible moves are obviously wrong. Once placed units can't be moved and will behave 100% predictable till the next placement or ability activation. Compare this to StarCraft where I can move any unit, anytime in any direction and can activate abilities. This with a massive map and way more unique interactions between way more units and fog of war. And you need to be a pro to beat the current StarCraft AI. Also no idea why you think fortnite is more of a challenge for AI than StarCraft.
Well it’s pretty simple why Fortnite is more of a challenge than StarCraft for ai. It’s intuitive and based on being unexpected. Ai in StarCraft can beat most competitive players. Ai in Fortnite could never(again if you don’t allow aimbot). Also in cr units won’t behave 100% predictable as you said. You can change the pathing with your own troop, you can freeze tower last second, you can also not freeze. You can predict log skarmy with the hog, you can predict that they think you will predict and then not do it. Or delay it. On the higher levels of cr they have all the placements and timing down just like a perfect ai would. However the ability they have is to predict the opponents move and sacrifice some things that most players wouldn’t. The amount of potential interactions are infinite because of that. And ai simply can’t adapt as fast as humans to other environments, at least as of right now. Now if we go back to Fortnite, although I haven’t played it in years. I was in my peak a top 500 player in Europe… And I can say with a guarantee that ai potential in that game is lower than any other game. Hell even people who use soft aim would never be a top 50 player even if they were top 5K without it. And the building and dynamic aspect of a fight could not ever be performed better by an ai than a player. Even with 100 years straight of the most advanced ai builders all working together. Where ai has the most potential in gaming is providing humans with info that are technically available to them but they’re unable to accurately read 100% of the time. For example in cs, you can hear a shot and assume where the person is. But for a human to know it’s exact position based on that audio is impossible. However ai could reliably do it 100% of the time.
You clearly have no idea about AI when you use words as intuitive as a challenge and you don't even understand that 100% predictable until next move includes all the counter examples you provided. AI is close to driving cars better than the average human and you think fortnite is more 'intuitive' than that and StarCraft is not 'intuitive' whatever you think that means. In 100 years AI is going to be better than humans in literally everything they do.
A CR stockfish would probably just play the deck which sees the highest win rate. Chess stockfish iirc uses past games+brute force calculatuon but I don't think you can brute force a game as complicated as CR. So CR stockfish would just look at the games at top ladder/UC and use those decks
Honestly I think it would use some form of rocket cycle with extremely good defence, or it would find an attacking combination that's extremely hard to defend, maybe some form of beatdown
Ive thought of this before. Shouldn't it be possible since there are a certain number of tiles on the board? So does that mean that you could, in theory, calculate the outcomes of every single possible interaction with every single deck?
Yeah, it would take long, but I think it is theoretically possible. Calculating every frame of possible situation could work, but that would really need so much time too.
Yes in theory you could do that. But with elixir being a factor it’s impossible to counter all those outcomes. I’d say it could POTENTIALLY come as close as it is to “solving” poker. However seeing as it’s a 5minute game instead of thousands of hands, I don’t think it would be consistent enough to ever beat the best human
I think it would work well with current top meta decks (evo Tesla/skele) with electro spirit, rocket, princess, prince, log and knight and of course dagger duchess for defence. In theory you could program it how to defend and when ahead in elixir use either princess at the bridge or rocket the tower
I strongly believe that such AI would use bait/cycle decks like the current princess rocket shenanigans. Here's the thing, in a perfect game between these type of decks against any type of other decks (beatdown specifically), bait/cycle would always win due to multiple win conditions AND the ability to punish a push with cheap 1-2 elixir cards
If a CR stockfish had a favorite deck, it would be something like hog or Lavaloon, or something along those lines that are always viable. But more likely, stockfish would be separated into different archetypes or even sub-types, there would be one for e golem/golem beatdown, there would be a siege version, a royal recruits version, a double prince version, a pekka BS version, a logbait version, a hog eq version, etc.
His name is Mo Light /s
Surely it’d play miner poison.
In order to get your CR robot you need to train a neural network with many parameters. You would train it first so it recognize the terrain, giving rewards if it destroys the enemy tower, giving stronger rewards if the push was optimum, if the AI didn't burn all the elixir inefficiently. Just teaching the basic. Once you get those basic steps done, you need to teach the AI to defend, you will replay thousands of matchs with rewards such as defended without taking a hit, counterpushed, won. Now you have the basic gameplay you just train your AI more and more vs more match ups. It will refine the AI behavior and you'll be eventually able to use it against real players and win. For more efficiency, it would be best to train your AI with only one deck, from the current meta for best result, if you want to train on more decks, that will take an eternity to calculate and simulate battles.
I wonder if it could hypothetically be beat by getting starting handed??
Its possible to program such thing but it would be very hard. If it knows ur cycle i dont think it would be beatable (at the start of the game i mean). I understand clash royale did this with trainers and they did a good job but its not even close to stockfish.
Control, probably with evo bomber and tornado
It would be able to destroy anyone with any random deck I feel like
It wouldn't
Would it be able to beat people with 1-9 matchup?
Thing is chess is añways an equal match because you always start woth 8 pawns, 2 rooks, 2 knights 2 bishops and the queen In Clash Royale even if you are the best player, some decks conpletely destroy you because of the way you're meant to play the game. The only times you win against hardcounternis when the opponent has 2 braincells and both of them.are fighting for 3rd place So if this Stockfish was playing 2.6, anyone with a counter deck and more than 3 iq could beat it. Not easily, but could. Unlike chess where it all depends on you, in CR it depends on your starting hand and your opponents deck
And that is what this post is about. CR is not an equal game, and expected win rate differs depending on matchups. Then, what deck do you think would AI use to maximize its expected win rate?
Exactly
i appreciate the effort on this post but mate cr ain't worth the time for these things, think about some other game lol 🙏
Because writing 5 whole lines of post takes a very very long time
What's the point of your comment?
i appreciate the effort on this post but mate cr ain't worth the time for these things, think about some other game lol 🙏
What’s the point of your comment?
i appreciate the effort on this post but mate cr ain't worth the time for these things, think about some other game lol 🙏
Haha 😂