AI for General Strategy Game Playing

This chapter addresses the understudied question of how to create AI that plays strategy games, through building and comparing AI for general strategy game playing. The chapter enumerates a series of common characteristics of such a game. Many strategy games can be played in multiplayer mode, where human players compete with each other for domination. There has been extensive research done on AI for traditional board games. The chapter addresses the problem of general strategy game playing. The Strategy Game Description Language (SGDL) is a model-based approach to develop strategy games. The chapter presents 11 agents that are created based on several different techniques. The MinMax, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), potential field (PF), and neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) agents were determined to be adequate in various models and map combinations and thus are capable of general game play.